13. Have a message you're actually enthusiastic to tell people.

The audience can quickly tell if someone is there because they want to talk about the topic they're presenting, and having a receptive audience makes it much easier to get on stage to talk about it. If the audience knows you're there because you want another line on your resume or because you're trying to sell them something the atmosphere can turn quite cold and that is a world of pain for a speaker.

> 11. the anxiety goes away

It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.

#8 - If someone absolutely insists on a demonstration and otherwise has to "do it live" this makes you look like a god on stage - https://github.com/sloria/doitlive

Basically just schedules whatever code you want to run so when you invoke the script it will step through whatever you want to run no matter the keystroke you make. No mistakes!

> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type

This can absolutely be made to work very well. When Josh Long did this at Goto, it was an absolute masterclass. He used timed zooms to almost turn it into comedy. The rehearsal involved must have been considerable.

> 9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it

That's good as a backup, or for simpler presentations (in a good way!) but Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions. Presnting PDFs is not guaranteed to be pain free as well, as I expereince on my corporate controlled laptop with stange versions of Adobe software.

> 11. the anxiety goes away

It does! also remember that the audience doesn't know what you are going to present, so they wouldn't care if you make mistakes.

I will add

13. Practice and learn speaking, a good start could be Vinh Giang's Youtube channel

> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type

As usual, thumb rules exist to protect you until you can confidently break them. One of the coolest presentations I've seen was several years ago at a React conference where the speaker live coded an electronic music and light show using React. They were demonstrating how "components" could really render anything.

What is the best way to show code?

I really want to show some code. Like 4-5 lines to give a gist.

I agree with these, but David Beazley breaks most of them and his talks are way better than mine ;)

e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-A78RgMhZU

Above all else, make it interesting and entertaining!

Which should go without saying…

Oh, one more thing. Keep on hand some of your previous presentations. Often, a speaker won't show up and the conference organizer is panicking and needs a replacement. Be first to volunteer your services! I've done that several times, and the results were always worthwhile.

One time, I didn't have an extra talk with me, but I volunteered anyway and asked for a whiteboard and markers. Frankly, it was the best talk I ever gave. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But it sure was fun! (I simply asked the audience what they wanted me to talk about.)

8. depends on the nature of the presentation. if it is a coding workshop then live coding is actually quite a good idea.

1. All tech discussion is irrelevant unless it’s leetcode. Don’t fill my brain with any other useless, unproductive information.

2. How much time (points) will this presentation take to get to prod. Then how many points (time) will it take to deploy to prod. Do we need a spike for this presentation. I’m going to put it in the backlog and close it out since we’ll never get to it.

My professionally produced video is a bit old though I have others recorded on a webcam. I don't know how often they're looked at (and I know a lot of people on the conference committees) but it's certainly useful to have at least something.

I don't want videos of me online. Would an audio recording + slides suffice in your opinion? Or would you doubt it was really live in front of a sufficiently large audience? Idk how common fraud here would be

Thank you for the thought you put into this. It's really frustrating when a speaker has an accent so strong it's unintelligible.

> I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.

Some people are much more privacy-conscious than others and thus at least don't want more videos of themselves online than what is absolutely necessary.

Okay, but what about the first time?

do you record and post videos of your own?

Perhaps your advanced engineering degrees enabled you to do public speaking and blogging?

What is LI?

I had a coworker in Seattle who commuted from the far side of Steven’s pass every day. That was a 2 hour trip each way. I desperately wanted to know what was up with her home life.

Some introverts can use a long solo car trip to wind themselves up to deal with people or decompress afterward so they don’t take it out on their family. Others find it all too stressful and just makes it worse. But that’s like 20 minutes for me. I can’t imagine two hours. We didn’t drive that long to get to grandma’s house.

> people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.

Or a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.

Interesting take; thanks for sharing.

One minor tangent (aiming for helpfulness, not pedantry), "I have few" reads as "I don't have many" (emphasizes the low number), whereas "I have a few" emphasizes the fact there's more than one -- which from context was clearly your intent. HTH!

Fellow speaker, and a large part of my "speaking with confidence" breakthrough was realizing this point exactly.

The other key unlock for me was the realization that I was the ONLY one in the entire room who would know when I fumbled a word or didn't deliver the content on each slide absolutely perfectly.

> That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.

I don't know you, and I feel the same about my public speaking but I suspenct that there's a lot of imposter syndrom in that

> The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.

Strange Loop was amazing. The vibes were perfect. And I've never been to another tech conference that I found to be so mind expanding. Most of the talks I'd attend had no practical utility in my daily life, but got me thinking about all sorts of what ifs and if/how I could apply some nugget of what they were saying to more practical applications.

The idea that East Lansing, Michigan, can support a regular gathering of ColdFusion users in 2025 is the most astonishing thing I've learned in quite some time. Consider me quite impressed.

rmason- I love how supportive you are of tech groups in Michigan. I’m trying to organize an Anthropic meetup, and you helped provide some great advice. Your love of tech and community is evident.

It's one of those few times where exposure is actually beneficial though.

Thank you. Very kind of you to say so.

Sure, it happens. Especially if somebody is already well known and respected in their field.

But it is not common, and I find it frustrating how many people think they can fast-track their way to the bigger events. I've been on the committee that rejects their submissions and find myself having to diplomatically explain to them "you've never done this before, nobody has any idea who you are, you've done nothing to establish your credibility regarding this topic, and you were one of 1500 submissions for 50 available slots... sorry, kid, that's not how this works."

One of the best topics for new speakers is "here's what I learned when I built project X".

Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.

It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.

Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.

No, it means you have something unique to say.

The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.

And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.

I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.

I don't think the author meant that you have to be the world leading expert at any topic. You can be pretty average, but you need to give it your personal twist. He is warning against very generic abstract talks that can be replaced by reading a man page.

No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!

Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:

Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.

But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.

They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.

Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.

Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.

That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.

I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.

That's how I read it as well. I think it's wrong because I've learned the most from people one step ahead of me. Experts who are ten steps ahead have the curse of knowledge: it's extra hard to figure out what things make sense to a conference audience. Many presentations go too fast and then too slow two minutes later

Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful

Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see

It's doable if you pick a very focused topic. In my first year of using Julia, I gave a talk on gradually adding Julia to a large Python codebase. Very few people could give a similar talk because (1) Julia is a fairly niche language, (2) most of the people who understood Julia <> Python interop knew it too well, and had forgotten all the common beginner challenges.

It is an extremely high bar if you aim for super popular topics.

You might want to spend time on some niche topic and there might be people who don’t have time to dabble in that topic but would be happy if someone did it for them.

Yes, it's bullshit.

I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?

Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?

There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.

If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".

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One tip I've found really useful over the past few years is to always try and include a "STAR moment" in a talk - where STAR stands for "Something They'll Always Remember".

Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.

I deployed my pelican on a bicycle benchmark as a STAR moment last year and it was really effective: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/

At PyCon a couple of years ago I used a vibe-coded counter of the number of times I said "AI" out loud: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/#pycon-2024.043....

I wrote a bit about this in my blog post on the same topic: https://www.simeongriggs.dev/how-to-give-a-great-conference-...

> Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.

The real experts never stop learning.

Some of them go to conferences because that's one of the few times in the year they can hang out with each other, and find out what their community is up to.

actually, the primary reason to go to conferences is networking. meeting people, make connections. you go to talks that interest you so you can meet people that share your interest.

same for giving presentations. you give presentations to promote an idea or work, to share something you have learned, to contribute to the community, and again, for networking.

fomo? not at all. personal development? that's a bonus, but not the motivation.