How to be a better speaker at tech conferences
I have attended six conferences and spoken at four. These numbers are dwarfed by those of many other people, and I don’t claim to be an expert on public speaking. However, I have noticed some repeating problems, which stem from the fact that in the tech community, our primary competency is making computers do things, not giving presentations. (I have been guilty of many of these problems myself.) In an effort to improve talk quality, I’m going to make some suggestions here.
Some of these points are my own opinion of what makes a good talk, and some of them are more guidelines than hard and fast rules. But let’s start with an example that’s neither of those:
Abide by the Code of Conduct
This one seems like it should be obvious, but I have seen it disregarded. (This is not one of the ones I’m guilty of violating haha.) If the CoC says that “no sexual imagery” is permitted at the conference, then do not include a picture of one or more people having sex on your slides. Only showing the picture briefly does not make it a good idea.
You may disagree with what is tasteful, or question whether anyone will find a particular piece of content offensive, or think that people are too sensitive in general, or suspect that Americans are imposing their Puritan-inherited sexual mores on overseas conferences which may not share those values. Those opinions are your right. But from a purely pragmatic perspective, I recommend taking a fairly conservative approach if you want to keep getting invited to speak. (If you really chafe at the restrictions, you can make your own conference and call it FuckConf 2016.)
Be mindful of your audience’s fluency with your language and culture
Some conferences have a fairly local crowd. Others are highly international, with varying degrees of competency in the language of choice of the people in the audience. If you want to be understood, limit the number of subtle linguistic and cultural references you make. And please speak slowly! (This is particularly hard for me when I’m on stage.)
There was once a conference with a really interesting talk about programming and poetry, which used Shakespeare as an example. Several attendees who I spoke with afterwards, for whom English was not their first language, reported that the Shakespeare was completely incomprehensible to them. (Not that I can blame them — many native English speakers feel the same way.) This limited their ability to understand and learn from the talk.
It would also be nice to limit your use of idiomatic expressions, which can be bewildering for non-native speakers. I was recently in Ukraine interviewing a candidate for my company’s office here. I used a new set of interview materials, and at the end, I shook the candidate’s hand and said, “Thank you for being my guinea pig.” A poll of twenty other Ukrainians in my office revealed that no one knew what the idiomatic expression “guinea pig” means, so I may have inadvertently made the candidate think I was calling him an animal. If this whole software engineer thing doesn’t work out, I’m going to try my luck as a diplomat.
I wouldn’t stress about removing every last cultural reference — it can be hard to know what is specific to one’s own culture and what will be universally understood. But a bit of conscientiousness in this area goes a long way.
Be mindful of how your content will be shown
Your slides look beautiful on your 16:9 Retina display. But when you present, they may be displayed using an ancient project with low resolution and poor color contrast. You can ask the organizers ahead of time what type of equipment will be used so you can prepare appropriately. Redoing your slides to be 4:3 instead of 16:9 is probably a bit excessive unless you’ve got a ton of time on your hands, but if you have color contrast that is essential to the audience understanding your point, you should verify that it will display nicely on the projector.
If color contrast is essential to your slides, please be mindful of people who are partially or completely colorblind, which is a surprisingly high percentage of the population. If you want to be hardcore about it, W3C actually publishes standards for how different colors have to be to be considered “accessible”.
The best thing you can do is plug your machine into the projector before your talk and quickly run through the slides to make sure it looks good. It’s nice to have the slides auto-advance every few seconds, and then walk around the entire room to make sure they are readable. You can generally sneak into the room you’ll be presenting in during a break in the conference to do this.
In particular, ensure that the text is big enough that it can be read from the back of the room. I was once in a talk that was run entirely out of the speaker’s terminal and text editor. This can make for a fascinating talk, but the font was way too small to read from even a few rows back. People would ask the presenter to increase the font size, and he would do so, but then when he would open a new terminal or text editor window, the font size would reset to being illegible. The frustration in the room was palpable.
Additionally, be cautious about important content on the lower half of your slide. If the screen is not sufficiently elevated relative to the audience, then people in the back may be unable to see the bottom half of your slides because of the rows of heads of everyone in front of them.
If you are presenting out of Chrome and you make it go full screen:
Please, hit the “Allow” button instead of letting it sit on top of your slides for the entire talk! I know this is nitpicky but it drives me crazy.
Don’t put a timer or progress indicator on your slides
Slides.js makes it easy to have a progress indicator on your slides. You can also easily edit the html template to add a clock or timer. I recommend against this — just like at a casino, you want people focusing on your content, instead of thinking about where else they have to be in a few minutes or counting down the time until lunch. Additionally, having a progress indicator can be awkward, because you may not be spending a uniform amount of time on each slide. This is totally fine, but it can create a erroneous perception that your talk is almost over or has barely started, just based on how many slides you’ve gotten through.
Progress bars, clocks, and timers are all helpful to you as a speaker, so you can pace your talk appropriately. Many tools offer a way to have a “presenter view” and a “presentation view” — the former just shows your slides, and the latter shows you a wealth of useful information, including a timer, what the next slide will be, your speaker notes, etc. I use Powerpoint primarily because I find its presentation view to be more useful than Google Drive’s, but there are a wide range of tools that offer this.
Consider having a backup for your slides
Technology can fail. If you are running your slides off your laptop, either the OS or the program you’re using to display the deck can crash. When I present with Powerpoint, my primary mode is the native app, but I also pull it up via the web viewer. To protect against your OS crashing, you may wish to have additional devices with your slideshow queued up that you can fail over to. This will allow you to immediately continue with your talk if your primary device fails.
Each slide should focus on one thing
The audience will have an easier time following your point if each slide is focused on a single idea. If you have a bulleted list, I recommend animating them so each bullet appears sequentially. This way, you can show each bullet as you explain it, instead of the audience reading ahead of you.
Code samples can also be hard to read, so I recommend making the font as big as possible and including as little else as you can on slides where they appear.
Pacing — you may speak faster
I’ve found that when I get up on stage, I finish my content in 75%-85% of the time it took me to get through it in practice. I’m not sure exactly why this is. I think the adrenaline makes me talk a little faster, and be less likely to say things that feel further afield from the main point. Whatever the reason, I try to build in a buffer so I have some room to shrink my content and still hit the timing goal.
One thing I’ve found to be helpful is having “hidden” slides. In Powerpoint, when you are advancing through the deck, a slide that is hidden is skipped unless you explicitly choose to display it. This allows you to be flexible with your timing. If you are cruising along and realize that you hit the midway point of your talk and you’re only 25% way through the time you’re supposed to talk, then you can start displaying the hidden slides to make up the deficit.
I’ve actually had a fair amount of anxiety about getting the timing right, but if you end early, it’s not that big a deal. If you are right before lunch or a break, no one will complain about leaving early.
Going late is far worse than ending too early. You’ll disrupt the schedule for the rest of your track, or at the least just cut in to the next speaker’s time. If you’re right before a lunch or snack break, people may just get up and leave.
If you are running a workshop, you must budget time for people to actually work on the content you’re showing them. The best workshop I’ve been in had an explanation of a concept from the presenter, followed by a substantial chunk of time for the audience to wrestle with that concept themselves and try to work it out in code. The worst workshop I’ve been in had the speaker talk for an hour about some concept, give about five minutes for us to code everything up, and say, “well, I guess we have to talk about the next topic now”. If I wanted to actually write code in the workshop, I had to either work through the coffee breaks or ignore what the speaker was saying during the next section.
One more note about workshops: be sure that it’s possible for the participants to actually do the workshop. If they are going to be installing something, run through the install yourself on conference wifi ahead of time. I’ve been on weird networks that have firewall rules that make certain bower install commands fail, for instance.
And if they are going to be writing code, make sure that someone who is new to the material actually could write the code. I was in a workshop that had interesting material, where we were learning to use the presenter’s pet-project framework he’d made, which relied heavily on obscure language features. The presenter would explain some things, and then ask us to write code that would accomplish some task. However, there was no documentation, and nothing about the existing code provided a clue as to what new code we would need to write. No one had any idea how to get started solving the problem.
Everyone in the room just sorta stared at the code for a while. Then someone asked, “Should we just copy from the answer key?” and the speaker admitted, “yeah, I guess that’s what you have to do, but hopefully the act of typing it out will be informative”. To solve this problem, test your workshop on a user who is new to the material.
It’s ok to be silent
It’s scary to be up on stage without saying anything. A moment’s silence to start the timer on your watch feels like an eternity. The temptation is to fill it with mindless small talk or telling everyone what you’re doing: “hold on just a minute while I start my timer…”. I recommend against this. Although it feels weird, no one notices the five seconds it takes you to hit a few buttons on your wrist.
Likewise, it’s ok to be silent for a moment to let the audience observe something on the slides if you want it to sink in. If nothing else, the silence tends to make people look up from their laptops and pay attention for a split second, and then you have a chance to grab their attention before they sink back into paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend a conference where they do twitter and email the whole time.
Be careful with obscenity
I personally am not bothered by obscenity, but some people don’t love it. I haven’t seen anyone get super worked up about it, but I have heard feedback about talks like, “It would be nice if the speaker didn’t say ‘Fuck’ every ninety seconds”. I have also heard feedback on a talk that was already going poorly, and the fact that the speaker was spewing obscenity made people in the audience feel like he didn’t know what he was talking about.
On a related note: be cautious about making jokes like taking out a flask mid-talk and taking a swig from it. I heard feedback about a talk where the speaker was in a tail-spin and panicking, and to try to introduce levity, he pulled out his flask. Several people didn’t realize this was a joke. They concluded that he was drunk and got up and left the talk immediately. This was not actually true, but the joke did not go over that well. I would not recommend doing this unless your talk was going amazingly well, and even then it’s probably only a good idea if it’s contextually relevant.
Use the mic correctly
A microphone will make you louder, but you still need to enunciate. Projecting your voice helps with this. If you are at a conference where someone else is controlling your mic, don’t worry about being too loud. Just project your voice and speak comfortably, and the operators will adjust your volume as necessary.
If the mic is hand-held, do not use that hand to gesticulate. It will make the volume of your voice fluctuate rapidly, which makes you harder to understand. It is also better to hold the mic below your mouth instead of directly in front of it, so you don’t get popping noises.
If the mic is mounted in front of you, point your mouth towards it when you speak.
If the mic is the type that you wear on your face, then you’ll have a cable from the mic to the radio box. If you can’t decide what to wear on the day of your talk, then you might consider clothing choices that let you conceal the mic gear. If that’s not practical, then it is absolutely not worth stressing over. However, if I were indecisive between a longer, looser-fitting button-down shirt and a shorter t-shirt, I might use this consideration as a tiebreaker and choose the first option so I could hide the mic gear.
Audience engagement gets everyone talking about your presentation
People absolutely love it when you say “everyone go to this URL and something cool will happen”. This is not possible for every talk, but if you can incorporate audience participation in a reasonable way, I’d recommend doing so.
I saw this most strongly at @benjaminbenben’s talk at Full Stack Fest. He had the audience point their phone browsers at his app, and then amazed everyone by using the web audio api to make all the phones make bird noises. This is the most engaged I’ve ever seen an audience at a conference. He definitely won the “how many people are actually paying attention to me instead of their laptops” contest.
Make eye contact with the audience
Some people get up on stage and feel a need to stare at their slides the entire time, either on their screen, or turning around and looking at the projected screen. When I feel the urge to do this, it’s because looking at the audience makes me think “holy shit all these people are looking at me and WHAT WILL THEY THINK.”
It’s advisable to glance at the slides occasionally to make sure they are still working, but please resist the urge to avoid eye contact with the audience. Look at the people listening to you, and spread your attention around the room instead of death-staring one person.
Proofread your slides
If your slides have grammatical or spelling errors, it is distracting. If you are not a native speaker of the language you are presenting in, ask someone who is to quickly look at your deck. (If you can’t find anyone and you’re presenting in English, feel free to ping me on twitter and I may be able to look. No promises though! ^_^)
Take your phone out of your pocket
This is super nitpicky, but: it looks nicer if your pockets are not full of bulky stuff. If you must have your phone on your person, I would recommend at least putting it in your back pocket. If for whatever reason this is not practical, this isn’t a big deal at all, but it does look a little more professional.
Bring water
I always bring water up on stage, but then in the adrenaline rush I often forget about it. Still, it feels like a good thing to have around, in case your throat suddenly gets scratchy, or if you just want to have a quick break from talking and you’d rather have the distraction of taking a sip of water than just sit in silence. Having easily accessible tissues could also become enormously valuable if your allergies kick in at the worst possible moment.
Anxiety pills
I met one speaker who took anxiety pills. You can get them from a doctor, he said, although he’d just gotten his from a friend. (When I asked him what type of pill he’d taken, he called out, “Hey [Friend’s Name], what did I take this morning?”)
If you have crippling anxiety, then apparently there is medication that will stop your adrenaline response without other side effects. If you are going to go this route, I recommend consulting a medical professional. This is not medical advice and you should make your own decisions.
Look at the other content
Conference organizers generally try to have a good distribution of topics, but sometimes there’s a bit more overlap than is comfortable. This can easily happen because talk abstracts are often vague and may be written before the talk itself is prepared.
When the schedule is announced, I recommend looking through the other talks to see if anything looks like it could potentially be redundant with yours. If something does look close, you could ping that speaker and offer to exchange slides with them, so you can both make sure that you don’t overlap more than you want to. Even if your talk is already mostly prepared, a few changes here and there can make a big difference to accentuate different details and make the content feel more distinct.
On the flip side, it can be quite nice if talks dovetail well together. I’ve seen conferences where there are multiple talks on the same topic, but they all look at it from different perspectives. The end result was more informative than any of the talks in isolation. This is another benefit you may get from having advance knowledge of what other speakers will be presenting.
In Summary
None of this is meant to discourage you from speaking. In fact, I highly recommend it. It’s easier to get accepted than you might think, and it’s a fun way to experience a conference. If you need encouragement, see weareallaweso.me. My goal with this post was just to help improve the collective quality of talks in our community.
Thanks to Dylan Greene for reading drafts of this.
