A technical talk about technical talks
Nicholas H.Tollervey
TIME: 0mins
This is a deliberately meta talk on giving talks.
By the end you will have a framework and some heuristics to
help you prepare a technical talk.
How to give a talk (Agenda)
What is a talk?
A presenter
An audience
A context
A call to action
What happens?
How to talk?
What to plan?
Decide agenda
Bullet points
Rehearse
Questions?
NO!
(To bullet point karaoke)
Let's think about:
Audience, Intent, Story, Delivery.
Communication is an important aspect of programming. So we should pay attention to it. We're going to explore these core concepts with a fun demo presentation at the end.
Intent
Why are you giving this talk to this audience?
Every talk has the same general intent: to affect a (hopefully valuable) change in the audience.
Your talk will also have a specific, subject related, intent.
You need to know what this is.
A long time ago
in a galaxy far,(it's all about the story!)
If all you're doing is a dump of information, email it.
If you must give a presentation - tell a story.
It's interesting and engaging.
It gives you a structure for organising ideas.
It helps you think about movement of thought.
A rough heuristic for story telling is... these are not
set-in-stone rules.
Beginning
Introduce yourself (make a connection)
Audience expectations (where are they now?)
Set the stage (context, key players, processes)
In a talk, use your beginning to make it intriguing.
Middle
There's a tension (found in the current context)
Describe the problem (unmask the source)
Why this is important (the value to be unlocked)
Find the inflection point, aha moment or reveal the devilish detail that everyone will agree is a pain.
End
Explore (what could we do?)
Resolve (here's what I propose)
Reflect (next steps, and questions)
The climax to which we're heading, and it should leave the audience wanting more.
So, assuming you have a structure or framework to your talk, how exactly are you going to deliver it?
Delivery
Clearly you're going to have to speak, but you'll likely have slides to complement your words and share afterwards with the audience.
These are some *personal* tricks and tips to think about. Again, no hard-and-fast rules here.
The bullet point secret
Don't use bullet points
(Unless you're enumerating a list)
If you find yourself writing bullets...
...put them in your presenter notes...
...then choose an image to illustrate...
...or a handful of words to make your point.
Never just read out bullet points. ;-)
Alternatives to bullet points
Surely there's a better way?
I have some ideas for reading out bullet points.
BOLD SUMMARY STATEMENTS
(With parenthetical clarification.)
You want the focus to be on what you're saying. The words on the screen give the core concept to keep people focused.
IMAGES
Again, forces the focus on the speaker, but gives people a break from words on slides. It helps the audience remain attentive and engaged.
Video's are a wonderful demonstration of how things unfold. Especially useful if a live demo is risky.
Code
"""
Python "hello" module.
"""
def hello(name="World!"):
"""
Say hello to the given name.
"""
return f"Hello, {name}"
a_name = input("What is your name? ")
greeting = hello(a_name)
print(greeting)
In general, don't get lost in the details.
But if you need to illustrate something technical, a code walk-through is helpful and concrete.
Tools
(My personal preferences. YMMV.)
These are my personal preferences. This presentation took about three hours to prepare yesterday afternoon.
Foo, bar, baz
Nicholas H.Tollervey
I also used to be a teacher - which is why I like explaining things (hence the need for placehholders in examples).
We're all technologists, and explaining stuff is a bread and butter part of our job.
"""
Placeholder example.
"""
def foo(bar="baz"):
"""
Random function that does stuff.
"""
...
But what comes next?
??? = foo(bar="baz")
We have run out of placeholders!
NO MORE ABSTRACT CODE EXAMPLES 😬
(How will we survive?)
We have undertaken extensive testing, with no noticeable side effects.
Why qux?
Three letters
Meaningless
Fun to say
Confuses non-coders
The Future?
(There are 17,576 unique three letter combinations)
And we're only just getting started. Join our community discord and clone our GitHub repository if you want to get involved.