Since 2022 I have tried to speak at least one conference/meetup a year. The main reason for this was it forces to really learn the area I want to present about a lot deeper. If you can explain something new to someone clearly then it really shows you understand it very well.

Recently, I was lucky enough to speak at GoLabs 2024 in Florence, which was a load of fun and a week later at the London Gophers November Meet.

This was funnily the 3rd time I had presented a very similar talk (I did Conf42 earlier this year). The topic was how we can create development environments for Golang using Nix.

I think generally speaking some of the best parts of meetups and conferences is not even the talks themselves it’s the networking. Meeting people who work at random companies you never would’ve met otherwise etc. So I really do recommend even if you don’t intend to speak, try to go to a conference or two. Especially if your company has a learning budget you can leverage.

Tips

On to some tips that I’ve learnt, or other people taught me that helped make me a better speaker. In no particular order. Remember these are all my own opinion and from my own experiences as a presenter.

Topic

The hardest part when I want to do a talk is actually coming up with the topic I would like to talk about. I generally would like to discuss a topic that I think others don’t much about and would find interesting, i.e.

  • How to use docker with Python
  • Pocketbase
  • Nix dev envs with Go

Coming up with topic that I feel passionate about is super important, as I think shows when you speak that you really care about topic x. But it also means I have more motivation when creating the slides.

Slides

We have a tendency to put everything you want people know on the slides. This can lead to them being crowded and harder to read, too dense full of information.

One of the best bits of advice I was given, if someone can see your slides and fully understand your talk. What does the value add of you as a speaker? Very little. So, in my opinion, the slides on their own shouldn’t make sense. You are there as a speaker to then present those slides such that it makes sense.

You want to add things like diagrams to drive your point home. Likewise, you may want to put key bullet points of topics you would like to talk about.

Leave the details in the speaker notes that the audience cannot see. As not to crowd the slides. In terms of software I really like reveal.js. Which allow us to super fancy slides (as HTML page), so super portable easy to share with others. I even host them on my Hugo (this blog). Especially if you need to show code, have a look, and it is markdown-driven.

Practice

Practice, practice and more practice. More likely than not you will be nervous just before you present. To make sure you are well-prepared, to practice your presentation. Until you can almost do the talk from memory. This may sound like a lot of effort, but it will really help you make your talk seem a lot smoother on the day.

Trust me, it can be a real pain, when you have a 40-min presentation needing to practice that multiple times a week It can be actually annoying. Talking from experience here!!! But I think it just makes your talk so much better.

As I say on the day you will be nervous and even if you make a mistake it will be easier to recover as you have Practised that talk so much. Sometimes I would just do 10 mins at a time, to make it more digestible, but as the date gets closer I would practice the entire talk more often and try to time myself. As I have found I am ALWAYS slower on the day and tend to need to speed up certain parts of my talk on the day itself.

Feedback

Alongside practice, I think feedback is so important both of my conference talks got so much better because people gave me feedback. Especially my Euro Python talk about Docker, it was a lot worse than the final version I gave.

Either you can do this by presenting live to people, say over a video call with colleagues at work, or you can record yourself send it to everyone you need to. Then they can give you feedback, the more detailed the better you don’t have to agree with everything and can decide what you want to change.

Feedback is key to improving yourself and your talk!

Talk you would watch

Finally, I think what helps me is to try to design a talk I would watch myself. At the end of the day, you are the one spending time making and giving a talk. Rather than trying to work out what other people want, set out to make a talk you would watch/enjoy.

I like talks that are a bit like stories, they build up the topic over the talk. Sometimes it’s like a bit of role play, we solved problem x but now what about problem y? Of course, this doesn’t mean entirely ignoring feedback. But don’t feel the need to change your entire to talk to suit what someone else would like (generally speaking).

Rejection

Not a tip for speaking per se, but typically, you will submit your talk when a conference has a call for proposal. I have seen most conference use either callforpapers or sessionize, which makes it easier to submit the proposal as you can re-use your existing one.

But as is normal, I found you will face more rejections than conferences who accept your talk. However, that is fine it’s not to say your talk is bad. Sometimes people misunderstand what you wanted to present based on your abstract. Sometimes it doesn’t fit with the conference. Keep submitting, eventually you will get accepted, some conferences even sometimes prefer to give first time speakers a go.