In three months, I spoke at five events in three months including APItheDocs, AWS Summit, Revolution Conf, AWS Community Day, and PearConf, all differing in size and target audiences. In that time, I developed a standard structure that helped me build my talks faster. Having a standardized structure also alleviates my social anxiety, as it allows me to speak quickly and improvise quite a bit, especially when I stray into anecdotes.Â
The First Five Minutes
Title Slide
This should have the title of your talk, where it’s being delivered, and your name. Basically, whatever information people need when they gloss over the thumbnail in the slides gallery. When speaking, this time should be spent telling attendees what the talk will be about and whatever hook you want to keep audiences in the room. If this requires a minimal amount of experience, this would be the time to mention it.
Intro Slide
This should not be your resume. Unless you’re in college or presenting graduate research, don’t bring up college. It should also include only the most relevant parts of your technical journey. If you put a job on your intro slide, it should have something that leads back into your presentation. It should also say why you’re qualified to give this talk now in a very simple way.
 The Next 3 – 5 Minutes
Boilerplate Slides
These slides explain the topic in detail. It should explain all the key words and jargon in your topic abstract and establish a common base of knowledge to work from, and why they’re important to know about.
 Each Five Minutes After
Content Slides
This is when you present each topic of your talk. An easily digestible topic will take about five minutes to explain as if you were reading a two or three page blog post. You can have either one slide with bullet points or several slides with screenshots and videos. If a topic goes drastically over five minutes, consider breaking it up into two topics and packaging them accordingly.
 Last Five Minutes
Wrap up Slide(s)
These slides should list all of your bullet points, including defined words and topics, things so someone reviewing your deck knows generally where they were among your slides. It should also make sense for someone taking photos in the audience to be able to make sense of.
Resource Slide (Optional)
In the case where you’re citing documentation, quotes, or other tutorials, you should have a slide of where these would exist as well as links to them should they download the slides for themselves.Â
Contact Slide
In lieu of a Q&A slide, put up your contact information. Again, it should be useful enough for someone taking a photo in the audience. It should have follow up information, such as your Twitter or LinkedIn, and the title of your talk. At this point you would ask for questions and leave up this contact information while you go over it.
 To see this structure in action, you can view the recording for my talk Gateways to Gateways: API Development in the Cloud I presented at APItheDocs in April 2019 hosted by Provonix.Â
 My post on how to structure a technical talk! #technicalspeaking #cfp In three months, I spoke at five events in three months including APItheDocs, AWS Summit, Revolution Conf, AWS Community Day, and PearConf, all differing in size and target audiences.









