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Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#81

Post by stevecalifornia »

yarrel wrote: post #63

* Practice in private. Practice, practice, practice. People will tell you that you can over-practice a talk, and that's true, but it's not true the first time you're giving a talk. Or the third. * Practice recovering when you lose your thread. The difference between amateurs and professionals isn't that professionals don't make mistakes, it's that they recover from them without it affecting the rest of their performa…

The anxiety of stage fright is almost exactly the same as having had drank too much coffee. Once you realize this it's easy to go forward since no one has failed a speech because they drank too much coffee.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#82

Post by ioddly »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #81
yarrel wrote: post #63

* Practice in private. Practice, practice, practice. People will tell you that you can over-practice a talk, and that's true, but it's not true the first time you're giving a talk. Or the third. * Practice recovering when you lose your thread. The difference between amateurs and professionals isn't that professionals don't make mistakes, it's that they recover from them without it affecting the rest of their performa…

The anxiety of stage fright is almost exactly the same as having had drank too much coffee. Once you realize this it's easy to go forward since no one has failed a speech because they drank too much coffee.

A recent Tim Ferriss post I read recommended literally drinking a bunch of coffee before practicing in front of the mirror/your friends/whatever so you'll be ready for that feeling when you are giving it for real.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#83

Post by onehappyfellow »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #81
yarrel wrote: post #63

* Practice in private. Practice, practice, practice. People will tell you that you can over-practice a talk, and that's true, but it's not true the first time you're giving a talk. Or the third. * Practice recovering when you lose your thread. The difference between amateurs and professionals isn't that professionals don't make mistakes, it's that they recover from them without it affecting the rest of their performa…

The anxiety of stage fright is almost exactly the same as having had drank too much coffee. Once you realize this it's easy to go forward since no one has failed a speech because they drank too much coffee.

Haha love the analogy. I'm going to steal that one.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#84

Post by [deleted] »

moomin wrote: post #42
agentultra wrote: post #27

If you want to talk at a local meet up group it's usually an informal process to introduce yourself to the organizers and pitch an idea. If you want to speak at a larger conference you'll have to keep an ear to the ground for a "Call for Proposals" or CFP. This is a more formal process where you'll have to pitch your talk and make it through the selection process. Some conferences are more friendly to beginner speake…

When I started doing talks for London Clojurians there were literally fewer speakers than speaker slots. This meant that people were pretty forgiving (it also helps that LDNCLJ are a bunch of very nice people). Nothing builds confidence better than not being very good and the world not ending.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#85

Post by picibucor »

First step: Start giving normal talks. Does not need to be tech talk. Visit your local Toastmaster Club and start working on the Competent Communication handbook. It will be fun, do not worry. You will get instant feedbacks, helping you improving. Being constantly on stage gives you confidence: You can do it! It's easy!

Second step: Tech talks: - Know your audience: Who will be there? What knowledge do they have? - Know your topic: Even if everybody understands your speech, there will be some questions in the Q/A. - Keep it simple: If you cannot explain it to your 9 years old, you do not understand your topic.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#86

Post by atsaloli »

I started at a local user group (http://www.uuasc.org/, the Unix Users Association of Southern California). At my very first meeting, the organizer asked me what I could present on... next meeting I was presenting. Very smooth (on the organizer's part -- I'm sure my presentation could have been improved). This was in 2001 and I gave a talk on performance monitoring and tuning of Apache httpd. =) Good times.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#87

Post by mcherm »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #15
mcherm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the former, it's rather easy really - there are plenty of minor events where you can offer to give a talk. Well, that's the part that I am finding difficult. I have some interesting topics to address; I have a decent amount of skill and experience at presenting; I have a lot of practice with internal audiences. But I am terrible at networking and this part you describe as "easy" is the stumbling block for me. D…

> "Do you have any specific pointers for finding events (even minor ones) which are local (I'm in the Philadelphia area, which is within driving distance of lots of east-coast places) and topical" You need to describe the subjects that you'd like to give talks about before anyone can suggest an event that might be suitable.

Well, for instance I currently have a talk mostly assembled which would cover the way in which our team architected a system to allow small components of a complex stateful system to be deployed independently with minimal risk to the other components of the system. This could be classified under "Devops" or "System Architecture".

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#88

Post by nunez »

Before I start, I want to get one thing out of the way:

You DO have interesting stuff to talk about.

Everyone thinks that their work isn't interesting enough to warrant a talk or that they have to do serious heroics to create something talk worthy.

That couldn't be further from the truth!

Everyone wants to learn something, and everyone is interested in hearing other people's experiences.

Now that's out of the way, this is what I do:

- Write a blog post on something that interests you. Publish it here, Reddit and on your favorite sites (if you want to). This will help arrange the thoughts that will eventually become your talk.

- Create a Slides presentation on your post. It doesn't have to be wordy, since you want people to pay attention to you instead of the projector. Here's an example of a good slide deck: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/randfish/inside-googles-nu...

- Give a talk at your local Meetup (or user group for your tech; there are many of them). Email the organizer to ask if they're okay with it (they usually are unless they are really really big, in which case you might have to wait)

That's it! It's easy to get into talks these days.

One thing to keep in mind: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. You don't want to give a deeply technical talk to a non-tech audience and vice versa. Always keep your audience in mind. Writing your post before giving your talk will help with that.

Also: your first talks will probably suck. You'll get nervous. You'll forget stuff. You'll probably improvise a lot. If public speaking is new to you, it will take some time to get comfortable with being in the spotlight.

You WILL get better!

It takes practice to get good at this, just like anything else. (I was on a national debate team in high school for three years, did a play a few years before that and did public speaking stuff in college; I'm comfortable with the stage, but it definitely took time to get there!)

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#89

Post by ZenoArrow »

mcherm wrote: post #87
ZenoArrow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Do you have any specific pointers for finding events (even minor ones) which are local (I'm in the Philadelphia area, which is within driving distance of lots of east-coast places) and topical" You need to describe the subjects that you'd like to give talks about before anyone can suggest an event that might be suitable.

Well, for instance I currently have a talk mostly assembled which would cover the way in which our team architected a system to allow small components of a complex stateful system to be deployed independently with minimal risk to the other components of the system. This could be classified under "Devops" or "System Architecture".

Okay, so if you had to summarise the lessons learned from overcoming the challenges you faced, what would you say they were?

Re: Ask HN: How do you start giving tech talks?

#90

Post by rlmflores »

A good way to develop presentation skills is to participate on a local toastmasters group: https://www.toastmasters.org/, I have been participating regularly for a year and I found out that I've been improving my presentation skills.

Besides that, I like the idea of starting small: present something for your closer colleagues, then present for your company. Once you have a talk accepted and you find your lines of thought, rehearse: find interesting topics, present them for your closer colleagues and see if they can give you feedback, iterate on that feedback and you will have something great (I presented my first talk 5 times for my colleagues, and even on the last I found space for improvement).

I've wrote a blog post about it: http://blog.rlmflores.me/slides,/conference/2012/05/31/confe...

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