How I prepare a talk for a tech conference (2022)

One or two well-placed jokes can be great if they’re a very minor part of the presentation.

When someone has their slides stacked with memes or spends large amounts of time on vacuous entertainment content, it always feels disappointing.

There was a period of time where our biggest local JavaScript conference felt like one big entertainment competition. Presenters were singing songs, playing guitar, showing several minutes of clips from TV shows, and telling jokes more than they were presenting anything useful. The conference was a hit for young people and juniors, but it became known as a big waste of time for everyone else.

The best talk I ever gave was when the scheduled speaker didn't show, and the organizer asked if anyone would volunteer. I volunteered, and gave an impromptu talk with no prep and no slides, just a whiteboard. I simply threw out questions to the audience, and let their responses guide things.

It was the best presentation I ever gave.

Too bad the video didn't work, either, and there's no record of it.

P.S. When traveling to a conference, I carry along the slides from my previous presentations. This enables me to fill in for missing presenters. I also had a talk that didn't go over well, so I just picked out a previous one and did that.

what works for me and is more time efficient is to get the introduction polished, then have a clear take away at the end. The middle stuff is better to go impromptu.

I remember the first meme like presentations back in 2002 at work and I hated it. It's like stop learning, now you have to find this picture funny (maybe it was some star wars reference, and I haven't watched them), and we will get back to it. It was cringe!

I think it can work in limited contexts. I've given an internal talk about SRE using the "this is fine" meme, representing a current emotional state, then contrasted that with the reverse meme[1] as a visual metaphor. Perhaps this_is_fine.png works because it does not rely on outside cultural context.

I've also used HTTP status cat memes on a carousel slide, to emphasize that SREs commonly understand them, before contrasting that with a custom non-HTTP protocol I support. If people laugh or pay attention, so much the better.

> I think it's usually better when you've run through it so many times so that you can deliver it without any notes, but it's still concise and complete. I practice double-digit amounts of times for every talk.

Agreed that rehearsal really helps and more people should do that. I wish I could put that 10+ rounds of practice into presenting but I'm typically doing internal stuff not anything with an honorarium or ticket price attached. Yet it seems like some kind of badge of honor in the tech speaker circuit to start building your slide deck the night before. Trust me: we can tell, especially when your first five minutes are panicked searches for projector compatible adaptors you forgot to pack or test.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseMemes/comments/dnlizu/the_th...

I certainly think there is a balance.

If you're not confident about your talk or your ability to present it, folks should be disabused of the idea that adding some gifs or a "One does not simply" meme will fix that.

That said, I think of my talks as sharing interesting stories. When I tell stories, I often crack a few jokes along the way, and my presentations are no different. I feel like adding humour is often a way of giving people insight into your thought process.

Of course, everyone is different, and perhaps you are dead serious about your way of thinking about compilers or neural networks or whatever your work on.

The author does an excellent job, however, of underscoring the fact that jokes can rely on an in-crowd or shared experience that some in the audience don't share. It's important in all aspects of your talk to keep that sort of thing in mind, and make sure your humour isn't just some twitter in-joke.

Personally I'm not much of a reherser. I like to make a point with each slide, and as long as I know the point, I can "freestyle" the actual text.

The exception are high-speed sessions, where I have a slide, or two, per sentence. They have to be highly scripted and so I practise them a few times. But, while they're a lot of fun, I don't do them often.

For me, prep is much more about what to leave out. It's easier to do a 2 hour session than a 1 hour, and harder still to do 30 mins. Slides mostly help to keep me on track and not get distracted.

You might realize that you are either speaking too fast or too slowly. You might notice that you are using your squeaky voice, there are ways to improve it. You might realize that you assume some piece of tech is known to everyone even though it's pretty obscure. You might realize you need one more slide for transitioning to a new topic better.

I agree though with your other point, the recording can help enforce that there are no redos before a live audience.

Also, if you mess up a sentence or slide all the time, maybe your phrasing is too backwards, so you should probably simplify it to something that feels natural to you.

It probably matters if it is related to the talk or not. A slightly related joke or funny picture at the beginning that introduces where you are going and then comes back with a deeper meaning at the end is very powerful.

Why would you throw Kevlin Henney under the bus?

Another advantage is that the speaker doesn't always get the question. Either can't hear it well, or the question itself is weird, complex, off-topic, or some variation on not-even-wrong. So they end up answering something else. If they repeat/summarize the question first, at least they're answering a question, and when this happens, the question which gets answered is often better than the one which was asked.

It happened so many times that I had no clue what someone asked, and the presenter repeats the question with their own words, usually much more clearly communicating the question that was asked.

Just go find the speaker later and ask questions if you have them.

It’s shocking how many conferences don’t do that. I’m still amazed when I go to other events and see things get 15 or 20 or even 30 minutes behind the published schedule. It’s just so disrespectful to the audience to do that in my opinion.

I'm autistic, I'd happily cut off your microphone on time, not matter if you're the pope or a Nobel laureate. This is why I'm not allowed to chair sessions.

Hi, I'm X, I work on Y at Z and maybe I worked on Y' at Z', welcome to my presentation on Topic establishes some context. And lets you know if you're in the wrong room. I don't think you need much more than that at the beginning. Maybe in the depths of the presentation you talk about options for a solution and how you tried some of the options on a project/at a company, when it's relevant.

We don't usually need to know a lot of other stuff from a CV, such as how long you were anywhere or where you went to school or a lot of details about job responsibilities. Just a little info to have some idea of the scope of 'databases' and 'embedded' for you --- there's a lot of computer words that have similar but different meanings depending on your industry.

The part that got me was right at the start:

"Why: I get very little out of 95% of them. I much prefer online recordings, which can come vetted/recommended. Also I can bump them up to 1.5x or 2x speed, so that at least if the talk isn’t that good I waste less time on it."

I also just don't enjoy these conferences at all. I rarely attend and have zero interest in ever speaking. Watching recorded presentations is far superior.

I've found that this is domain specific. You see it more for tech conferences for instance, but less so in biotech conferences

I would rather not give the presentation than do this. It is a cringe and self-embarassing experience. Once, I almost quit my job because certain types of high-level presentations at my company requires dry-runs and I refuse to do it. And I regularly give presentations at a few conferences a year with sufficiently good delivery.

As someone who has presented a LOT, practice is useful. I always do at least a bunch of mental run-throughs. That said, a real run-through, which I don't always do, results in a better Take 2. So, yeah, do a real rehearsal when you can.

(I won't practice dozens of time though. At peak I presented a lot and practicing for a given presentation that much would have been impracticable.)

Association alone isn't very convincing. If people really feel they need to establish credentials they should talk about what they do. It is almost like at a job interview. I don't need to know that you worked for X - I want to know what you did at X.

Introductions should be no more than what you can fit into one breath. After that it is just some person going on about themselves, and that isn't very attractive. Get to the meat first, and then we can talk.

"you came here to learn about <topic>, not me. Feel free to Google me if you want. Just please keep in mind that all teenagers make mistakes. It's not my fault you only made boring mistakes."

To make it work, you need to deliver the last line while seemingly preoccupied with something presentation-related. Otherwise, it seems hostile. An example could be as simple as pretending to change settings on microphone or moving one slide back, then forward twice. It conveys it was intended to be inner monologue

Are there other plausible explanations?

E.g., perhaps the presenter struggles with ADHD-based procrastination, and is only able to make slides under imminent deadline pressure.

Or maybe they tend to be neurotic and over-think things, and are experimenting with being more spontaneous in their preparation.

(Asking as a neurotic ADHD person with moderate social anxiety.)