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
13. Have a message you're actually enthusiastic to tell people.
The audience can quickly tell if someone is there because they want to talk about the topic they're presenting, and having a receptive audience makes it much easier to get on stage to talk about it. If the audience knows you're there because you want another line on your resume or because you're trying to sell them something the atmosphere can turn quite cold and that is a world of pain for a speaker.
It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.
> 9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
That's good as a backup, or for simpler presentations (in a good way!) but Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions. Presnting PDFs is not guaranteed to be pain free as well, as I expereince on my corporate controlled laptop with stange versions of Adobe software.
> 11. the anxiety goes away
It does! also remember that the audience doesn't know what you are going to present, so they wouldn't care if you make mistakes.
I will add
13. Practice and learn speaking, a good start could be Vinh Giang's Youtube channel
> Powerpoint allows you all kinds of [things] like animations or transitions
Those are not benefits. Do not do those things. Anything more complicated than embedding a video is a distraction and will not help your presentation. (And the video can be done by alt-tab to VLC or linking YouTube or ... .)
Seriously, trust me on this one.
I have seen a lot of presentations in my day, from sales engineers trying to sell me on things to literally hundreds of guest speakers from all over the world back when I was in grad school. That last one was especially valuable, because I got exposed to a huge variety of speakers and styles, not just a monoculture from one place or company.
And the best of them either never used that crap, or it passed through my brain leaving so little evidence of its existence that it may well never have been there to begin with. I only remember the bad associated with that stuff: a speaker once had to answer a question, went back a couple of slides (fine so far), then had to wait fifteen seconds or so for his dumb, contentless transitions to play out, each slide he advanced, trying to get back to the slide he wanted to be on. Stuff like that is all that's in my head when I think of transitions and animations. The best speakers really do just never bother with it in the first place.
> Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions
I know. I just go for very basic stuff - large fonts, black text on white background, no border, no colors. I ruthlessly eliminate everything but the point I'm trying to make.
> 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
This can absolutely be made to work very well. When Josh Long did this at Goto, it was an absolute masterclass. He used timed zooms to almost turn it into comedy. The rehearsal involved must have been considerable.
> 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
As usual, thumb rules exist to protect you until you can confidently break them. One of the coolest presentations I've seen was several years ago at a React conference where the speaker live coded an electronic music and light show using React. They were demonstrating how "components" could really render anything.
Another one I've seen was someone live coding (well, doing some small code changes to an existing codebase, compiling, uploading) a program that controls a drone and made it perform a couple of tricks on stage.
Live demos do work, it's all about pace, preparation, and fallback plans.
Just do it. There's nothing wrong with it, if that's the kind of talk you want to give.
Look at stuff by david beazley, matt godbolt or casey muratori. They all have talks which focus on small pieces of code and i'm sure it's a tremendous effort to frame that well enough and pace it appropriately, but it sure works for them (and me watching their talks).
I ruthlessly make the code examples as simple as possible. Eliminate everything but the point you're trying to make. I'll adjust the font to fill the slide.
And it doesn't have to even be code that compiles, unless it's about the language design and it really really matters for that presentation. You can yadda yadda whatever you want. Syntax doesn't exist anymore, just use greyed out "..." for the uninteresting parts.
Tell a story. It might be "unrelated" to thd topic at hand (I based one on Shackleton's expedition, and another on a Robert Frost poem (two roads diverged.) Or it might be related, a "my journey" type, or it might be about the experience seen through the eyes of a customer. But a story helps the audience relate, and keeps a thread through it all.
If you can, be funny. Frankly this is hard if you're not a 'funny' person. Delivering a good joke, or line, well can be learned but if it's not your thing steer clear. Bad funny is worse than not funny.
If you're not funny naturally then get a funny person to help you script in "dry" humor lines. You can deliver them dry, in fact often the dryer the better.
"We founded our business in Jan 2020. Nothing could possibly go wrong".
But good funny is great. Learning while laughing really keeps the audience engaged.
Reacting to the audience engagement is also a skill worth developing. When they're bored, move on. When they hiss or boo or laugh or leave, these are all valuable feedback.
Enjoy yourself. If you're having fun, they will too.
Oh, one more thing. Keep on hand some of your previous presentations. Often, a speaker won't show up and the conference organizer is panicking and needs a replacement. Be first to volunteer your services! I've done that several times, and the results were always worthwhile.
One time, I didn't have an extra talk with me, but I volunteered anyway and asked for a whiteboard and markers. Frankly, it was the best talk I ever gave. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But it sure was fun! (I simply asked the audience what they wanted me to talk about.)
I once got a panicked email from a conference organizer in Japan at about 3AM because a speaker was at another event and completely forgotten about this one. (Hey! Happens.) I was able to be like, no problem. Here's a presentation that works.
And, if need be, I could have just done something on the fly instead.
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.
> 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.
>
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.
Some people are much more privacy-conscious than others and thus at least don't want more videos of themselves online than what is absolutely necessary.
My professionally produced video is a bit old though I have others recorded on a webcam. I don't know how often they're looked at (and I know a lot of people on the conference committees) but it's certainly useful to have at least something.
I don't want videos of me online. Would an audio recording + slides suffice in your opinion? Or would you doubt it was really live in front of a sufficiently large audience? Idk how common fraud here would be
I feel like if you don't want videos (and I assume photos) of you online then speaking at a conference is probably not the aligned action to pursue that goal
If you're the sort of private person who doesn't want a big online presence - why bother to speak at a software conference? Especially a conference big enough they're selective about who they allow to present?
About 90% of speakers at big events are there to promote their product, or to get their company's name out there for recruitment purposes, or to promote their consultancy, or to build their personal brand. If you don't give a shit about any of that stuff, maybe you don't need to bother?
I'd probably put it more diplomatically. But if you're speaking at a conference, there may be video, audio, and photographs which may be posted online and may be part of the terms you sign up for when you register. If any of that bothers you, you may not want to speak.
This is just my personal opinion, but your expertise in your proposed topic would have to be really good (i.e. you've written a few blog posts about it) for a conference to overlook this.
Recorded videos act as a portfolio for both potential speakers and conferences alike. I think some first-time attendees rely on past videos to determine whether a conference is worth going for.
(That said, we've set videos as unlisted for people who think that they've bombed their talks before — think leaving the stage in tears because the Q&A was harsh — but that's just goodwill.)
I don't know how often recorded videos are viewed--conference committees have to wade through a lot of applications.
But conference presentations are basically public events and if that bothers you, you should probably reconsider doing one. (Yes, per parent, if there's a real disaster--and those happen--they may be deep-sixed but I wouldn't count on it.)
Personally I would find a video that's slides with audio just as compelling as a video where the speaker was visible in terms of helping me understand if that person could give a competent presentation or not.
I imagine it'll go against your talk getting into the shortlist.
But there are some conferences that ask and respect your preference whether you'd like the video recording to have your face or just the audio. But I have yet to see a conference that go as far as asking the audience to not take photos of the presenter, so it's pretty much moot if you do not want your photos published at all.
Speak at your local meetup, and record yourself doing so if the meetup doesn't record the talks!
Meetups often have trouble finding speakers (well, many of the non-AI ones here do), so it's a win-win for both the meetup organisers and the budding conference speaker.
Another way to get your name out there is to speak at free (/low-cost), multi-track conferences like FOSDEM. Free conferences tend to be more receptive of first-time speakers because attendees didn't pay hundreds of dollars for their tickets.
(If you are an up-and-coming speaker, please don't let my comment discourage you from submitting their proposals to larger conferences. Some conferences have the resources and willing alumni to run speaker mentorship programs.)
Local meetups are very easy to get selected into, and they often have two or three speakers lined up, with a balance of speakers they know and are experienced, and new speakers.
Most of the time, the organizers are squeezed to find a speaker, so you are pretty much guaranteed to be offered a slot if you just ask the host.
The conference typically does it anyway, and otherwise you can ask a friend in the audience, or make a new friend who's willing to, or put a tiny tripod somewhere with your phone in camera-from-lockscreen mode. The point is showing that you can present on stage, so audio is most important I'd assume. It doesn't have to be amazing quality/angle
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.
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.
I had a coworker in Seattle who commuted from the far side of Steven’s pass every day. That was a 2 hour trip each way. I desperately wanted to know what was up with her home life.
Some introverts can use a long solo car trip to wind themselves up to deal with people or decompress afterward so they don’t take it out on their family. Others find it all too stressful and just makes it worse. But that’s like 20 minutes for me. I can’t imagine two hours. We didn’t drive that long to get to grandma’s house.
I had about a 90 minute commute (by train or car/subway) at one point--about half the time because I did a lot of traveling. But couldn't have handled that long-term. Latterly, I had about a 2 hour commute into a city office--but rarely.
> 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.
Or a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.
In semi-retirement, I very selectively pick a few conferences to travel to in locations I want to be, at appropriate times of year, in interesting venues. Definitely less than I used to do.
One minor tangent (aiming for helpfulness, not pedantry), "I have few" reads as "I don't have many" (emphasizes the low number), whereas "I have a few" emphasizes the fact there's more than one -- which from context was clearly your intent. HTH!
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? ^_^
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.
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.
I’m comfortable doing it, and generally receive positive responses, but I’m not “a natural.”
If I have something that I need to “get just right,” like a class or main speaker gig, I have to practice a lot, and can come across as a bit “stiff.” If I don’t practice, I do well, but not predictably so, which makes me a bit of a “wildcard.”
I know quite a few folks that can walk up to a podium, in front of hundreds of people, at little notice, and knock it out of the park. They often practice.
Steve Jobs was one of the best public speakers I ever heard, and I’m told that he used to practice for hours. I knew a woman (I’m friends with her ex) that used to regularly appear on TV, and keynote finance conferences. She has an “aw shucks,” casual style. Her (ex) husband told me that she’d practice before each gig for many hours.
The folks that make it seem to be “natural,” at anything, generally practice a lot. I speak frequently, but it’s not structured practice.
I suppose it's a combination, some people are more comfortable speaking and improvising on the spot but everyone needs to practice. I can add to your list a CEO of a big bank, he speaks freely and it's a pleasent to listen to him, but I heard that he practice using a private instructor as well
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.
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.
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.
rmason- I love how supportive you are of tech groups in Michigan. I’m trying to organize an Anthropic meetup, and you helped provide some great advice. Your love of tech and community is evident.
The idea that East Lansing, Michigan, can support a regular gathering of ColdFusion users in 2025 is the most astonishing thing I've learned in quite some time. Consider me quite impressed.
>> 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.
One of the best topics for new speakers is "here's what I learned when I built project X".
Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.
It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.
Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.
The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.
And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.
I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.
That doesn't mean every talk has to be unique and special. An "introduction to XYZ" talk may have a bunch of equally valid speakers, which all naturally provide a slightly different angle and there is a bunch of factors going in the decision about who gets the slot.
Some talks are plain craftswork, not unique experiences and still very worthwhile.
It can. But I don't want to compete for my slot with others who can give the same talk, or a talk that is similar.
I want to make the conference committee choose between "Do we want ilc's talk on X." or "Do we want foo's talk on Y." If we are both discussing the same thing, if I'm unknown, I will lose. OTOH, if I have something interesting to talk about... I have 2 routes to "victory". "ilc gives great talks, he gets good grades and is working on his skills." and "Man that's a damn cool topic. We want that at our conference, even if ilc isn't the BEST speaker, the combo is better."
I didn't start out as the best presenter. I learned. But I always knew I had to have an interesting topic, something that made it worth them giving me a slot.
No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!
Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:
Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.
But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.
They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.
Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.
Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.
That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.
I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
That's how I read it as well. I think it's wrong because I've learned the most from people one step ahead of me. Experts who are ten steps ahead have the curse of knowledge: it's extra hard to figure out what things make sense to a conference audience. Many presentations go too fast and then too slow two minutes later
Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful
Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see
It's doable if you pick a very focused topic. In my first year of using Julia, I gave a talk on gradually adding Julia to a large Python codebase. Very few people could give a similar talk because (1) Julia is a fairly niche language, (2) most of the people who understood Julia <> Python interop knew it too well, and had forgotten all the common beginner challenges.
I don't think the author meant that you have to be the world leading expert at any topic. You can be pretty average, but you need to give it your personal twist. He is warning against very generic abstract talks that can be replaced by reading a man page.
It is an extremely high bar if you aim for super popular topics.
You might want to spend time on some niche topic and there might be people who don’t have time to dabble in that topic but would be happy if someone did it for them.
I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?
Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?
There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.
If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".
One tip I've found really useful over the past few years is to always try and include a "STAR moment" in a talk - where STAR stands for "Something They'll Always Remember".
Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.
> Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.
The real experts never stop learning.
Some of them go to conferences because that's one of the few times in the year they can hang out with each other, and find out what their community is up to.
actually, the primary reason to go to conferences is networking. meeting people, make connections. you go to talks that interest you so you can meet people that share your interest.
same for giving presentations. you give presentations to promote an idea or work, to share something you have learned, to contribute to the community, and again, for networking.
fomo? not at all. personal development? that's a bonus, but not the motivation.
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
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