Advice for making a conference presentation

Question

I participate in a couple of OSS projects and I really want to help out in marketing them, so I thought it'd be interesting and a valuable personal experience to make a presentation/talk on one or several developer conferences.

What's a good structure for presenting a technical software framework/product? Any advice on what NOT to do? Should I have slides filled with code, or should I make it into some form of entertaining show?

What was your most memorable conference talk? What do you like about them? What do you dislike? Should I do live coding (all live coding fails right?)?

Answer 1

I've spoken at a number of conferences. Some thoughts:

• you had better be confident (and good) at public speaking
• use humour, but don't tell jokes
• a few basic foils are better than reams of verbiage and/or code
• say one thing, say it clearly, and say it repeatedly
• kick a few sacred cows - this always gets people interested

Another thought is that this will probably get closed pretty quickly. You should definitely make it Community Wiki.

Answer 2

If you're going to be an "evangelist" the best way to do that is to show how easy it is to use the framework / product.

The most memorable presentation for me was the Tech Ed ASP.NET MVC session, where the chap started with absolutely nothing, and in about 90 seconds had a working web application using Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC (including custom displays and result filtering).

Once you've hooked people with the "selling point" (it might not be speed with your products) you can invite people to look in more detail at high level diagrams that explain how it fits together and some code examples.

Answer 3

As from Neil plus.

• Don't rush, it's not a race and as the audience may be hearing material and ideas for the first time they need time to absorb it
• practice your delivery no matter how much it embarrasses you or bores you so you get the timing right, so you know all your material is there and nothing missing and speak it out loud, this way you can often spot errors, mistakes or just stupid things
• practice ad-libbing and off-the-cuff remarks so you don't dig yourself into a hole and they sound more natural
• look at the audience, not anyone in particular but cover all of them so they feel included

and of course DON'T PANIC even if you go wrong the audience probably won't spot it so don't tell them

Answer 4

1. Your audience will notice what presentation software you use, and will appreciate it if it is fropen. Recommended are OpenOffice Presentation and Latex Beamer;
2. Code on slides is fine, but you generally should not have anything on your slides that you aren't going to read out to your audience. Put code snippets up, and go through them one at a time, not three lengthy function definitions. For this point and my next, cf. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2054557/best-font-size-for-latex-beamer/2055581#2055581
3. Don't pack too much information on your slides. There's no consensus on how much information is best, but if you use a 14pt or larger font, you will find it hard to go wrong here.
4. Ways to make your talk easy going for your audience: Present complex ideas graphically - it's fine to come back to the same graphic again and again. Jokes help you bond with your audience, even bad ones. Make sure most of your audience will be able to take something away from your talk - think ahead what that should be.
5. Avoid language that will alienate your audience. Mark Shuttleworth may have done more for Linux usability than anyone else alive, but that's only the second association he has in my mind. The first is that he's a sexist jock.
6. Memorable talk? Guy Steele is fantastic. Growing a Language (Google video) is a good first talk of his to watch.

Answer 5

Mark-Jason Dominus has a very good presentation about this very topic: [Conference Presentation Judo].1 He challenges just about all conventional wisdom, and I found it very persuasive. I haven't been to any of his talks, but he always get good ratings from the attendees.

Postscript: A Taste of MJD

1. Higher-order Parsing Techniques for Perl (Google video, 57 mins)
2. Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags (Google video, 45 mins)