10 things to improve your tech talks
- Practice your talk before speaking. Several times. Record yourself. Watch it. At a conference, people paid $$$ for this.
- Assume wifi is unavailable for your talk. Don't depend on it to run demos.
- Assume you'll get few or no questions. Given a 45 minute slot? Aim for 40 minutes.
- If you insist on live coding, make sure you've written down the code ahead of time. We don't want to watch you debug in real time.
- If your talk title says it's about X, don't make the first quarter/half not talking about X. We probably came to listen to you talk about X, not your life story. Exceptions exist, but do so carefully.
- Waiting for audience participation is awkward. "Can anyone see what's wrong?" Just move on.
- The best slides are ones that are useful after the talk. You can export with speaker notes! Have speaker notes!
- Be professional. Know how your computer works. How the presentation software works. Show up ahead of time, make sure tech is ready.
- Don't save your talk for a big conference. Run through it at a user group or meetup. Adjust. Improve. Repeat.
- You can't please everyone. Present for a target audience. Title and description should aim to entice that target audience.