How to Deliver a Talk at a Programming Conference

Check out developer Paul Hudson’s curated collection of tips and advice on preparing and giving talks at tech events. From examples of talk titles and speaker bios to what makes a good slide deck, there’s some solid advice here from an array of experienced speakers. While some of the info is specific to mobile devs, most is much broader. Some of my favourite nuggets involve how to pick a presentation topic, the part that a lot of people – no matter how many talks they’ve given before – can find challenging:

I think a great talk is a talk that only that person can give – something created at the intersection of their passions and experience.

Cate Huston

The best conference presentations are about something the presenter really cares about – either because it’s something they’ve experienced or because they’re deeply interested in what they’re talking about.

Ellen Shapiro

Try to connect what you’re saying to real-world experiences. If you have anecdotes, use them. If you have places where you tried and failed, use those. Seeing real code is great, but hearing from your personal experience is often better.

Paul Hudson

Check out the post.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.