He's pretty right on the "get bored" bits. I have few friends that are doing a lot of conferences every year after, say, year 6, and they are people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
> people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
Or a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.
>> Write a talk nobody else could do; tell a story nobody else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach them that.
I don't think the author meant that you have to be the world leading expert at any topic. You can be pretty average, but you need to give it your personal twist. He is warning against very generic abstract talks that can be replaced by reading a man page.
That's how I read it as well. I think it's wrong because I've learned the most from people one step ahead of me. Experts who are ten steps ahead have the curse of knowledge: it's extra hard to figure out what things make sense to a conference audience. Many presentations go too fast and then too slow two minutes later
Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful
Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see
One of the best topics for new speakers is "here's what I learned when I built project X".
Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.
It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.
Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.
I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?
Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?
There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.
If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".
No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!
Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:
Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.
But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.
They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.
Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.
Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.
That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.
I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
> Finally, watch out for events that put video of their sessions online. Having a couple of YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciate audience can make all the difference when a programme committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.
This, very much this.
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
A short meetup talk or a lightning talk at a different conference could make all the difference towards being selected, because we need to know that you're vaguely capable of conveying what you want to share to the audience.
I don't want videos of me online. Would an audio recording + slides suffice in your opinion? Or would you doubt it was really live in front of a sufficiently large audience? Idk how common fraud here would be
My professionally produced video is a bit old though I have others recorded on a webcam. I don't know how often they're looked at (and I know a lot of people on the conference committees) but it's certainly useful to have at least something.
>
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
Some people are much more privacy-conscious than others and thus at least don't want more videos of themselves online than what is absolutely necessary.
One tip I've found really useful over the past few years is to always try and include a "STAR moment" in a talk - where STAR stands for "Something They'll Always Remember".
Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.
I’ve been doing public speaking for my entire adult life, but not for a living.
That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
This is one of those areas where folks can make money/satisfy ego, so there’s a ton of competition. I’m not competitive, and am not interested in making money doing this kind of thing, so I don’t really try.
I do appreciate folks that are good at it, though; especially when I want to learn. A skilled orator can make learning a lot more fun, and can be very motivating.
Public speaking plus blog posts did more for my career than my advanced engineering degrees. They lead to my past three places of employment. I did a talk or wrote a blog post, posted it to LI and then the decision makers reached out to me. This got me employment at workplaces I loved. I only write/ talk about things I enjoy, and they needed people with skills in the topics I wrote/ talk about. Perfect fit. I highly recommend this approach.
I have run a ColdFusion users group in East Lansing for the past twenty five years. I have helped many first time speakers and this is some outstanding advice.
Although I have never done it myself I can also recommend Toastmasters. Seen some speakers soar after attending this group for a year. You wouldn't even think that it was the same person presenting. Having that experience of public speaking can also greatly accelerate your career.
This year I spoke at HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth. The topic was "Hacking ATMs: past and present". I really enjoyed it, it took a lot to prepare though. I haven't gotten any monetary benefit from it, but I would definitely do it again.
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^
If no one else is aware, Dylan is one of the best conference talkers in the industry. A rare combination of technical knowledge, experience and fantastic to watch if you ever get the chance.
1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it
I struggled for a long time to figure out what would be "interesting enough" to give a talk about. Turns out that the way that we do different things in Next.js was not talked about enough. Did my first technical talk about some decisions and mechanisms that Next.js uses for dynamic detection and rendering and found a sweet spot.
That's insightful! Thanks for sharing.
I've been applying to conferences recently to present an open-source library I built (a unified client for AI providers), but I haven't gotten any responses yet.
I think the project is solid—it basically lets you switch from OpenAI to Anthropic in one line of code—but I suspect my CFP (Call for Papers) abstracts are failing to hook the organizers.
For those here who review CFPs: Do you prefer abstracts that focus on the "Technical How-To" (e.g., 'How to standardize I/O layers') or the "Story/Philosophy" (e.g., 'Why we need primitives, not frameworks')? I feel like I might be getting too technical too fast.
I like the general idea, and I owe so much for the talks and bloposts. That said, I really miss the old deep boring technical talks with speakers with an attitude of "I do not care if you meet the tecnical (and probably cognitive in some several cases) requirements to be in this room".
I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.
The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.
Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.
Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.
Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.
My issue is that the next ladder rung involves going out and doing presentations at conferences and the like. However... I did that 10 years ago, it feels like I'm past that. A lot of things now feel like I've done them 10 years ago. Which makes me think, should I have been earning what I do now back then? It feels the wrong way around.
This is a great list. As someone who has spoken at hundreds of conferences, there's one piece of advise I give younger speakers, particularly those nervous about how the audience will receive them. Dylan alludes to this in a different context
> Finally: respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty at a community event, or five thousand at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you get to do this. They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time
This is the same thing I say except, them _choosing_ to attend your talk, and opting in to giving you their time and attention is a signal that they _want_ you to succeed. They are HOPING you deliver your message, and that your demos all work, and that you conclude well. If kept in mind, I believe this can help alleviate some of the anxiety.
Sidebar: I've done this for a very long time and I still get nervous at the beginning of every talk. And I will be the first to admit—you WILL run into the occasional show off in the audience who is intent on demonstrating to you (and to the rest of room) how much smarter or more experienced they are than the speaker. That will happen—but it's an aberration.
I've given many talks at conferences, meetups, and otherwise. My number one piece of advice is to /really/ know your subject. Sometimes I am asked to present something I don't already intimately know, and it can be tempting to put together a presentation and learn just enough to present, but it's MUCH better to really go deep and learn the subject fully. Why?
1. Competence creates confidence, and confidence creates trust.
2. You can answer questions, pretty much any question, and if you can't you can let the audience know graciously without coming off as unknowledgable.
3. It makes it easier to present well, because you don't need to or are not tempted to read from the slides, you're telling a story or sharing information in a natural way, off the dome, using the slides only as a topic guide because you already fully understand everything about the subject.
I have found this to be so important, that I sometimes /choose/ to present something I'm interested in but don't know well (with enough lead time) as a jumping off point to dig deep into it. I have long believed if you want to really understand something, the benchmark for having achieved competence is successfully teaching that subject to another person and seeing them succeed with it.
If your presentation requires a custom software installation, give the audience the instructions as a hand out/script so you can focus on the important part.
I once did a breakout about a Geo support in Django, but the presenter spent the entire time helping people install PostgreSQL with geo support for an entire morning. We never ran a single line of Django code when the presentation was over.
I just wrote (with some AI help) a recently fast rrb tree implementation for c# [0]. I am waiting for the phone calls, but so far I have gotten nothing in 24h. Maybe if I figure out how to use docfx...
40 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 57.0 ms ] threadOr a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.
That's an extremely high bar, no?
Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful
Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see
Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.
It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.
Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.
I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?
Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?
There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.
If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".
Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:
Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.
But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.
They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.
Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.
Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.
That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.
I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
This, very much this.
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
A short meetup talk or a lightning talk at a different conference could make all the difference towards being selected, because we need to know that you're vaguely capable of conveying what you want to share to the audience.
Some people are much more privacy-conscious than others and thus at least don't want more videos of themselves online than what is absolutely necessary.
Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.
I deployed my pelican on a bicycle benchmark as a STAR moment last year and it was really effective: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/
At PyCon a couple of years ago I used a vibe-coded counter of the number of times I said "AI" out loud: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/#pycon-2024.043....
https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837
That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
This is one of those areas where folks can make money/satisfy ego, so there’s a ton of competition. I’m not competitive, and am not interested in making money doing this kind of thing, so I don’t really try.
I do appreciate folks that are good at it, though; especially when I want to learn. A skilled orator can make learning a lot more fun, and can be very motivating.
I don't know you, and I feel the same about my public speaking but I suspenct that there's a lot of imposter syndrom in that
Although I have never done it myself I can also recommend Toastmasters. Seen some speakers soar after attending this group for a year. You wouldn't even think that it was the same person presenting. Having that experience of public speaking can also greatly accelerate your career.
Speaking at a conference? Same story. You do it, because it's for "personal development", until it's pointless.
Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^
1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it
Oh wow, this, 1,000x this!
They will try to convince you to work for free for the "exposure."
I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.
The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.
Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.
Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.
Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.
> Finally: respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty at a community event, or five thousand at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you get to do this. They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time
This is the same thing I say except, them _choosing_ to attend your talk, and opting in to giving you their time and attention is a signal that they _want_ you to succeed. They are HOPING you deliver your message, and that your demos all work, and that you conclude well. If kept in mind, I believe this can help alleviate some of the anxiety.
Sidebar: I've done this for a very long time and I still get nervous at the beginning of every talk. And I will be the first to admit—you WILL run into the occasional show off in the audience who is intent on demonstrating to you (and to the rest of room) how much smarter or more experienced they are than the speaker. That will happen—but it's an aberration.
1. Competence creates confidence, and confidence creates trust.
2. You can answer questions, pretty much any question, and if you can't you can let the audience know graciously without coming off as unknowledgable.
3. It makes it easier to present well, because you don't need to or are not tempted to read from the slides, you're telling a story or sharing information in a natural way, off the dome, using the slides only as a topic guide because you already fully understand everything about the subject.
I have found this to be so important, that I sometimes /choose/ to present something I'm interested in but don't know well (with enough lead time) as a jumping off point to dig deep into it. I have long believed if you want to really understand something, the benchmark for having achieved competence is successfully teaching that subject to another person and seeing them succeed with it.
I once did a breakout about a Geo support in Django, but the presenter spent the entire time helping people install PostgreSQL with geo support for an entire morning. We never ran a single line of Django code when the presentation was over.
[0]: https://github.com/bjoli/RrbList/tree/main/src/Collections