This was the biggest change between the presentations I had to give in high school and the ones in college and above. In high school, the topic was usually given to us, whereas in college and later, I got to choose the topic I was most knowledgeable about. The latter meant I was more passionate, more able to answer audience questions and more able to tailor the delivery to the audience.

One piece of advice I heard was that if you absolutely have to talk about a topic you're not familiar with, talk about being a beginner in that topic. Talk about your perspective as an outsider learning that topic in the first place.

Think about your slide and presentation style. For example, I have enormous decks for most of my talks (think like 55 slides for 30 minutes) but I burn through them very quickly, usually less than 20 seconds per slide. I came from film editing before moving to software so I approach my Powerpoints like a movie, it's just my nature. Others have really short decks that are information dense so the emphasis is on the talking part of the talk and the slides just provide a reference in the background. Others forego slides in favor of straight-up demos, which is certainly slick if you can pull it off (high risk, high reward) and need little pictorial illustration.

Use the old 5 paragraph essay rules from high school as a starting point for structuring your talk: tell you're audience what you're about to tell them (thesis, topic, core argument) and how you're going to tell them (outline), then tell them (supporting paragraphs), then tell them at the end again what you told them and how you told them (conclusion, restating your intro).

Humor helps, generally. This isn't supposed to be a standup set so definitely don't go overboard, but it can really help. Particularly if you can tie it in with some empathy for your audience. ("We're gonna do this in Perl. I love writing Perl, you just hold shift and smash the number row for awhile.")

And for heaven's sake don't read your slides.

Do a live demo, people love live demo's, but be prepared for when disaster strikes (it will), if possible run your live demo on a physical device with you during the presentation.

Most places allow you to have 2 devices connected, or quickly switch the HDMI cable to the demo machine.

Do not use a linux machine, I know this sounds harsh, but with all the types of beamers/screens out there, a windows or mac machine will just have a much higher success rate. (I learnt this the hard way, in the end I could choose between mirrored 640*480 or full hd on the beamer only, which makes live demos much harder).

Create short slides, the slides are there to guide you and the audience. Try to prevent reading the slides out loud.

Use images and videos, they can tell more then a thousand words.

I often use the STAR approach to tell my story, this helps structure your talk. You don't need to follow star exactly, but if trying to explain something, it often helps to first give a bit of background why you did what you did.

Make sure you let the audience know if and when you will be answering questions, some talks really benefit from interactivity, but if you are short on time, let people know they can ask their questions later (perhaps add a slide at the end with sources and your contact information).

Also, relax, the audience has already decided they want to listen to your presentation.

- Ask yourself what is your real goal of the talk. Are you trying to teach people something? Or are you making a live-action advertisement for a product/service (or for yourself)? Optimize your talk ruthlessly for that goal.

- If you're doing a talk in front of a small audience (say, 30 or less people), and you're going to discuss details of code or charts presented on slides, then put all those code snippets and charts you want to discuss in a single document and give everyone a printout. A printed document has much higher resolution and quality than a slide (especially for the people sitting in the back), and will allow them to look back (or forward) at an important figure if you're currently showing another slide. Paper is cheap and quite ecological, so don't worry about that.

When I first started, I got practically physically ill while giving a speech, and I was very, very nervous. I realized I either had to learn to give speeches smoothly or I would essentially partially cripple my whole career. The first time IBM asked me to give a speech in New York one evening, I decided I was going to give a really good speech, a speech that was wanted, not a technical one but a broad one, and at the end if they liked it, I'd quietly say, ``Any time you want one I'll come in and give you one.'' As a result, I got a great deal of practice giving speeches to a limited audience and I got over being afraid. Furthermore, I could also then study what methods were effective and what were ineffective.

While going to meetings I had already been studying why some papers are remembered and most are not. The technical person wants to give a highly limited technical talk. Most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give. As a result, many talks are ineffective. The speaker names a topic and suddenly plunges into the details he's solved. Few people in the audience may follow. You should paint a general picture to say why it's important, and then slowly give a sketch of what was done. Then a larger number of people will say, ``Yes, Joe has done that,'' or ``Mary has done that; I really see where it is; yes, Mary really gave a good talk; I understand what Mary has done.'' The tendency is to give a highly restricted, safe talk; this is usually ineffective. Furthermore, many talks are filled with far too much information. So I say this idea of selling is obvious.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

1. Don't start your talk by apologizing. "Well, first I need to apologize. I'm insanely jet lagged, and so I'm not sure how coherent this is going to be." "First, I'd like to apologize. This is actually a revised version of a talk I gave in 2009." "Let me start with an apology. I have a terrible head cold."

Just stop. If the talk is incoherent, you'll just have to do your best on the spot. If you're tired, too bad. If you think people might have trouble hearing you, say so. But don't apologize. People do this because they're nervous, not because the audience has been insulted or aggrieved in some way, and while it might seem like a friendly gesture, it's more likely to communicate that you're unprepared. Or nervous. And it's a cliche.

2. Do not ever go over time. In fact, go under time. As Edward Tufte once said, "No one ever left a presentation wishing it had gone on for another 45 minutes" (or something like that; you get the point).

3. Do not read your goddamn slides to the audience. Please. That is not "giving a talk." You can maybe do that if it's a long quote, but don't read the bullet points that everyone can clearly see right in front of them. Expand on them, provide counterpoints to them, whatever, but do not read them. If you're thinking of your slides (when you're creating them) as "what I'm going say," you're probably doing it wrong.

4. Use a laser pointer sparingly or not at all. Use it only to make a precise gesture necessary to point something out very specifically on a chart or map, and then shut the thing off. Making dizzying circles around every bullet point is incredibly annoying.

5. "Never mind the mic. Can everyone here me? I'm just going to speak loud." Unless you're very experienced with this (professional teacher, actor, or something like that), you probably don't know how to project your voice for twenty minutes. Get the mic fixed and use it. If the mic can't be fixed, speak way louder than you think you have to (without shouting). This is a learned skill, and most people don't know how to do it (but think they do). If the venue is large enough to require amplification, it's there for a reason.

6. Speak at a moderate pace. People speak fast when they're nervous. The proper pace will feel a bit slow to you, but perfectly natural to the audience. Check yourself periodically. Write it down on your notes. Slow down.

7. If some parts of the information you're trying to communicate are very dense or there's some useful data that will help to contextualize your presentation, create a handout. Do not try to cram it all into a slide.

8. Take some time to try to imagine every conceivable question you might get in the Q&A. You won't hit them all, and things do come out of left field, but you don't want to be caught totally off guard. Just review any common misconceptions or objections to what you're saying, and give some thought to how you're going to respond. Some people just want to comment. Thank them, briefly offer a comment if appropriate, and move on.

9. If you feel the need to ask a question like, "Does everyone know what a frubazzle is?" don't. If the question is warranted, then you can be absolutely sure that someone in the audience doesn't know what that is. Just say, "Some of you may not be familiar with the term, 'frubazzle.' A frubazzle is a . . ."

10. Commit to getting better and better at it. When I gave my first talk (in grad school), I thought, "It's going to be really embarrassing when I faint dead away in front of all these people," and I made a lot of mistakes. Today, I have only the slightest pang of nerves when I step up, and it goes away immediately. When you hear a good talk, try to figure what made it good. How did the speaker behave? How were the slides set up? Did they do anything that you can incorporate into your own presentation "style?" Public speaking is an ancient art, and you need to treat it as you would the art of writing or the art of coding: with care and study.

Remember to pause and speak slower. It gives the impression you are really considering what you are about to say next and allows you a break.

Don't drink alcohol before the talk (unless you need a shot to calm your nerves) and do have a bottle of water available as your mouth will most likely become dry.

Lastly relax. The audience is unlikely to call you out unless you make a total hash of it and they usually want you to succeed.

Usually the first part of the story of a tech talk explains what the problem is. Many tech talks fail because the audience either doesn't understand the problem, or doesn't believe your problem needs solving. Think carefully who your audience are, and ensure you explain the problem in enough detail that you connect with your audience.

The middle part of a tech talk then is usually spent on explaining your solution to the problem. If you've explained the problem well, that the outline of the solution will basically work should be reasonably self-evident. Many tech talks fail here, because they dive too deep into the details too fast. Again, know your audience, so you know how deep to dive. You can never fit all the details you have in your head into a talk, so think carefully about what the most important features of your solution are, and focus on those. Keep less important details for backup slides you can turn to if asked.

The third part is usually evidence that your solution works. Often this involves graphs. Again, focus on only the most important results - more than about three graphs and your audience will switch off. Explain the experiment, and explain what the axes represent. Way too many people don't spend enough time on this, so no matter how good the data, no-one understood.

Finally, your conclusions. What did you learn? How complete is it? What are its limitations? You're not entirely doing a sales job, and your audience are wise enough to know that your system will have limitations. You should be the one to explain them, rather than have them come out in questions (when they'll start to doubt eveything else you told them). Finally, what future directions do you think should be taken?

Of course, different talks have different shapes. Find what works for you. Sometimes you need to iterate between problem - solution - new problem - revised solution, etc.

When you present, know your first few sentences by heart, because you'll be nervous. After that, it matters less, you'll have settled into the talk, and you'll appear less stilted if you're not reciting a script. Most importantly, turn your excitement dial to 11. If the audience feel you're not excited by the work, why would they be?

Don't spent 10 minutes on the introduction. A very common mistake is people step too slowly through the setup material. Just lay out the problem and GO. In fact, even throughout the talk, assume the audience is smart and can fill in the obvious blanks.

Briefly, rather than using topic titles ("Experimental Setup", "Results"), use assertions ("Sampling occurred over 5 days", "Sunlight causes significant degradation") as titles. Then the bulk of the slide is some information, preferably graphical, that supports the assertion. Reading the titles in order should give you a strong sense of the presentation content.

I strongly recommend "The Craft of Scientific Presentations" by Michael Alley, which covers the assertion-evidence approach, and a host of other practical topics.

[0] https://www.assertion-evidence.com

Before creating a single slide, write down sentence by sentence, word by word, what story you want to tell. You can use tools to get a very rough metric of how long your written text will translate being spoken. Stop when you reach your talk length.

Once you are done, you can start creating slides. Choose what you like the best and what fits your story. Few slides, many slides (e.g. Pecha Kucha), no slides.

I would never do live coding but show small videos instead. I have seen live coding fail more often than being a great success. But if you want to do so, have a fallback video at hands.

Now your rehearsal: Not 1 full, not 2 full rehearsals, do as much as you can! For my last and very first talk for a conference I did like 20 full rehearsals, 5 of them in front of people, some in the living room, some in front of the mirror. I bet this can be less in the future but it got me super confident. Rehearsal matters! Don't be lazy and you will be amazed how confident you can go into your talk.

When you black out during your talk, don't panic because you have a full script which you could theoretically read word for word. That always calms me down.

Good luck and have fun.

I find it helpful to go train the whole talk with a metronome (at a slowish tempo) to have an upper bound on how much time the talk will take.

Another point I found out _after_ I presented is to better avoid any caffeinated drinks -- apparently it makes your mouth dryer. Adding a bit of nervousness makes matters worse and you end up having to drink a sip of water every few minutes.

[1] https://youtu.be/wNrTDEaDVwU

Start with a bang. Have a controversial opinion? Lead with it. The slide with your name probably shouldn't be the first one, unless the conference makes you start that way. This goes back to point one -- telling a good story. You know how most movies start with something really exciting in the first few minutes? This is called the "inciting event" and is what drives the narrative. Your talk should have that too.

Talk clearly, look at your audience, if it's hard to hear what you're saying at all then there is no point.

Make it clear what the problem you're solving is, why solving it would be nice, why obvious solutions aren't good enough, then work towards a big payoff at the end. Show that your tech solves the problem, and does it very neatly!

When explaining stuff, use examples.

2) Read "The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs" ... its not really about Steve Jobs so much as its about how to be a great presenter.

3) building or writing a talk is significantly less important than the delivery... which means that more of your time should be spent on how to deliver the speech (recording I find is the best way to practice)

4) Pick a single thing and do it well, do not attempt to put too much into a talk or tackle something massively complex.

5) Make sure that everyone is walking away with something they can actually use. This doesn't require it be a hard skill... "Soft" or philosophical utilities are just as good

6) Have Fun and be funny... Speakers have a tendency to want to show off the size of their intellect, and the level their competency- having a speech be entertaining is way way more important.

7) DO NOT READ FROM YOUR SLIDES. know your shit. slides are supplementary

Extra Credit. Here's a collection of some fantastic technical speeches:

* https://vimeo.com/9270320 * https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat * https://youtu.be/o_TH-Y78tt4 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c * https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M * https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY

I start by figuring out what I want my audience to take a way from the talk. Then I break it up in keywords and then I build my presentation.

Once that is done I practice once or twice, by my self, talking to the computer while I rearrange, add or delete from the presentation to make it what I want it to be.

Once this is done I practice, going through the entire presentation until I’m able to give it on the fly if I was woken up at 4am. I don’t practice it word for word though, but when you’ve talked about a subject enough times, you can do it again.

The practice but is really, really important. Especially if you’re not used to giving speeches. At first I thought that if I just practiced in my head, I’d be fine, because I knew what I wanted to say. Hah, not so. The first time I gave a presentation I was a stuttering incoherent mess, because I hadn’t practiced by saying the words out loud. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I just couldn’t.

Now, many years later, I don’t have to practice as much because I’ve gotten better verbally. So yo can definitely be the type of person who doesn’t need to practice out loud. But I had to do more than a thousand presentations to get to a point where I could comfortably skip practicing on short presentations and only doing it once or twice on long ones.

As for questions afterwards, take your time to think about your answer, and if you don’t know the answer, then be honest and always, always be polite and affirmative. If you make people feel like they asked a good question, even when you think it wasn’t, then they and everyone around them will like you better. This too gets better with practice, but it’s obviously not something you can practice on your own.

Humor is typically a good thing, it relies a lot in timing and it sometimes falls flat. Just never do it at someone’s expense.

For each slide, think about what the audience take-away is. They should learn something from what you say for each slide.

Mingle and introduce yourself to a few people before your talk but don't tell them you are a speaker. Before you get on stage see if you can find them in the audience and pretend you are talking to them and not a huge audience. If you can't find some known faces, pick one from the first few rows. Helps with the nerves.

Until you get good at speaking, you need a lot of rehearsal for each talk. Present once in front of a willing friend and then after making corrections, get a few volunteers at work to be an audience. As many rehearsals as possible.

Slow down. Pause. People need a little time to digest each idea. Your material is new to them.

Like everything in life, the only way to become good is to make mistakes. With speaking you do that in front of a lot of people. It helps if you can laugh at yourself and be forgiving. The audience will often treat you the way you treat yourself.

1. Don't read the slides to your audience. Generally speaking, the audience can read.

So what are slides for then? Well, if it's a text only slide, I treat them as being there to be reminders of what I'm supposed to talk about now. And that's it. The content is what I say, not what's on the slide. So there doesn't actually need to be much on the slide at all. Just a couple of bullets to reflect the high points of the conversation. Now graphics are a different story.

There are exceptions, of course. I've been known to do a slide with a massive list of "things" in 10 point font, with like 30 items on it... but when I do that, it's to make a point - a point like "there are a fuck-ton of options for X" or whatever.

The other thing I try to do, is put links and pointers to other resources somewhere in the deck, so that sharing it with the audience actually provides some value. If you adopt the "very information sparse" slide format, then the slides don't really provide much value to the audience after the fact. Whether that's an issue or not is kinda up to you.

It really depends on the topic of the talk. If it's something that can be demonstrated in a quick and straightforward way, do a demo by all means. But I've seen talks where people were forcing a demo into a talk about complicated concepts. There's little value in seeing someone type in a page of code, compile and run. Or seeing something run without understanding what is happening on screen. I would much rather have the speaker spend those minutes discussing the topic.

> Do not use a linux machine

Better advice: make sure you know how to setup an external screen on your laptop and how your presentation software works with it. Try it before hand with an old VGA monitor.

> Create short slides, the slides are there to guide you and the audience. Try to prevent reading the slides out loud.

I would argue that the slides are there for the audience. Ideally, you need to be able to present your talk without seeing your slides. They are not cue cards for the speaker.

Very short slides light on content (e.g. memes, one word or sentence per slide) make for a terrible tech talk in my opinion. Do make your slides informative. They should complement what you are talking about. Show a relevant graph, code snippet, etc. related to what you are talking about. If you can't do that, fall back to a summary of your spoken content in a 3-4 bullet points per slide.

Much of the time, there's a machine already there ready to go. If that's the case, probably best to use it.

Seems to me that these days, the safest way to handle your slides is to have them on the web, with a backup on a USB drive. No need to worry about operating systems or video modes. The site's IT guys already did the work.

There are various shiny frameworks to do this (revealJS.com et al), but even PowerPoint presentations can be viewed in-browser, with OneDrive.

> prevent reading the slides out loud

Good advice.

> Use images and videos, they can tell more then a thousand words.

Indeed. This hints at another good 'rule': avoid wordy slides. Let your talk itself be the wordy bit. The slides just support.

> Also, relax, the audience has already decided they want to listen to your presentation.

Well, not always.

Physicists are so used to looking at plots most of us are really good at interpreting them. But this is a hard-earned skill. If I talk to the general public I have to take great care in keeping plots and graphics really really simple.

I hear the humanities have similar issues with text. So whatever your background is, tailor not just your content and language to the audience but the visual language as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...

So, if I understand gnur's meaning, you present a situation you were in, what task (or target) you were attempting to achieve, the actions you took, and the results.

"The website suddenly went down as traffic increased. I needed to find out which backend service was becoming overloaded and triggering the failure. I quickly deployed and configured WhizBangMicroservicesAnalyzer, and used it to assess the current status of our various backend microservices. It detected that our caching servers were running out of RAM due to a misconfiguration causing them to hit a corner case. I was able to fix the configuration error and bring the website back online."

two are still too few IMO (I'm not a native speaker but still). I like to do at least ~5, where I can get a feel for the sentences I'll pick for transitions (like some sort of theater play) so should I get stuck somewhere I know how to transition to the next talking point/topic.

>Do not use a linux machine,

eh, my experience with linux machines was mostly positive, what I can recommend though is to have the slides ready (4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio) in the cloud as a "safety net"

Personally, for me to feel very comfortable in delivering the talk, I practice the whole presentation at least five, six times.

The first couple of those practice runs, I tend to adjust the slides and my talk, to iron out the wrinkles in either my slides, my words or the transitions/logic between the slides.

The latter practice runs are essentially to memorize the whole talk. I typically write out my whole speech in the speaker notes, but after two-three practice runs I don't need to look at them anymore.

The result is a presentation delivery that as an intronerd I'm very comfortable with -- even the jokes have been practiced and perfected -- and one that I could deliver practically verbatim the next day.

I have done a lot of presentations over the years, and to the best of my recollection, every single one has been done using a Linux machine, and this has mostly been a non issue.

I think a better adage might be "get there early so you have time to deal with technical issues, bring any potentially required adapters, and have your presentation on a thumb-drive in case you need to borrow someone else's machine to present in a pinch." I say, "on a thumb drive" as opposed to "in Dropbox" or whatever, because you may rarely find yourself in a position of not having net access in the location of the talk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...

I'm not sure if I agree with that, in my experience they seem to fail or underwhelm about 50% of the time.

1. I simply don't think its true - there have been many talks where I have become interested 10 minutes in.

2. It puts tremendous pressure on the speaker for some kind of fireworks in their first 10 seconds.

Your 10 seconds went badly? Who cares just make sure the next 10 seconds are interesting, or the next.

Last time I went to a conference I was actually a little surprised by the number of people at the talks who where clearly working during the entire thing. Why bother, you most likely pay for the plane ticket, the hotel and the conference it self, and then not pay attention? If you're only interested in one talk, then just go to that one and then leave.

Given that people mostly show up to technical talks of their own free will, I don't think you need to trick them into paying attention. It's fair to assume that they are generally interested and focused on what you have to say.