Three Things I’ve Learned from Speaking at Desert Code Camp

TL;DR Underestimate your audience to a degree. Use whatever tools you can to get away from the lectern. Always leave your audience with something to do.

I love presenting technical topics. I find that sharing insight about the things I find most exciting. It is a rewarding way to grow your community, your own knowledge, and your own authority. I regularly speak at Desert Code Camp. The following are a few tips and reminders that I’ve come to through careful reflection on my past talks.

1. Drop the Bar for your Audience

All sorts of people attend conferences. All sorts of people from all sorts of background and technical levels. When you’re writing a tech book, the term people throw around is Minimum Qualified Reader (MQR). The same thought should be given when speaking.

It is almost always better to slightly underestimate the technical level of your audience. In doing so, you can establish a common understanding and vernacular with more advanced participants and teach the basics for beginners. This goes quite a long way to establishing your credibility. Advanced participants will trust that you know what you’re talking about because they know what you know. With that established they will be more likely to listen to what you say next. Beginners will be able to learn from you immediately and be more likely to follow as you advance to deeper subjects.

I understand the attraction of seeming smarter for your audience. But if you overwhelm your audience, you will only seem like a poor speaker. The reality is that as soon as you take the stage, you’ve put yourself in the expert space. Please don’t beat it to death. Great speakers convey ideas with clear, concise, audience appropriate thoughts.

2. Hide Your Slide Control

Its good to walk around a bit during a presentation. If you’re bound to your lectern to advance your slides then you’ll end up creating one of two distracting situations.

First, you might just never leave the lectern. This feels stuffy and highly formal. In some situations this may be appropriate. I find it creates more stress than anything else. In the worst case, the lectern is placed in an awkward location relative to the crowd or the screen.

Second, you might walk around but find yourself jumping back to the lectern every time you need to advance a slide. Like some kind of presentation carriage return. Its unnatural, distracting, and lets your wandering impact the speed and flow of the presentation.

It doesn’t really matter how you do it. But break that tether. You could use a clicker, wireless mouse, timed slides, or — if you’re rich in friends — an assistant. These solutions have been around for ages, and frequent presenters have adapted to their quirks and built formulas that work. I’m an experienced presenter, but still find problems with each of these.

I talk with my hands (gesticulate) throughout a presentation and have found that having something in my hands to be stifling or at worst distracting. I might accidentally click and distract the whole audience by advancing the slide.

Timed slides are a disaster waiting to happen. Using these requires a well rehearsed presentation and prohibits any mid presentation conversation. For small and mid-sized presentations, conversation is critical. Having that flexibility is paramount when you have an audience of varied skill level. It can be difficult to predict the depth that you’ll need to cover in those situations.

I honestly hate using an assistant. Using one you might not need to literally run back to the lectern, but by looking at or otherwise signaling your assistant you will still send the audience’s attention away from you and your material.

At the October 2014 Desert Code Camp I used the Myo armband for two of my three presentations. These presentations took place in a classroom at the Chandler Gilbert Community College. The room could hold about 40 people comfortably. The front of the room had the media station and “lectern” at the left corner of the room and the screen in the right. The lectern is really just a desk. This necessitates a standing, walking presentation.

My first presentation reused older slides in Prezi. Prezi does not currently have Myo integration and so I again found myself tethered to my laptop. Walking back briskly to advance the slides. I’ve gotten quite good at timing myself and knowing when I’m running out of things to say about the current slide. So, while the impact was minimal, I could still feel it.

My second and third presentations though were quite different. Before I get into how it went, know that I’m not writing this to sell Myo. I think its a cool device, but what I hope a reader takes away from this is how the development of wearables and augmentation technology will impact our lives.

First, nobody asked me how I was controlling the slides. Some people noticed that I was not jogging back to my laptop. And one person suggested that it seemed I was controlling the presentation through sheer will. I think this is a win. Not because I want to mystify people, but because it was just not important. We were all there to talk about an unrelated subject.

Second, the Myo is a gesture recognition based input device. This is potentially a problem for heavy gesticulators like myself. The Myo does two important things to help with this and I experienced benefits from each. The unlocking gesture is uncommon in my gesticulator’s vernacular. This means it was rare to accidentally tell the Myo that I was about to send a command. But it did happen. And when it did, the Myo vibrates. If you mean to unlock the Myo, this is no big deal and you hardly notice. If you randomly make the gesture, the vibration will surprise you a bit and let you know that you should be careful with your hand for the next few seconds. It happened about three times over the span of two hours. When it did, it was no big deal, which is in itself a big deal.

Third and lastly, people seemed to stay engaged more between slides because the pause between each was minimal. Maybe this is true. Or maybe it was me that was more engaged. Either way, it felt like a win. The flow of these two presentations was seamless and natural. It was like a conversation you might have in a living room, coffee shop, or in front of a whiteboard.

I don’t benefit if you go with the Myo. As a conference goer, I do benefit if you use a tool that lets you interact more naturally with your slides. So find something next-gen that works for you, or do us all a favor and build something.

3. Prompt for Action

One thing that I’ve found lacking in some of my presentations is a strong call to action at closing. While I typically present several resources for follow up near the beginning of my slides, I occasionally miss that strong message at the end. The difference is specific.

In presentations where I clearly suggest action for follow up, people approach me after the talk to thank me or sometimes share their personal application of whatever I was talking about. People know what they need to do next if they want to pursue the subject further.

Other presentations where this was light or missing, I’ll spend 15 to 30 minutes after the fact talking with one or more people about the subject. We’ll spend time refining the material or talking about related subjects or projects. After my last talk on Docker, I noticed this and realized that in my revised slides I had failed to carry over a fair list of related projects and topics to check out. The result was a few longer conversations about Docker’s place relative to other technologies.

The presentation had an audience of about 35 people and I managed to avoid most of the typical controversial back and forth. People seemed to get it. Even from the front of the room I noticed several people have “A-HA!” moments. And that after all is why I love presenting. But I can’t help but feel like I shorted people by excluding that strong call to action. I’ll fix it next time and in Docker in Action.