Tags: presentations

I tried do some live-blogging at An Event Apart Seattle. I surprised myself by managing to do all six talks on the first day. I even managed one or two after that, but that was the limit of my stamina. Torre, on the other hand, managed to live-blog every single talk—amazing!

Some of the talks don’t necessarily lend themselves to note-taking—ya kinda had to be there. But some of the the live-blogging I did ended up being surprisingly coherent.

Anyway, I figured it would be good to recap all the ones I managed to do here in one handy list.

1. Beyond Engagement: the Content Performance Quotient by Jeffrey Zeldman. I think I managed to document the essence of what Jeffrey was getting at: for many sites, engagement isn’t the right metric to measure—the idea of a Content Performance Quotient is one alternative.
2. Digital Marketing Strategies for the Busy “Web Master” by Sarah Parmenter. The structure of Sarah’s talk lent itself well to live-blogging, but I strongly disagreed with one or two of her suggestions (like encouraging people to install the disgusting abomination that is Facebook Pixel).
3. Scenario-Driven Design Systems by Yesenia Perez-Cruz. This one was hard to live-blog because it was so packed with so many priceless knowledge bombs—an absolutely brilliant presentation, right up my alley!
4. Graduating to Grid by Rachel Andrew. The afternoon sessions, with their emphasis on CSS, were definitely tricky to capture. I didn’t even try to catch most of the code, but I think I managed to get down most of Rachel’s points about learning new CSS.
5. Fit For Purpose: Making Sense of the New CSS by Eric Meyer. There was a fair bit of code in this one, and lots of gasp-inducing demos too, so my account probably doesn’t do it justice.
6. Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed by Jen Simmons. There was no way I could document the demos, but I think I managed to convey the excitement in Jen’s talk.
7. Navigating Team Friction by Lara Hogan. I only managed to do two talks on the second day, but I think they came out the best. Lara’s talk was packed full with great advice, but it was so clearly structured that I think I managed to get most of the main points down.
8. Designing Progressive Web Apps by Jason Grigsby. I had a vested interest in the topic of Jason’s talk so I was scribing like crazy. Apart from a few missing diagrams, I think my notes managed to convey most of Jason’s message.

Of course the one talk I definitely couldn’t live-blog was my own. I’ve documented lists of links relating to the subject matter of my talk, but if you weren’t at An Event Apart Seattle, then the only other chance to see the talk is at An Event Apart Boston in June. That’s the only other time I’m giving it.

I thoroughly enjoyed giving the talk in Seattle, particularly when I treated the audience to a scoop: I announced my new book, Going Offline, during the talk (I had been scheming with Katel at A Book Apart and we co-ordinated the timing to a tee).

An Event Apart Seattle just wrapped. It was a three-day special edition and it was really rather good. Lots of the speakers (myself included) were unveiling brand new talks, so there was a real frisson of excitement.

It was interesting to see repeating, overlapping themes. From a purely technical perspective, three technologies that were front and centre were:

• CSS grid,
• variable fonts, and
• service workers.

From listening to other attendees, the overwhelming message received was “These technologies are here—they’ve arrived.” Now, depending on your mindset, that understanding can be expressed as “Oh shit! These technologies are here!” or “Yay! Finally! These technologies are here!”

My reaction is very firmly the latter. That in itself is an interesting data-point, because (as discussed in my talk) my reaction towards new technological advances isn’t always one of excitement—quite often it’s one of apprehension, even fear.

I’ve been trying to self-analyse to figure out which kinds of technologies trigger which kind of reaction. I don’t have any firm answers yet, but it’s interesting to note that the three technologies mentioned above (CSS grid, variable fonts, and service workers) are all additions to the core languages of the web—the materials we use to build the web. Frameworks, libraries, build tools, and other such technologies are more like tools than materials. I tend to get less excited about advances in those areas. Sometimes advances in those areas not only fail to trigger excitement, they make me feel overwhelmed and worried about falling behind.

Since figuring out this split between materials and tools, it has helped me come to terms with my gut emotional reaction to the latest technological advances on the web. I think it’s okay that I don’t get excited about everything. And given the choice, I think maybe it’s healthier to be more excited about advances in the materials—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs—than advances in tooling …although, it is, of course, perfectly possible to get equally excited about both (that’s just not something I seem to be able to do).

Another split I’ve noticed is between technologies that directly benefit users, and technologies that directly benefit developers. I think there was a bit of a meta-thread running through the talks at An Event Apart about CSS grid, variable fonts, and service workers: all of those advances allow us developers to accomplish more with less. They’re good for performance, in other words. I get much more nervous about CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries that allow us to accomplish more, but require the user to download the framework or library first. It feels different when something is baked into browsers—support for CSS features, or JavaScript APIs. Then it feels like much more of a win-win situation for users and developers. If anything, the onus is on developers to take the time and do the work and get to grips with these browser-native technologies. I’m okay with that.

Anyway, all of this helps me understand my feelings at the end of An Event Apart Seattle. I’m fired up and eager to make something with CSS grid, variable fonts, and—of course—service workers.

Rachel and Drew are starting a new service called Notist. It’s going to be a place where conference speakers can collate their materials. They’ve also got a blog.

The latest blog post, by Rachel, is called Do I need to write a brand new talk every time?

New presenters often feel that they need to write a brand-new talk for each conference they are invited to. Unless your job is giving presentations, or you are being paid very well for each talk you give, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep this up if you do more than a couple of talks per year.

It’s true. When I first started giving talks, I felt really guilty at the thought of “recycling” a talk I had already given. “Those people have paid money to be here—they deserve a brand new talk”, I thought. But then someone pointed out to me, “Y’know, it’s actually really arrogant to think that anyone would’ve seen any previous talk of yours.” Good point.

I explain it to people like a band touring an album. Lots of work goes into the album, and the tour puts those ideas on display. To expect a band to write a brand new album’s worth of music in between Pittsburgh and Chicago is absurd.

— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) October 30, 2017

Giving the same talk more than once also allows me to put in the extra effort into the talk prep. If I’m going through the hair-tearing-out hell of trying to wrestle a talk into shape, I’m inevitably going to ask, “Why am I putting myself through this‽” If the answer to that question is “So you can give this talk just once”, I’d probably give up in frustration. But if I know that I’ll have an opportunity to present it more than once, improving it each time, then that gives me the encouragement to keep going.

I do occasionally give a one-off specially-commissioned talk, but those are the exceptions. My talk on the A element at CSS Day’s HTML Special was one of those. Same with my dConstruct talk back in 2008. I just gave a new talk on indie web building blocks at Mozilla’s View Source event, but I’d quite like to give that one again (if you’re running an event, get in touch if that sounds like something you’d like).

My most recent talk isEvaluating Technology. I first gave it at An Event Apart in San Francisco exactly a year ago. I’ll present it for the final time at An Event Apart in Denver in a few weeks. Then it will be retired; taken out to the woodshed; pivoted to video.

I’m already starting to think about my next talk. The process of writing a talk is something else that Rachel has written about. She’s far more together than me. My process involves lots more procrastination, worry, panic, and pacing. Some of the half-baked ideas will probably leak out as blog posts here. It’s a tortuous process, but in the end, I find the satisfaction of delivering the final talk to be very rewarding.

Here’s the thing, though: until I deliver the talk for the first time in front of an audience—no matter how much I might have practiced it—I have literally no idea if it’s any good. I honestly can’t tell whether what I’ve got is gold dust or dog shit (and during the talk prep, my opinion of it can vacillate within the space of five minutes). And so, even though I’ve been giving talks for many years now, if it’s brand new material, I get very nervous.

That’s one more reason to give the same talk more than once instead of creating a fresh hell each time.

This was my third year attending South by Southwest and also my third year speaking.

It seems to have become a tradition that I do a “bluffing” presentation every year. I did How to Bluff Your Way in CSS two years ago with Andy. Last year I did How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting with Aaron. This year, Andy was once again my partner in crime and the topic was How to Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0.

It was a blast. I had so much fun and Andy was on top form. I half expected him to finish with “Thank you, we’ll be here all week, try the veal, don’t forget to tip your waiter.”

As soon as the podcast is available, I’ll have it transcribed. In the meantime, Robert Sandie was kind enough to take a video the whole thing. It’s posted on Viddler which looks like quite a neat video service: you can comment, tag or link to any second of a video. Here, for instance, Robert links to the moment when I got serious and called for the abolition of Web 2.0 as a catch-all term. I can assure you this moment of gravity is the exception. Most of the presentation was a complete piss-take.

My second presentation was a more serious affair, though there were occasional moments of mirth. Myself and Derek revisited and condensed our presentation from Web Directions North, Ajax Kung Fu meets Accessibility Feng Shui. This went really well. I gave a quick encapsulation of the idea of Hijax and Derk gave a snappy run-through of accessibility tips and tricks. We wanted to make sure we had enough time for questions and I’m glad we did; the questions were excellent and prompted some great discussion.

Again, once the audio recording is available, I’ll be sure to get it transcribed.

That was supposed to be the sum of my speaking engagements but Tantek had other ideas. He arranged for me to rush the stage during his panel, The Growth and Evolution of Microformats. The panel was excellent with snappy demos of the Operator plug-in and Glenn’s backnetwork app. I tried to do a demo of John McKerrell’s bluetooth version of the Tails extension using a volunteer from the audience but that didn’t work out too well and I had to fall back on just using a localhost example. Still, it was good to be on-hand to answer some of the great questions from the audience.

And yes, once the audio is available, I’ll get it transcribed. Seeing a pattern here? Hint, hint, other speakers.

As panels go, the microformats one was pretty great, in my opinion. Some of the other panels seem to have been less impressive according to the scuttlebutt around the blogvine.

Khoi isn’t keen on the panel format. It’s true enough that they probably don’t entail as much preparation as full-blown presentations but then my expectations are different going into a panel than going into a presentation. So, for something like Brian’s talk on the Mobile Web, I was expecting some good no-nonsense practical advice and that’s exactly what I got. Whereas for something like the Design Workflows panel, I was expecting a nice fireside chat amongst top-notch designers and that’s exactly what I got. That’s not to say the panel wasn’t prepared. Just take one look at the website of the panel which is a thing of beauty.

The panelists interviewed some designers in preparation for the discussion and you can read the answers given by the twenty interviewees. Everyone gave good sensible answers… except for me.

Anyway, whether or not you like panels as a format, there’s always plenty of choice at South by Southwest. If you don’t like panels, you don’t have to attend them. There’s nearly always a straightforward presentation on at the same time. So there isn’t much point complaining that the organisers haven’t got the format right. They’re offering every format under the sun—the trick is making it to the panels or presentations that you’ll probably like.

In any case, as everyone knows, South by Southwest isn’t really about the panels and presentations. John Gruber wasn’t keen on all the panels but he does acknowledge that the real appeal of the conference lies elsewhere:

At most conferences, the deal is that the content is great and the socializing is good. At SXSWi, the content is good, but the socializing is great.