Advice For PyCon Speakers
This page is a consequence of my inexperience at speaking at technical
conferences (read: none). It’s a combination of content provided by
others, small bit of editorial discretion, and various resources from ye
ol’ internet. Finally, it’s a work-in-progress and I will gladly take
feedback.
Ultimately, my intention is to get a form of this page up on the
official PyCon site, if people find it helpful.
Mainly, a bunch of folks in the Python community were very generous with
their time and shared some great advice. Most of the content on this
page is just a compilation of what they had to say. The value here is
that their perspective is collectively quite appropriate to the Python
community. You might go as far as to call it pythonic. :)
The whole point it to focus on the practical advice of people that know
what speaking at PyCon is all about. PyCon is it’s own creature and who
would understand it better?
Some of the contributers provided links to things they have written on
their blogs. These, along with other more general public speaking links,
can be found below in the Resources section.
May this be as helpful to you as it has been to me!
Talk Proposals
It’s a little late for this one...
Preparing
To start off, here’s a great bit of general advice from one of the
contributers, inspired by Dale Carnegie:
Talk about something you know well; speak passionately about it;
speak to the audience as you would your friends (they want to hear
what you have to say).
Know Your Stuff
- Make sure you’re genuinely interested in your topic and just have fun
with it.
- Know your material. Don’t give a talk on something you only vaguely
know about. Don’t think that the few months you have between
submission time and the talk will be enough for you to learn about the
topic.
Building Your Talk
- One approach: structure the talk as you would a story, where each
section leads naturally into the next, building in complexity.
- Another approach: write out every word you plan to say, and time
yourself saying. Then turn it into an outline and throw away the text
before you actually speak. This way you’ll have the precise words
somewhere in your head, but you won’t be reading from a paper. Your
outline can help guide you.
- An overarching mindset: “Entertain, Educate, Practice”. (See this blog post.) Remember, play
to your strengths.
- Treat your “PyCon presentation [as] be a trailer for your expertise.”
(See this blog post.)
- Often you should try to avoid introducing concepts if you will have to
say things like “and I will explain that more in a few slides.” Making
“forward references” like that breaks the linear flow and makes it
more difficult for the audience to concentrate on what you are saying
now, since they start worrying about what you will be saying in a
minute. It isn’t always possible to be completely linear, but consider
starting with that as a goal.
- A lot of “intro to X” talks start by doing a live demo and installing
the tool. Seriously avoid that. No one cares about how easy it is to
install a tool until they have seen why they care about using it, at
which point they can look at the instructions on the project web site.
Instead, jump in and get right to something interesting to grab the
audience’s attention, or they are going to go back to checking email.
- “Tell em what you are going to tell em, tell em, and then tell em that
you told em.”
- Keep the talks short and focused. Explain to the audience why they
should also be passionate about the subject. GET THEM HUNGRY.
- If you are funny, use it. Good, geeky tech jokes == good.
- Gender references and sexual/racy refs are right out. Don’t. Just
don’t.
- If in doubt, err on the side of not talking long enough. It’s better
to have the audience thinking “That talk left me wanting more. I need
to go talk to the presenter/download the package/go to the BoF,” than
“That talk stretched 15 minutes of material into an hour. What a
waste of time.”
- Don’t waste time on introductory material, e.g. explaining Python’s
syntax, explaining XML for fifteen slides.
- Have your important research done before you start trying to prepare
the talk. If you run out of preparation time, don’t skimp on
rehearsal; instead, cut scope from the talk, or make do with a simple
but readable visual design.
- Don’t think of talk length as an indicator of value. There is a
reason why the most popular sessions of the entire conference are the
lightning talks. Less is More.
All About Slides
- The slides are primarily to support your talk.
- Slides should not be too “busy”. Keep them short, effectively as
“reminders what to say”.
- If a bullet point gets up to 15 words, consider breaking it up.
- Group related points.
- Only hit the most important points on the slides. Expand as you speak
if there’s audience interest.
- Presentations look best when the slide size is the same as the
projector’s native resolution. For the conference this year, that is
????x???.
- The most important thing about slides is that the audience needs to be
able to read them. That seems obvious, but all too often the slides
are hard to read.
- Many people have trouble reading light text on a dark background. It
may work for you on your laptop screen, but projected in front of the
audience in a dark room is a completely different story. Use a white
or other light background color with high contrast dark text in a
large font.
- Background colors that look great on a laptop or monitor screen often
lose something in the transition to a projector. You can’t predict
what the venue will give you in regards to quality/brand of projector,
so why take unnecessary risks?
- Strongly consider using the default font of the slide software. Maybe
its not fancy or artistic, but your message won’t be obfuscated by
forcing people to squint to see slides reinforcing what you’re saying.
- Use more slides with less code per slide in order to increase your
font size. Wrapping lines to make them less than 80 columns helps with
the size, too.
- If all of the slides show code and output, there probably isn’t enough
visual reinforcement of whatever framing story you are using to tie
everything together. Use pictures to reinforce concepts, without
simply throwing keywords up on a bullet list. Use diagrams to explain
the architecture of the thing you are describing.
- Try to finish your slides way before the conference. It’s tempting to
put them off, but the more you go through them, the more secure you’ll
be with your timing and your content.
- One way to make the slides and the talk work together is to ramble
through your talk a few times, recording it, then organize your slides
off of that.
- Aim for big text, clear images, good contrast. Stand about five feet
from your laptop screen – can you see the text from that distance?
- PyCon does not have a published volume of proceedings, but the slides
and other materials for talks are often made available on-line.
Therefore, be sure your presentation can be turned into a format
suitable for online viewing. While PDF is permitted, HTML is better.
Keep graphics reasonably sized for web access.
- Hopefully your slides are finished up in advance of the conference.
Consider uploading the presentation to the conference talk proposal
system or to a page linked from your talk’s page on the PyCon site.
This gives the audience more information in choosing which talks to
attend, and people can refer to the slides if they miss something
during your talk.
- Don’t try to squeeze more than 10 lines of code onto the slide; if the
font gets too small, the code will just be a meaningless set of
squiggles to people in the back of the auditorium.
- If possible, view your slides on a projector and see if they’re
readable. Are the font sizes large enough? Is there enough contrast
between the text and the background?
- Plan on spending absolutely no more than 60 seconds on any slide.
- Conversely, only a few seconds for a slide may be too little.
- Above all, try to be consistent about how long you spend on each
slide. The audience will respond well to consistency.
Demos
- As noted above, don’t do a demo of how to install a tool.
- Be hesitant to rely on live demos. Fumbling around on stage changing
between a code editor and a terminal where the code is running takes
time that could be spent telling the audience something else
interesting. They believe you can type and they believe you can run
programs. Just show them the meaty bits.
- Phrased another way, don’t do live demos.
Practice, Practice, Practice
- (Try to find all the references to practice that you’ve already read.)
- If it is you first time around, it may be worth going to a local
interest group or somesuch to practice your talk in front of a small
audience.
- Everyone you’ll see at Pycon giving “good” talks has also given their
fair share of bad talks. It just takes practice. The best way to
practice is just to give talks.
- Video yourself (even just for part of your talk) and see yourself “in
action” as others see you.
- Giving a talk is not a writing problem or a design problem. It is a
performance problem. If you are a new speaker, you should probably
spend more time practicing your presentation than you spend writing
and designing the slides.
- Practice! Go through your talk at least twice just to yourself.
You’ll find yourself much more confident if you know the talk well
enough not to worry about forgetting it or what you will say next. It
just flows better and you’ll feel much more relaxed.
What to Bring
- Bring your own dongle, and your presentation on a thumb drive, in
several formats.
Somewhat More Officially
For a 30-minute slot, you have 25 minutes to talk plus 5 minutes for
questions. 45-minute slots mean you have 40 minutes to talk and 5
minutes for questions. Time your talk accordingly.
At the Talk
Before You Get Started
- Make sure you got a good night sleep (yeah right).
- In fact, be rested, fed, and sober (not somber) for your talk. Skip
the late night party and get a good night’s rest. The day of the talk
eat food that makes you feel physically better.
- The backdrops are generally black so don’t wear dark clothes. On video
it can look like you it is just your head bobbing around by itself.
Steve Jobs can get away with it because he has a professional lighting
crew, you don’t.
- Remove your conference lanyard. It can distract you, you will play
with it, or it will get caught in your wireless microphone and cause
problems.
- Turn off or silence your own mobile phone and in general remove any
large objects from your pockets which make it look like you are hiding
your next bottle of beer in there.
- If you don’t need wifi for your talk, disconnect yourself from the
network, shutdown all applications besides the presentation software.
Temporarily turn off any notifications, or sources of notifications as
the popups can sometimes cause presentation software such as KeyNote
to drop out of presenter mode. The audience also doesn’t want to hear
all the tones as people mention you on live Twitter streams saying how
cool or lame your talk is.
- Try to verify ahead of time that your computer works with the AV
system. If you are going to rely on speaker’s notes, consider
printing them out ahead of time in case you can’t use your laptop
screen for some reason. Remember Murphy.
- Be in the room a few minutes early if you can, and chat to people
already in the room as you prepare.
- Introduce yourself to your session chairperson no later than the break
before your talk. Once the presentations start the chair will be
focused on managing the session.
DOs and DON’Ts During
- DON’T give a talk with any kind of pen in your hand. You might just
end up with ink all over your shirt.
- For that matter, be conscientious that having anything in your hands
could be a distraction, to the audience or to you.
- DON’T move around. Stand still. See this blog post.
- DO take the podium... then move to the side. Make sure the audience
can see you. This is a good thing. We like seeing the whole person.
Once you’re out there, stand still. Don’t sway. Try not to lean.
Keep your hand movements to, maybe, one every five minutes. This
works really well if you’re actually calm and well-rested.
- If you’re tired, stay behind the podium and grab it. This isn’t the
best thing in the world, as it weakens your visual presence, but it
also won’t be distracting your audience.
- DO speak loudly! This naturally makes you slow down and enunciate
your words more clearly. It also makes you seem and feel more
confident. It’s very hard to listen to a talk, even from a very
knowledgeable person, who is talking too quietly and mumbling words.
It’s amazing what effect it has on your confidence too.
- DON’T just read the slides. People came to hear what you have to
say.
- What you should be doing is using the slides to remind yourself of
your next point. Think of them as notes for your speech, not the
speech itself.
- DO remember about the microphone, whether it’s attached to your
lapel or is on the podium in front of you. Some speakers will turn to
point at the display and talk away from the microphone; be sure to
point and then turn back.
- Never, ever do a live demo, or depend on the wireless.
About the Audience
- Unlike some academic conferences, PyCon is not an adversarial
environment–you’re not going to be attacked afterwards.
- Just flat-out realize you will be presenting to hundreds of people
(even at worst case of 10% of the conference, that’s 150 people). But
presenting to a lot of people is actually easier than a small group at
a users group. Why? Smaller venue means more attentive attendees.
- When you present at PyCon you have to realize a huge portion of people
will be on their laptops, staring at their screens. This doesn’t mean
they are not listening, but it can be disconcerting as you won’t be
able to use the audience to easily judge how engaging you are being.
- Said one contributer: “I have presented and thought I sucked and then
later have tell people they loved my presentation, even with
essentially no one laughing at my jokes.”
- Look around at your audience and pay attention to their body language.
- Check that the audience is hearing you (“Can you hear me at the
back?”) and understanding you (“Does that make sense to everyone?”;
“Are there any questions about that?”).
- It takes people about 10 seconds to realize you have asked a question,
so if you ask if people are understanding you need to wait that long
for it to be effective, else just always assume that someone will
speak up if you are being confusing.
- Encourage the audience to fill all available seats, rather than
standing/sitting in the aisles or by the door.
- Open Space, BoF, and Followup. Don’t forget to invite your audiance
to a BoF or Open Space followup! The part of your audience which is
passionate (or has become passionate due to your presentation) are
encouraged to continue the conversation, and you the presenter are a
key part of that.
Question Time
- There may be that one smart aleck who tries to point out some bad
design decision or mistake or something that is really not important
or your fault. Feel free to answer them succinctly to get them off
the microphone.
- Someone will ask you a tough question that you can’t answer on the
spot, so just ask them to catch you after the talk.
- If someone asks on the mic a very specific question that is really
only helpful to them, ask them to talk to you after so you can get to
more questions that are helpful to the whole audience.
- Have a prepped response for when you just don’t know an answer. It’s
okay to say ‘I haven’t run into that’ or ‘I’m not familiar with that’.
It’s not okay to bumble and fake it.
- During the Q&A portion of the talk, always repeat any questions that
were asked without a microphone - otherwise many people in the
audience won’t hear the question.
- Consider finishing your talk early for extra question time. Then
prepare some bonus material in case people run out of questions. See
this blog comment.
- Be nice to people who come up to you after a talk. You never know who
is that new person who comes up to you, and you might regret it later.
Be nice to them and you’ll find out. Try to find time to talk to
everyone, even if for just a minute each.
Handling Nervousness
- Remember, they’re more scared of you than you are of them!
- You shouldn’t get all worried about “being remembered for a bad talk”.
The honest truth of the matter is that almost nobody is going to
remember much about the actual presentation of your talk. So, don’t
sweat it.
- If you’re nervous, thinking that if you screw up that you’ll forever
ruin your reputation in the community due to fidgeting a tiny bit too
much? Chill out. We’re all still working on our talks.
- Take a deep breath and relax. One contributer said, “I’ve yet to see
a talk where someone was booed off the stage, and I’ve seen some
horrific talks.”
- If you are nervous, there’s nothing wrong with admitting that. The
information you present is your talk’s primary value. PyCon audiences
are very forgiving.
- Take time to yourself before you speak. Deep breathing is always good
preparation. Your nervousness will be less apparent than you suppose.
- And again, the best remedy for nervousness is to practice, practice,
practice.
Acknowledgements
Finally, a big thank-you to the folks that have contributed (in no
particular order):
* Raymond Hettinger,
* Katie Cunningham,
* David Beazley,
* Brett Cannon,
* Doug Hellmann,
* C. Titus Brown,
* Michael Foord,
* Ned Batchelder,
* Danny Greedfield,
* Graham Dumpleton (from comments),
* Doug Napoleone (from comments).
* Jacob Kaplan-Moss (from comments).