I thought it would be fun to share a review on how I currently prepare for conference talks. So here goes, we’ll eventually see how it changes at the end of the year!
Reviewing my 2019
I got to speak at two conferences, on top of making guest appearances at my alma matter and creating and facilitating workshops. I also had the chance to submit more conference abstracts, some of them getting great reception, and leading to invitations to speak in 2020. I felt confident going into 2019 after signing up for as many speaking opportunities as possible. I spoke and wrote 1-2 times a month for eight months straight. I spoke up throughout the year and took advantage of just practicing talking about relevant topics anytime I could, even if it was in meetings and whatnot.
I recommend this path for anyone looking to improve their speaking and presentation skills. I tend to be shy and quiet whenever I’m in new spaces. I also struggle with feelings of anxiety during those periods. It really is about how much you practice. Sometimes you can only manage small doses of public speaking at a time, but don’t let that bother you keep at it, and you’ll eventually grow into your style. I’m not the person with 20 years of experience, and I don’t have to be. I’m excited to grow and learn my style of presenting, and I’m proud of my current progress. I’ll also add some tips that worked for me later on in this post for speaking. So without further ado, this was my 2019 year!
Tip #1 Starting Somewhere: Believing in your Talk Topic.
Because all content needs a topic, we’ll start here.
In general, I don’t stress on the talk topic too much. In every instance, the topics you suggest are products of time you invested (or will invest) in training, research, work, and or projects. Sometimes these topics may be success stories or implementations/solutions that worked for you. I will say that the most crucial part of this is that the talk topic is relevant to me, the speaker. If I’m living the life of a developer, then the technologies I’m working with connect with and apply to other developers. You can even be more specific than that and target enterprise developers or Java EE developers. You can leverage common ground and say that you’re also a developer, or you’ve been a developer, or you’ve worked with developers. Hey, here’s my talk.
You need to just start somewhere with that common ground. You need momentum going into this to believe in yourself. You need to be able to say this is my purpose for speaking in front of an audience. I’ll keep going with this developer example: If I’m thinking about an audience of developers, then I should believe as a developer what conference content is relevant to me. And position this relevance for the talk content and abstract.
If you’re presenting a topic on a board concept like DevOps, it may have many misconceptions for community or conference attendees. If you feel that people are going to enjoy a shorter straightforward presentation with time for Q&A, then stick to that format. You may find that they will appreciate someone who works with DevOps practices sharing their best practices. You can use this reasoning to frame your talk. Sometimes merely saving people time by sharing tips and tricks can build your repertoire as a speaker. I’ll talk about building credibility as a speaker here in a bit.
You don’t have to be a subject matter expert at the time that you’re proposing a talk. In tech, things change rapidly: how much you understand will change, how a technology work together with other technologies will also change.
You can always edit or grow an abstract. It’s also okay to use writing a talk proposal as a way to figure out how a small part of current work/life fits into the bigger picture. Your day to day may make it hard to see what’s most relevant and telling, so take time to recognize trending and relevant topics in your field. Eventually, you’ll find a problem that fits and speaks to you.
TIP #2 Understanding Conferences
Something that helps with starting is following conferences you enjoy going to or would like to attend.
Conferences will typically have a Call for Proposals or CFP. You basically write up a pitch for your talk by aligning it to current tracks of interest. If you were to present your topic it’ll be included in the conference’s sessions. Each conference has its own set of session formats. You’ll typically have things like an opening keynote, mini-sessions, panels, and workshops. You also have session tracks that organize sessions for attendees. If I were to host a conference on animals I could have 50 speakers and session tracks for birds, reptiles, and mammals. The mammal track would only contain sessions related to attendees interested in mammals.
CFPs will typically ask you to provide a few sentences or paragraphs as an abstract(summary) of your session, the session format, the session track/relevant topics, and possibly other details about you as a speaker. All these details depend on the conference. The smaller conferences tend to have fewer session formats and tracks. Conferences will also have chairs or reviewers, typically relevant individuals from the field, review, and determine which sessions will belong to the program that year.
All this is why I don’t stress too much on my abstract. It’ll resonate, or it won’t. Many uncontrollable factors go into acceptances and rejections (note: sometimes conferences will refuse any repeated content or similar content being submitted).
A few other conference tidbits:
Conferences tend to repeat around the same time of year every year. So you can bookmark the event page or subscribe to CFP notifications and general announcements.
Conferences will have an archive of previously accepted sessions that include talk content and abstracts. You can quickly learn from observing successful sessions.
There will also most likely be event blog or content that explains what’s most pressing and important to the organizers and sponsors of the event that year.
tldr: Look for conference info and messaging so that you can tailor your abstract to fit with that conference of interest.
TIP #3 Make the format work for you
I have a format for writing abstracts that works for me. Typically I’ll spend one or two sentences with a few general statements. Next, I’ll introduce the topic. Then present the takeaways for the presentation. Usually, the final sentences will have the words “this session will XXX“, or “attendees will leave with XXX.“ Here’s an example:
Microservice architectures depend on the granularity, responsiveness, and elasticity of components. The communication between components is integral to the success of systems. Istio is a service mesh for microservices that provides additional features for managing and understanding your microservice architecture. Join us in this presentation about service mesh. Attendees will learn how Istio Service Mesh fits into the context of microservices, what metrics help understand a microservices application, and how to use Istio to expose platform and application level metrics.
Excellent, so I’ve said not to worry throughout this whole post. At this point, you’ve submitted a response or two to a conference CFP. Next is the part where you’ll find out if the talk is accepted. There’s typically a few things I’m thinking about when this happens: yay, time, and format.
You’ll get a confirmation: (hooray), and then it’ll be a bit of paperwork for getting your info and agreeing to speak at / travel to the event. Along with this confirmation, you’ll get info about the important dates for the event, and so you can start planning out enough time to prep for the event. The format of the session will also be confirmed, and so you’ll have a good idea about the room set up and the amount of time you’ll have to speak. Timeboxing is essential: if you’re signed up to fit into a 20-minute slot, you probably won’t have time to: introduce yourself, talk on your content, do a demo, and have a Q&A session at the end. I want to mention this because I’ve often seen poor planning for speaker sessions. Practice and be realistic about how much you can fit into the time slot.
The first thing I like to do when prepping for a speaking event is to consider the content break down. This usually comes in the form of a single slide that features an agenda. The break down for the abstract above would be something like:
A Level Set: What is Istio, What is OpenShift Service Mesh?
Part 2: Distributed Tracing: CNCF Jaeger Architecture with Service Mesh
Part 3: Monitoring and Metrics architecture within an OpenShift Environment
This breakdown or agenda has to speak to you, else you may find yourself trying to compensate by introducing additional aspects to your talk when you may not have the room or relevance to do so.
In a 20-minute speaker slot, I’ll have time for 10-15 minutes of speaking time and potentially the remaining time is people settling in and out. Q&A is great to have in case you miss anything, just be sure that your slide deck doesn’t have animations because animating through those slides will be hell if you need to reference a past slide. It’s also great because you get to end your talk and then end the Q&A session, coming out with potentially two sets of applause.
Another tip for presenting is to know that’s it’s ok to be nervous. Even the most experienced speakers will get butterflies. Hell, it’s the #1 fear for humans listed in surveys, above death. Just realize that it’s possible to have your nerves settle even while you’re on stage. Owning the stage will settle your nerves!
Something that works for me is memorizing how I want to do the start of my presentation. Do something fun or on theme to grab the audience’s attention, have an introduction, then go into your talk. Having a good start and response from the crowd will help you relax.
Three stats continue to stand out in my mind and help me understand what it takes to do a good job:
attendees determine within the first 15 of a presentation whether the presentation is worth their attention.
more than 50% of that decision is based on nonverbal cues.
you’ll plan for 100% of your talk, practice 80% and deliver about 60%.
I’ll probably have to update that last stat when I find it. It’s 4 am and this took longer than expected to write. If you enjoyed this post let me know! I’ll also say it’s not easy, signing up to speak at an event while juggling life and regular day to day job responsibilities. If you know someone who’s doing it, give them a big kudos! There’s so much more to cover about speaking, what’re your favorite public speaking tips and tricks?
