DEV Community

Discussion on: What I learned from submitting my first speech to a tech conference

Collapse
 
dmbaturin profile image
Daniil Baturin

whip up a presentation out of thin air in two weeks, just because you want to submit it to some conference

How about making slides the last night? I've done that. Don't be like me. It's doable but the quality obviously suffers.

Then there's a subject of live demos. I've been in tricky situations with my live demos. From my experience, I found that these checks help:

  • It works without Internet access.
  • There's an easy way to reset the demo setup to its clean state.
  • Every step works as expected from that clean state.

However, people rarely get upset if something isn't working. If the basics work, that's usually good enough. If you successfully improvise something with your live demo upon a request from the audience, it will look cool, but if not, no one will count it against you.

Collapse
 
sjarva profile image
Senja Jarva

Oh gosh, I bet that making the slides hours before deadline is a horrible experience! 🙈 I wouldn't recommend that either, but good to know that it is possible 😁

You have really good points about making demos! I'm going to save these and make sure I follow them I have a speech with a demo (this time it was just slides).

And yeah, I've heard the same that the audience is really forgiving about demo effects 😊 I guess it's because we all know often these things don't work when they should (in client demos etc) 😁🙊

Collapse
 
dmbaturin profile image
Daniil Baturin • Edited

making the slides hours before deadline is a horrible experience

Well, horrible is relative. I mostly spoke at (semi-)academic conferences where a) people don't really care about the way your slides look b) it's mostly to demonstrate things that don't work well spoken aloud, like formulas and diagrams c) you already have a conference paper written by the point you need slides, so you can reuse parts of it for the slides.

It may be a good idea to write a "conference paper" even if it's not a part of the process, since it can help you plan the speech, and you can also reuse it as a blog post.