Ask HN: What are the things keep in mind while giving/preparing for a tech talk?

- Ask yourself what is your real goal of the talk. Are you trying to teach people something? Or are you making a live-action advertisement for a product/service (or for yourself)? Optimize your talk ruthlessly for that goal.

- If you're doing a talk in front of a small audience (say, 30 or less people), and you're going to discuss details of code or charts presented on slides, then put all those code snippets and charts you want to discuss in a single document and give everyone a printout. A printed document has much higher resolution and quality than a slide (especially for the people sitting in the back), and will allow them to look back (or forward) at an important figure if you're currently showing another slide. Paper is cheap and quite ecological, so don't worry about that.

It really depends on the topic of the talk. If it's something that can be demonstrated in a quick and straightforward way, do a demo by all means. But I've seen talks where people were forcing a demo into a talk about complicated concepts. There's little value in seeing someone type in a page of code, compile and run. Or seeing something run without understanding what is happening on screen. I would much rather have the speaker spend those minutes discussing the topic.

> Do not use a linux machine

Better advice: make sure you know how to setup an external screen on your laptop and how your presentation software works with it. Try it before hand with an old VGA monitor.

> Create short slides, the slides are there to guide you and the audience. Try to prevent reading the slides out loud.

I would argue that the slides are there for the audience. Ideally, you need to be able to present your talk without seeing your slides. They are not cue cards for the speaker.

Very short slides light on content (e.g. memes, one word or sentence per slide) make for a terrible tech talk in my opinion. Do make your slides informative. They should complement what you are talking about. Show a relevant graph, code snippet, etc. related to what you are talking about. If you can't do that, fall back to a summary of your spoken content in a 3-4 bullet points per slide.

Before creating a single slide, write down sentence by sentence, word by word, what story you want to tell. You can use tools to get a very rough metric of how long your written text will translate being spoken. Stop when you reach your talk length.

Once you are done, you can start creating slides. Choose what you like the best and what fits your story. Few slides, many slides (e.g. Pecha Kucha), no slides.

I would never do live coding but show small videos instead. I have seen live coding fail more often than being a great success. But if you want to do so, have a fallback video at hands.

Now your rehearsal: Not 1 full, not 2 full rehearsals, do as much as you can! For my last and very first talk for a conference I did like 20 full rehearsals, 5 of them in front of people, some in the living room, some in front of the mirror. I bet this can be less in the future but it got me super confident. Rehearsal matters! Don't be lazy and you will be amazed how confident you can go into your talk.

When you black out during your talk, don't panic because you have a full script which you could theoretically read word for word. That always calms me down.

Good luck and have fun.

Much of the time, there's a machine already there ready to go. If that's the case, probably best to use it.

Seems to me that these days, the safest way to handle your slides is to have them on the web, with a backup on a USB drive. No need to worry about operating systems or video modes. The site's IT guys already did the work.

There are various shiny frameworks to do this (revealJS.com et al), but even PowerPoint presentations can be viewed in-browser, with OneDrive.

> prevent reading the slides out loud

Good advice.

> Use images and videos, they can tell more then a thousand words.

Indeed. This hints at another good 'rule': avoid wordy slides. Let your talk itself be the wordy bit. The slides just support.

> Also, relax, the audience has already decided they want to listen to your presentation.

Well, not always.