Speaker Cheat Sheet, or How I Gave My First Report

I have been doing front-end development professionally for 6 years, and for about 15 years with computers as a hobby. Never in my life I had to attend conferences and, frankly, I was embarrassed to first just appear at such events, and until the last moment and speak. As it turned out, it is in vain, because it is great to perform!

At the end of April, Zhenya, a colleague, suggested that he go to Yekaterinburg to Dump , the Ural conference of web developers. Once this happened, I applied for a speech and began to invent a topic.
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The report begins with a speech request.

Initially, colleagues - Andrejka and Pasha - suggested that I tell you about the heroes of web development: the community lacks idols to be used for. The topic is curious and interesting, but it does not bother me to the depths of the soul. I continued to search, looking back at what really bothers me. This topic was found.

I really like to work productively and enjoy the result. Real enthusiasm requires, at a minimum, a task adequate to existing knowledge, suitable conditions (remuneration, pleasant colleagues, sufficient time) and good tools that will help focus efforts on the task and not waste energy on the routine.

For several years I worked as a freelance layout designer, collaborated with large and small clients, completed about a hundred projects - from layout of a promotional website for a couple of pages to 200 pages of a tender portal without layouts. I am ashamed to admit: I can hardly remember which new technologies I studied during this time.

Of course, I got a lot of experience, my knowledge deepened and expanded, but in other areas: I learned to get along with clients and better than ever understand them, learned to sell my services in different ways, I did well in graphic design and interaction design, I approached to understand how and why the business works.

I am a web technologist, but for all this time I have hardly studied any new technologies. I was simply in an information vacuum, not realizing that it is possible to work more efficiently and with a high buzz - including thanks to new methodologies and tools.

I decided to tell you about how to switch to the use of independent units and not to step on the rake of technological limitations. After talking with colleagues and correcting the name several times, I focused on the topic “Building sites on independent blocks from Jade and Stylus using Grunt.js”. I sent a letter to the organizers, a couple of days later I received an answer that the topic was interesting and would fit well into the program of the frontend section, and began to prepare.

It is not clear from the title, but I was going to focus not on technologies, but on methods and approaches to layout with independent blocks. I was afraid to change the topic, because I did not have a finished report yet, and I was afraid of “not getting” into a more abstract “why should the maker-up switch to independent blocks”. Leaving the names of technologies, I insured against failure: it is better to tell the obvious things about the tools than not to say anything at all.

Apply for a speech in advance, and get ready to start even earlier. It will be easier for you to speak, and for the organizers - to prepare an interesting event, if at the time of submitting the application you have a well-developed topic.

Preparation for performance will take at least a month

I began to prepare late. After returning from my hometown in early May, I plunged headlong into work and only a week before the conference I sketched a rough outline of the report. The assembly process and the technologies involved are familiar to me, so the list of theses on the A4 page was enough to calm the conscience.

A few days later I reformulated this list into 6 points of a plan of the form “problem - solution”, since still worried about the upcoming speech. Having calmed down once again, I started preparing the slides.

With the new plan, the future report seemed more harmonious. I took shwr.me , chose the appropriate theme, experimenting a bit with the engine, and sketched the title slides. I didn’t want to do a boring report with a bunch of small text typed in 12-point times or Helvetica, so I decided to dilute the presentation with funny pictures.

The selection of pictures took several hours, and still nothing was ready. Having made only half of the slides, I found that it was total nonsense. I had no idea how to make a distinct story out of these 6 obvious problems. I didn’t want to dwell on the problems, not offering solutions, but in my sketched plan there was no place for them.

There were only 2 days left before the speech, and I, still completely unprepared, went to bed, intending to make the entire report in one day. I was hoping to make slides before dinner, rehearse the story in front of my colleagues, pack my things and go to the airport the next morning.

In the morning, completely do not sleep, I sat down to work. As I assumed the day before, it was difficult to start switching to a suitable state again and start doing something. I started to look at the reports from TED and 404 fest to find some features and catch inspiration, recalled various tips and seemed to be dug my head against the wall, not noticing the obvious solution to the problem.

After a couple of hours, I accidentally felt the method of preparation that came up to me. I just got up from the chair, imagined that I was in front of the public and began to speak on the chosen topic for myself.

The most important thing in the report is an interesting first-person narrative. Slides - text, pictures, pieces of code, real examples - are also very important, and a lot of time will be spent on their preparation. Get ready for corrections and find a handy tool for creating and editing presentations.

Choose an interesting topic, speak out and write down

I turned on the recorder, got up in the center of the kitchen and started talking until the moment when my thoughts ran out. This moment came quickly, and I repeatedly recited the same small pieces of the report, until a small coherent story was obtained. The first few times I listened to the recordings, but in the end I used a voice recorder only for timing, making sure that my voice sounded normal.

The synopsis turned out to be detailed and accurate, then superficial and inconsistent, which immediately revealed problematic pieces. I tried to reformulate them in order to easily divide the text into abstracts-crib for slides. Writing down about a third, I accidentally saw myself in the mirror and fell silent, forgetting everything I was talking about.

From the mirror I was not watched by a charming guy with lively facial expressions like Eddie Murphy, but by some kind of hatred like Dr. Hannibal Lector. Only my lips moved on my face, and it was clearly visible that all the muscles of my face were very tense and I could not smile normally. Because of this, I dropped out of work for an hour, but calmed down and went back to work, having lunch and looking at the report of Bryn about the guglochka - he was also not very charismatic.

Over the next few hours I outlined 6 points of the plan for the folding story and said everything several times. It turned out that the report will meet the planned 25 minutes, and the remaining 15 I can spend on an example of assembling a real project and answering questions. Worrying, I started talking fast. I hoped that the story would be able to stretch a bit, because during a real performance, I’ll definitely switch on unplanned topics and, I hope, speak more measuredly.

In some sections, I noted special places for questions from the audience and went to work, not having time to rehearse in front of my colleagues.

Concentrate on making a coherent and interesting story. Give examples from the life, communicate with the audience. Do not worry about your appearance, voice and manner of speaking. Choose an interesting and relevant topic for you: confidence and the necessary attitude will come thanks to this, and not as a result of memorizing the text.

Prepare a presentation and other materials in advance.

On the eve I learned from Vasi Aksyonov, program director of the front-end section , that in the evening at the Yandex office in Yekaterinburg there will be a preliminary report run. This calmed me down a bit, but I decided to rehearse in front of Leshaya — a friend of the front-end, who is interested in modern tools and improving the efficiency of labor.

The slides were not ready, so I sketched a small cheat sheet on a piece of paper and began to tell, replacing the methodological material with explanations on the fingers. Despite the fact that I spoke to a close friend, I still worried, stumbled and started to dance - in those places that were not worked out well enough.

I liked a friend, and I was especially impressed with the assembly of a real project. He gave me a couple of tips on behavior in public and offered to do a part with a real example more, because it’s clear and interesting.

Until now, I was torn between making a simple story with a presentation and a master class, but I found that it was difficult to demonstrate real cases without preparation. As for an interesting story, you need to think about the sequence of presentation, highlight important pieces of the project that you want to draw the attention of the audience. There was no time left for all this, and I decided that the part of the report with examples would be small.

Returning home late at night, I continued. It seemed that there should be 10-15 pieces of slides and it would take a couple of hours, but in the end I could not finish them until the morning of May 24 - the day of the conference. I greatly underestimated their number, because I was only thinking about funny pictures, alternating useful information, but I completely forgot about a bunch of code and appearing one after another points of the plan.

All this had to be edited and corrected several times. Having made a mistake from the very beginning, I wrote the code in the old-fashioned way, with my hands, repeating exactly that workflow, from which I dissuaded my listeners in the report :-) I worked until the morning, but did not manage to finish the presentation.

I managed to work a little before boarding the plane - mainly over the correction of inaccuracies - after which my laptop was discharged, and with it my head. Almost 70 slides took a lot of time to do bad monotonous editing, and I was going to finish them already in Yekaterinburg before the rehearsal in Yandex.

Presentation is a cheat sheet. Compose it so that it is easy to remember what to say, looking at the slide. Most of the time will be spent on preparing slides with code or other real-life examples, because they must be both visual and concise.

Be sure to rehearse and correct the shortcomings.

Ekaterinburg and its inhabitants were friendly. We were well received and offered to take from the airport to the city for a rehearsal. A speech to experienced colleagues worried me even more than a speech at a conference, so I preferred to linger and rehearse myself a little.

On the run I was the last to speak: it was late and there were a few people left in the hall. Already in the course of my speech, it seemed to me that I didn’t open the topic enough, and at the very last moment I had the feeling that my idea with a bunch of pictures was stupid. I did not like my story, but I learned to hammer on unnecessary excitement.

After the story, Vasya and Anton Nemtsev asked questions and commented on the report, from which it became clear that I didn’t explain some of the points badly, formulated my thoughts somewhere and gave incorrect examples. All this was easy to fix, but it is much better to make such corrections a week rather than a few hours before the performance.

I liked that joining the crowd is much easier when you are a speaker, and not a simple listener. The guys turned out to be interesting and friendly, conducted a tour of the Yandex office and around the city, told funny stories about traveling (hello, Anton!) And were friendly about us, escorting us back to the hotel.

The slides for the last section of the report about the project collector were not ready, and I wanted to do them before going to bed, but because of the night walk, I just went to bed, deciding that it was better to finish the presentation with a fresh mind.

Prepare a report in advance and speak to experienced colleagues. You will be helped by their comments and the very fact of appearing before those whom you consider to be professionals. Questions from competent experts will identify problem areas of the report, and you will be calm in front of your listeners, correcting mistakes in advance.

Get ready to speak, check out the technique.

On the preliminary run, it turned out that my Ubunt does not want to be friends with the projector and spits incomprehensible errors. I copied the report to a USB flash drive and took advantage of Vasya’s laptop, but with a real example it was tight: I didn’t have an extensive working environment to build the site on another computer.

Registration for the conference began at 9 am, reports at 10:00, and my presentation at 10:45. The guys asked to come by half past nine to check and adjust everything, and I woke up only at 9 am! Having assembled at lightning speed, I went downstairs and finished the last slides at breakfast. Of course, there was no question of any detailed examples, and I inserted the last slide with a link to my utility on the githaba 10 minutes before the presentation.

I had time to come before the start of speeches, and we checked all laptops in advance. It turned out that he is on friendly terms with the projector in the Ubunta hall, but with small jambs in the sweep, and even the console for managing the presentation picked up. This made me happy, and I was able to speak with my computer. True, there was still no real example, because I did not have time to discuss this with the client.

Organizing a conference is a difficult task, and you will greatly simplify the life of the organizers if you prepare and test the technique and presentation in advance, and also stock up with copies of materials for the presentation.

Prime time, respect for the audience and the reaction of the audience

When I began to speak, people still crowded at the check-in due to the overlays with transport, and the hall was only half filled. Later, I guessed that at conferences, as well as on television, there is prime time - pre- and afternoon hours. Speakers at this time collect more listeners and get more feedback, are better remembered and usually tell more interesting things.

At the end of last year, I conducted a webinar on How the Site Works - from servers and protocols to the backend and frontend. I prepared for several days, made a detailed plan and spoke online to 10 people. The main goal was to look at the reaction, interest, and responsiveness of the audience. It was a very interesting and exciting experience. Things did not go as I expected.

My webinar tried to cover too large a topic, even a few topics. How the site works in all its details is the topic of a whole book, and not an introductory lecture for students, which I wanted to do. No need to wait for some kind of super-reaction and a thousand questions, unless you are just talking about something incredibly important to your listeners and you have not established very good contact.

You should not interrupt the story for the sake of answering the question of one person, and certainly you should not go deep into the details, distracting from the topic. People come to listen: when I departed strongly from the topic, I felt like they are distracted, start to get bored and end up disappointed.

The report is the same story as with the webinar: listeners want to have fun and learn something new. If the report includes a code, then you can show some elegant or important piece explaining the basic concept, but you should not go into details very much - few will be able to penetrate, but most will be bored.

The performance was very different from the rehearsals and my assumptions about how it will pass.

It's good that I still prepared a presentation with pictures, small pieces of code and points of the plan, and not small text on each slide. This is a common respect for people. True jokes and pictures that seemed ridiculous during rehearsals did not provoke a violent reaction by themselves. I noticed that the audience is either gradually swinging like a pendulum, until everyone laughs, or something really witty must be said to make the audience laugh.

I was in vain worried that I would be unsure about speaking or being ashamed of the audience. Of course, the first 5 minutes I felt awkward and a little shy, but later calmed down and began to enjoy the story. If you believe the sensations (I haven’t seen the video yet), the report turned out to be collapsible, but rather superficial: you need more examples and interesting case studies from life.

During the rehearsal, Lesha gave me advice: the first thing to find in the hall is a person who will be pleased to tell. This decision should be absolutely spontaneous and unconditioned, fleeting. Such a person was found - it was a guy in a red T-shirt, sitting in the center of the hall. The psychological effect of such a technique is clear: it is much more pleasant to tell something to a person who listens attentively and likes it rather than giving a report to the opposite wall of the hall. I couldn’t always look at the audience: now and then I looked at the slides, or I just looked where it was not clear, thinking. I tried to look "over the heads" and from time to time met the looks of a guy in red.

My more than half an hour passed very quickly. I probably would have forgotten the text if I tried to memorize it - the main thing to remember is the plan (reminders are the slides) and rehearse before the performance. It would have been difficult for me to speak on the basis of a technically literate, but passionless text, but it turned out to be quite easy to talk about what I think and what I said more than once.

The reaction of the audience was calm. At the end of the report I was asked a couple of questions from the floor and a couple more personally. It was unexpected and curious to feel that people coming up with questions were also worried - probably because they were not used to the attention turned to themselves. In the same way, I was worried before the performance, but it turned out that it was not scary to be in plain view.

At conferences there is a prime time - about lunch time. Respect your listeners: prepare an interesting presentation, tell based on slides, give examples from your own experience and ask questions to people. In the hall there will certainly be experienced specialists who will give valuable feedback.

Perform more often

For a long time I did not dare to speak. I thought that I did not have enough knowledge for public speaking. It seemed that there would always be people who did all this a hundred years ago - and this is true. But you can look at the performance from the other side.

Speaking, you not only share your thoughts and experiences with the audience, but also receive feedback from them. It came from the scientific community, as Kostya Romanov told me. To prepare a report, it is necessary to penetrate well into the subject area, and if you start preparing in advance, you will surely learn a lot of new things and make a report based on in-depth knowledge.

I thought that I had nothing to tell about, because the things that I can tell about are already known to me and in my opinion are obvious, but this is a delusion. Someone may easily not be aware of what I am saying, and someone will give valuable comments. And it is definitely useful for everyone to see how another specialist solves problems.

If you manage to make your presentation entertaining and funny, the audience will definitely be grateful and will try to use your ideas in their work, and this is probably the best thanks for the speaker-techie.

To you, as well as to everyone though to any experienced specialist, there is something to tell. Even if you are not confident in your own knowledge, listeners will surely like the boring performance, and you will receive valuable comments and advance in the area of ​​knowledge you are talking about. Speak without embarrassment!

PS There was a video report

Unfortunately, it was not assembled with the presentation, so it’s better to watch it separately: a presentation from the report “Building sites on independent blocks from Jade and Stylus using Grunt.js” .