Great Technical Talks
blog.testdouble.com
blog.testdouble.com
> Near-term trends and innovations that people can grapple with or adopt today in hopes of being well-positioned tomorrow > Medium-term rumblings... > Long-term visions of the future that contextualize today's fashions within the broader strokes...
As someone who is presenting at his first national conference soon, I was hoping to read through this article and get some good insight. Your list of 4 items amounts to advice that can be summed up as:
1. Old lessons applied to new technology. 2. Future-proofing your skill-set. 3. Analyze today's hard problems and share new solutions. 4. Bold, new ideas that we otherwise wouldn't make the time for.
And this can be summed up in 3 steps:
1. Present a problem. 2. Present solutions to the problem. 3. Solve the problem with the solutions.
Or, more concisely:
1. Solve a problem.
Whether the problem is an old or new problem is irrelevant. And whether the solution is old or new is irrelevant. This is essentially covered in the Angular example.
The result of solving a problem is having to describe the problem. And usually that's best done with a story.
1. Tell a story about solving a problem.
This provides context. And, everyone loves a good war story. This helps you connect (as mentioned in the connect portion of the article). Also, by telling a story, and solving a specific or specific problems, you avoid that general overview. You have to dig into specifics, because your problem was specific.
So, the shortest advice I can sum up is: Tell a problem solving story.
The good parts were in the discussions and questions afterwards but they were often severely truncated because, well, we gotta fit in another half-hour presentation on... unit testing. The "Oh, come talk to me afterwards" rejoinder that genuinely interesting questions got seemed like a cruel tease.
Anyway, recently I took this slightly negative attitude and turned it on its head - what if I ran a tech event with the talk-to-question ratio completely inverted? If the discussions were what we liked, why not create an environment were the talk was simply a quick 5 minute introduction framing an extended, round-table discussion period?
It's still early days, but this has worked extremely well so far. (The result, if anyone's intested, is at: http://www.manytomany.co.uk/)
Have you considered recording and releasing it as a podcast? Assuming enthusiastic support for the idea, of course.
Briefly. However, given how we're all seated in a big circle I'm not sure the quality would be good enough. I would also have reservations that the act of recording it would affect what people shared in a negative way.
Really good idea
I'll definitely be keeping this stuff in mind on future talks I do.
The author talks down on giving "tool talks". I agree, those are the most boring talks to listen to, but at the same time, "tool talks" are pretty much the only way to get a speaking slot these days. Those kinds of talks are easy to create a coherent proposal. The more interesting out of the ordinary talks are hard to propose.
* Many conferences have lightning talk sessions, which are much more open to speakers (though they're much shorter slots).
* Local user groups are almost always looking for willing speakers.
* You can record yourself giving the talk and post it online.