Great public speaking/talk/CFP resources as they come in

Speaking
#1

How To Give A Great Tech Talk by Josh Berkus

This right out of the Linux Foundation CFP guidlines, a two-piece Youtube talk/tutorial on Tech Speaking by Josh Berkus. May every one of you use it for the betterment of mankind! :smile:

In the instance that your talk is accepted, we want to make sure that you give the best presentation possible. To do this, we enlisted the help of seasoned conference speaker Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL Experts) who has prepared an in-depth tutorial on “How to Give a Great Tech Talk”.

You may not instantly become a brilliant orator overnight, but we strongly encourage all of our potential speakers to watch this tutorial and hopefully you will see more of the audience watching and listening to you as opposed to checking their email during your presentation.

Skills you will learn include:

  • Know your audience
  • How to prepare for a talk
  • Nobody cares about your slides…but make good ones anyway
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Speakers
  • Clock-watching
  • Audience interaction 101
  • When your demo crashes
  • The audience outside the lecture hall
  • Common presentation issues and tips

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE9y3gyF8Kw
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcOP4WQfJl4

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#2

How To Prepare And Write A Tech Conference Talk by Lana Reinhard

So I decided to make this a collection-point of public speaking materials, and in that spirit I’m following the above up with a fresh post from Lana Reinhard on writing a talk for a tech conference.

First of all, it’s long. Like, really, really long — and a followup is coming on actually giving the damn talk, so prepare sandwiches. TBH I just wanted to throw this link here first, then remembered that it was me asking you to give a TL;DR and decided to read it first - took me about half an hour!

But it’s sooooo worth it!

She’s not a developer, but gave several talks at (and organized) tech conferences & contributed to open source projects (also, non-code contributions). She is also an introvert, like many of us here. She mentions tons of wonderful tips, tricks and methods to find a topic, write up an idea, propose it for a CFP and finally flesh it out so you can stand on the big stage on the big day and be a bit less nervous about it.

Topping all those off, there are also plenty of follow-up reading linked, so y’all can dive into the topic more if you wanted. Definitely check this out!

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