Somebody at the local meetup asks whether you would give a talk next month. Your first reaction is probably a list of reasons you are not the right person. You are not an expert. Everyone in the room will know more. You have nothing new to say.
Most first time speakers believe a talk needs to be an authoritative survey of a subject. It does not. The talks people remember from local meetups are usually one person describing one real thing that happened to them.
We moved our test suite from forty minutes to nine, and here is what actually made the difference. We tried event sourcing on a small service and backed it out after four months. I joined a team with no tests and this is how we started. Nobody in the audience can tell you that you are wrong about your own experience. You are, quite literally, the only expert in the room on it.
Keep it small. Fifteen or twenty minutes. One problem, what you tried, what worked, what did not, and one thing you would tell somebody facing the same situation. Resist the urge to add background slides about the whole history of the technology. The audience came for your story.
Practise it out loud, several times, ideally in front of one friendly colleague. Reading slides silently in your head is not practice. You will find the parts where you stumble and the jokes that only work in writing.
On the night, know that the room is on your side. People at meetups want the speaker to do well, partly because many of them are thinking about giving a talk themselves. Nervousness is visible to you far more than to them. If you lose your place, pause, look at your notes, carry on. Nobody minds.
Expect at least one question you cannot answer. I do not know, but I would guess, is a perfectly good response, and it often makes the audience trust the rest of what you said.
Afterwards, something small but real changes. You will have done the thing you assumed was for other people, and the second talk will feel very different from the first.
Monday: write down one problem you solved this year that surprised you, and tell the organiser you have a talk.
– Asael Shinder
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