NEILB's Blog

This is the fourth in a series of posts about giving a tech talk. My primary goal for this series has been encouraging people who've never given a talk, so for this post I asked a number of experienced speakers what advice they had for first-time speakers.

This is the third in a series of posts about giving a tech talk. The first post covered the length of talk a first-time speaker might choose, the second post covered selection of topic. For this post I asked a number of experienced speakers how they prepare their talks.

The previous post in this series covered what length of talk is good for first-time speakers. In this post we'll look at the topic. You want to give a talk at a Perl conference or workshop, but you're not sure what to talk about. Again, I asked a number of experienced (and regular) speakers, how do they come up with topics?

If you're thinking about giving a talk at a tech event, one of the things you'll need to consider is what length slot to go for. While they vary, the most common options are lightning talk (3 or 5 minutes), 20 minutes, or 50 minutes. I've seen a lot of recommendations for lightning talks (LTs), since they're over quickly, but if you're nervous about standing up in front of your peers, lightning talks can be daunting, since you're generally talking to all attendees. So I asked a number of experienced speakers: what length of talk is best for someone's first talk at a tech conference?

I think we should do more to encourage people to speak at our conferences and workshops. Specifically people who've never given a talk. I think there are a number of things we can do to encourage them, and one of the ideas I had was to talk to people who are widely accepted to be good speakers, and see what they had to say. This is the start of a series of posts, based on those conversations.

If you've never given a talk at a Perl conference or workshop, but would like to, the YAPC::NA videos are a good source of inspiration and how (not) to give a talk. Watch a bunch of videos and make brief notes: distil these down into guidance for yourself.