Tags: notist

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Friday, June 7th, 2019

Three conference talks

Conference talks are like buses. They take a long time and you constantly ask yourself why you chose to get on board.

I’ll start again.

Conference talks are like buses. You wait for ages and then three come along at once. Or at least, three conference videos have come along at once:

  1. The video of the talk I gave at State Of The Browser called The Web Is Agreement.
  2. The video of the talk I gave at New Adventures called Building.
  3. The video of the talk I gave at Frontend United called Going Offline.

That last one is quite practical. It’s very much in the style of the book I wrote on service workers. If you’d like to see this talk, you should come to An Event Apart in Chicago in August.

The other two are …less practical. They’re kind of pretentious really. That’s kinda my style.

The Web Is Agreement was a one-off talk for State Of The Browser. I like how it turned out, and I’d love to give it again if there were a suitable event.

I will be giving my New Adventures talk again in Vancouver next month at the Design & Content conference. You should come along—it looks like it’s going to be a great event.

I’ve added these latest three conference talk videos to my collection. I’m using Notist to document past talks. It’s a great service! I became a paying customer just over a year ago and it was money well spent. I really like how I’ve been able to set up a custom domain:

speaking.adactio.com

Saturday, January 26th, 2019

Building

Here are the slides for the opening keynote I delivered at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham on Thursday. They make no sense out of context like this. You kinda had to be there (or suggest to some other conference that I should deliver this talk again—hint, hint).

Tuesday, December 4th, 2018

Create Landmark Timing Slides - Notist

This is something I do in my presentations. I have speaker notes scattered throughout the slide deck with the “beats” of the talk—10 minutes, 20 minutes, etc.

If I hit one of those slides and I’m ahead of schedule, I can go on a few more tangents. If I hit one of those slides and I’m behind schedule, I can cut to the chase. Either way, having those decision points spread throughout the talk really helps to keep things smooth.

One thing that can really help in the delivery is knowing if you’re running fast or slow before you crash into the end of your talk. That way you can make adjustments as you go along by glossing over smaller points to speed up or expanding more on your ideas to slow down.

Sunday, October 22nd, 2017

How to write a talk - Notist

Rachel describes her process of putting technical talks together:

This method of creating a talk is the one that I find gets me from blank page to finished slide deck most effectively.

She also acknowledges that many other processes are available.

If you are stuck, and your usual method isn’t working, don’t be afraid to try a different approach even if just to get the ideas moving and take you away from staring at the blank page! You might discover that some types of talk benefit from an alternate starting point. There really are no rules here, other than that you do end up with a talk before you need to walk out on that stage.