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So you want to speak at software conferences?

239 points by speckx

by WalterBright

12 subcomments

Some things I've learned over the years:
1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it

by ValentineC

6 subcomments

> Finally, watch out for events that put video of their sessions online. Having a couple of YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciate audience can make all the difference when a programme committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.
This, very much this.
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
A short meetup talk or a lightning talk at a different conference could make all the difference towards being selected, because we need to know that you're vaguely capable of conveying what you want to share to the audience.

by runamuck

2 subcomments

Public speaking plus blog posts did more for my career than my advanced engineering degrees. They lead to my past three places of employment. I did a talk or wrote a blog post, posted it to LI and then the decision makers reached out to me. This got me employment at workplaces I loved. I only write/ talk about things I enjoy, and they needed people with skills in the topics I wrote/ talk about. Perfect fit. I highly recommend this approach.

by hibikir

3 subcomments

He's pretty right on the "get bored" bits. I have few friends that are doing a lot of conferences every year after, say, year 6, and they are people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.

by tristor

0 subcomment

I've given many talks at conferences, meetups, and otherwise. My number one piece of advice is to /really/ know your subject. Sometimes I am asked to present something I don't already intimately know, and it can be tempting to put together a presentation and learn just enough to present, but it's MUCH better to really go deep and learn the subject fully. Why?
1. Competence creates confidence, and confidence creates trust.
2. You can answer questions, pretty much any question, and if you can't you can let the audience know graciously without coming off as unknowledgable.
3. It makes it easier to present well, because you don't need to or are not tempted to read from the slides, you're telling a story or sharing information in a natural way, off the dome, using the slides only as a topic guide because you already fully understand everything about the subject.
I have found this to be so important, that I sometimes /choose/ to present something I'm interested in but don't know well (with enough lead time) as a jumping off point to dig deep into it. I have long believed if you want to really understand something, the benchmark for having achieved competence is successfully teaching that subject to another person and seeing them succeed with it.

by raju

1 subcomments

This is a great list. As someone who has spoken at hundreds of conferences, there's one piece of advise I give younger speakers, particularly those nervous about how the audience will receive them. Dylan alludes to this in a different context
> Finally: respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty at a community event, or five thousand at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you get to do this. They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time
This is the same thing I say except, them _choosing_ to attend your talk, and opting in to giving you their time and attention is a signal that they _want_ you to succeed. They are HOPING you deliver your message, and that your demos all work, and that you conclude well. If kept in mind, I believe this can help alleviate some of the anxiety.
Sidebar: I've done this for a very long time and I still get nervous at the beginning of every talk. And I will be the first to admit—you WILL run into the occasional show off in the audience who is intent on demonstrating to you (and to the rest of room) how much smarter or more experienced they are than the speaker. That will happen—but it's an aberration.

by RomanPushkin

0 subcomment

This year I spoke at HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth. The topic was "Hacking ATMs: past and present". I really enjoyed it, it took a lot to prepare though. I haven't gotten any monetary benefit from it, but I would definitely do it again.
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^

by ChrisMarshallNY

1 subcomments

I’ve been doing public speaking for my entire adult life, but not for a living.
That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
This is one of those areas where folks can make money/satisfy ego, so there’s a ton of competition. I’m not competitive, and am not interested in making money doing this kind of thing, so I don’t really try.
I do appreciate folks that are good at it, though; especially when I want to learn. A skilled orator can make learning a lot more fun, and can be very motivating.

by Kamilbenkirane

0 subcomment

That's insightful! Thanks for sharing. I've been applying to conferences recently to present an open-source library I built (a unified client for AI providers), but I haven't gotten any responses yet. I think the project is solid—it basically lets you switch from OpenAI to Anthropic in one line of code—but I suspect my CFP (Call for Papers) abstracts are failing to hook the organizers. For those here who review CFPs: Do you prefer abstracts that focus on the "Technical How-To" (e.g., 'How to standardize I/O layers') or the "Story/Philosophy" (e.g., 'Why we need primitives, not frameworks')? I feel like I might be getting too technical too fast.

by braza

1 subcomments

I like the general idea, and I owe so much for the talks and bloposts. That said, I really miss the old deep boring technical talks with speakers with an attitude of "I do not care if you meet the tecnical (and probably cognitive in some several cases) requirements to be in this room".
I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.
The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.
Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.
Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.
Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.

by indymike

0 subcomment

If your presentation requires a custom software installation, give the audience the instructions as a hand out/script so you can focus on the important part.
I once did a breakout about a Geo support in Django, but the presenter spent the entire time helping people install PostgreSQL with geo support for an entire morning. We never ran a single line of Django code when the presentation was over.

by rmason

2 subcomments

I have run a ColdFusion users group in East Lansing for the past twenty five years. I have helped many first time speakers and this is some outstanding advice.
Although I have never done it myself I can also recommend Toastmasters. Seen some speakers soar after attending this group for a year. You wouldn't even think that it was the same person presenting. Having that experience of public speaking can also greatly accelerate your career.

by wyattjoh

0 subcomment

I struggled for a long time to figure out what would be "interesting enough" to give a talk about. Turns out that the way that we do different things in Next.js was not talked about enough. Did my first technical talk about some decisions and mechanisms that Next.js uses for dynamic detection and rendering and found a sweet spot.

by sbachman

1 subcomments

Never speak for free at events held at for-profit companies.
They will try to convince you to work for free for the "exposure."

by macintux

0 subcomment

I haven't checked these links for a very long time, but some presentation resources I accumulated when I was frequently giving talks:
https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837

by bjoli

0 subcomment

I just wrote (with some AI help) a recently fast rrb tree implementation for c# [0]. I am waiting for the phone calls, but so far I have gotten nothing in 24h. Maybe if I figure out how to use docfx...
[0]: https://github.com/bjoli/RrbList/tree/main/src/Collections

by zipy124

1 subcomments

If no one else is aware, Dylan is one of the best conference talkers in the industry. A rare combination of technical knowledge, experience and fantastic to watch if you ever get the chance.

by moralestapia

0 subcomment

>They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time.
Oh wow, this, 1,000x this!

by Cthulhu_

0 subcomment

My issue is that the next ladder rung involves going out and doing presentations at conferences and the like. However... I did that 10 years ago, it feels like I'm past that. A lot of things now feel like I've done them 10 years ago. Which makes me think, should I have been earning what I do now back then? It feels the wrong way around.

by thetrumanshow

9 subcomments

>> Write a talk nobody else could do; tell a story nobody else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach them that.
That's an extremely high bar, no?

by stevenalowe

1 subcomments

Good article, just wanted to add that the time from idea to international speaker can be weeks/months, not necessarily years, depending on your niche

by bronxasaur

2 subcomments

I feel like while this is a great start for how to get practice giving talks, it could do with some expansion on how to make a great presentation.

by YouAreWRONGtoo

0 subcomment

[dead]

by sapphirebreeze

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by YouAreWRONGtoo

2 subcomments

FOMO is the only reason people attend conferences, which is why I visited a few to figure out whether I was missing out on anything.
Speaking at a conference? Same story. You do it, because it's for "personal development", until it's pointless.
Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.