#technical speaking

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. 

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. 

Demystifying Public Speaking

For those of you that don't know, one of my current goals is upping my technical speaking game. I was hesitant to read this book for two reasons:

There are a lot of free technical speaking resources online.

Submitting a talk proposal feels like an odds game for those of us who aren't notable enough to be invited to speak at conferences.

I dove into this book with a lot of skepticism, and some of that skepticism was due. I hoped to walk away from this book with advice on how to bounce back and iterate on a proposal after rejection, but, since author Lara Hogan is an invited speaker at this point in her career, she seems to be too deep into the technical speaking circuit to provide that advice.

Once I reset my expectations about this book, however, I found it quite useful. Reading Lara Hogan's words gave me the chance to peek inside the brain of an experienced technical speaker. She mentioned things that were new to me – drafting speaker contracts, handling a Q & A, etc. – which I couldn't have learned about outside of this book. I also admired her empathy towards budding technical speakers who are steeped in fear and nervousness.