[Inpycon] Some thoughts on talks and what not to do in a tech talk

[Noufal Ibrahim]

On Tue, Sep 28 2010, Pranav Prakash wrote:

> One more thing which I would like to add is that- before the start of day's
> events, all the speakers should come and report somewhere about their
> presence. The only obvious way is to sit at your venue and wait for the
> turn. And then the event in-charge announces your name and you go down
> there. And yes, taking down cell numbers of the speakers is important, in
> order to communicate any change in schedule or anything. Also, I am planning
> to write a blog article on what not to do in a tech-talk, based on the
> mistakes I did (in this talk and previous ones) and the mistakes I saw
> people doing. Some of the points I could come up are
>
> * Avoid the temptation to do in too detail of your favorite subtopic.
> * Avoid coding on the fly. Generally people dont like to see the speaker
> "coding" something there and then only. It breaks the rhythm and introduces
> boredom
> * Understand your audience in the beginning, and be prepared to cut/add
> things on the fly. Do a general talk with people who might be your audience.
> Helps in getting what they want
> * People mostly ask question comparing the things you just told and the
> things they do, so be sure you are prepared for such things
> * Avoid too much code samples, showing something working lasts longer than
> the codes
> * Don't be bookish, people come to dev talks with the expectation of getting
> benefits from others experience, and not to attend a bookish lecture by a
> stupid professor

[...]

Good points. I will be writing a summary of the whole event similar to
what I did last year. I will be listing a bunch of articles by others at
the bottom. If you can send me your links, I will add them there.

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