Since the fall of us, colleagues. Summer hibernation came to an end, and autumn began to delight us with IT exhibitions, announcements and conferences of various shapes and sizes. For the past few years I have been closely involved in hackathons and conferences, and very often I hear questions about the audience and speakers - why do all these people get together, what do they want from each other and what practical benefits other than pizza? As part of this post, I gathered some information on the subject and my own observations on how to prepare and conduct a presentation at an IT conference or a meeting in the easiest way. Under the cut - my answers to strange questions and a few practical techniques accumulated over the years of struggle with laziness and common sense.

Part I
About the benefits of the case

For a start, I will share my fundamentally wrong vision of why people do two things: go to conferences and speak to them. A clear position on this issue allows us to understand where the most useful things are buried and how to dig it up.

Why listen to speakers?

I assume that all the relevant information is on the Internet - articles, tutorials, official documentation, stackoverflow and Habr. Is the conference format effective in terms of gaining knowledge? In the field of any genetic engineering - maybe I do not know how information spreads there. But for IT people, it is completely ineffective, all the same can be found on the Internet faster, easier and with a much wider range. Then why do we go to conferences?


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Get squeeze information in an unknown area

If someone speaks at the conference, then we believe that he understands at least a little in this area and is not too far behind the times. After listening to him and talking on the sidelines, we get a unique opportunity to get concentrated information in an unknown area. For example, you make websites and use rails. Want to expand your horizons? You crawl to the conference for the report “website development on nodejs - summaries from the fields”, listen to the speaker, compare his experience with yours, ask questions. This is much more effective than finding dozens of “rails vs node” articles of varying degrees of obsolescence on the Internet, or fucking off the thickness of the fundamental work “development on nodejs from A to” in three volumes.

Ask questions in a related field

Writing thick desktop solutions using Qt? I wonder how colleagues who use wxWidgets struggle with localization? At the conference, you can ask people who last did this a few hours ago to get a fresh summary of the fields and a description of the last rake that was seen.

Experience in using new solutions in their field

We administer a large network infrastructure and deploy software with deb? Want to chat with colleagues about interesting cases? We go to the conference, listen to what our colleagues are saying about the docker, and discuss on the afterparty over a beer, whether it is necessary to finely crush containers or not.

Why speak at conferences?

A more interesting question is why speak at conferences. Most of the IT people I interviewed on the sidelines after conferences and meetings, speak in order to improve their own skills. There is an opinion that the easiest way to improve something is to bring it out of the comfort zone, and let them adapt. Preparing to speak very well fits this principle: announcing our performance at the conference, we automatically turn on the internal mechanisms of motivation:

• Our will power is directly tied to the instincts. It is almost impossible “just like that” to want and spend a dozen hours to isolate and design some of your knowledge. If you leave a request, then immediately reach the instincts of achievement, the fear of social condemnation.
• Our memory has built-in interesting / uninteresting filters, technically implemented by such a part of the brain as the hippocampus. It is difficult for us to work on complex material, if we are not interested in it. The anticipation of pulling out, of positive emotions from it makes our brain work more effectively with memory and locus of attention during the creation of a presentation.

And not a single preparation. The speech itself develops the ability to convey their thoughts orally. This has a very positive effect on our career, because in most cases, a successful specialist is someone who is good at communicating with his colleagues.

And the last thing that can be said about the benefits is the opportunity to get a live feedback from the target audience. One of the main advantages of conferences and meetings is the ability to gather in one place people interested in some kind of technology stack so that they are ready to sacrifice their interests for several hours of their time.

Part II
How to make a presentation

Why do you need a presentation?

What is the role played by the presentation? My opinion is purely auxiliary. In accordance with a number of near-scientific hypotheses, our brain is designed in such a way that it automatically filters incoming information, preventing all garbage from filling up long-term memory. How he does it? There are criteria. For example, they talk to us. Even if we are not very interested in what the interlocutor says, animal instincts will lower the resistance of information coming from a person, because we are social animals. And, conversely, a tired lecturer mutters something from a piece of paper - our instincts do not perceive this as communication, and increase the resistance of "irrelevant" information. In accordance with these criteria, what the speaker tells us is well digestible information. The presentation behind the speaker in terms of our instincts only distracts from the “communication” with the speaker. Moreover, if the speaker's words begin to diverge from those indicated in the presentation, the brain begins to wedge from such dissonance, and the hippocampus further increases the resistance to memorization. Why in this section do you need a presentation? Many people perform without presentations or with presentations in which there are three slides and on all three cats. Nevertheless, you should not completely ignore the presentation either, it has some benefits:

• Help for those who "lost" during the performance;
• Help for those who have a poor understanding of technical terms by ear;
• the ability to write to evaluate the basic tenets of the report and decide whether to watch it;
• possibility to copy something in the record.

Presentation requirements

About how a good presentation should be, a lot of articles on the Internet and even a few books have been written. In the context of the above, I will highlight the most important thing, in my opinion:

• minimum of text and pictures - just enough so that you can understand what the speaker is talking about right now, without distracting from his speech;
• color calibration for the projector - bright light colors, nothing dark;
• colleagues by colleagues, and if there is an opportunity, then also by a professional Prüfder who will “brush” the Russian language.

In general, somewhere like this:

Part III
How to perform

The most, in my opinion, the simplest part. To perform well at a conference or a meeting - you go out and tell the hall a story.

Of course, here we need to make a reservation that the conference conference is different. At top conferences, it is important to take into account the specifics of the event itself, the level of the assembled specialists, and so on, and so forth. But, as a rule, it is only experienced speakers who are interested in this conference, for whom this habratopic is interesting only by mentioning in vain the hippocampus :).

There is a strong opinion that for a good performance it is necessary to train twenty times, and after that “the performance will go like clockwork”. But I have a suspicion that all these recommendations are sharpened by a person speaking for the first time in his life and to whom the most important thing is to be able to say at all in front of the hall and not faint on stage. In my opinion, if you start the performances with small mitapov people at 50-100, or with the third or fourth speech at the conference, then you do not need to train. Learning the text and “polishing” make the performance unnatural, activating the increased audience resistance to the material being presented. But when you just go out and start telling an interesting story to the audience, using the presentation as road signs to tell everything, the effect usually exceeds all expectations.

Here it should be noted a trivial thing, that all people are different. The recipe, in my opinion, is suitable and will suit many - but not all :).

The second important thing is eye contact with the audience. The principle of operation is extremely simple: when a person says something and at the same time looks at you or in your direction, then instincts consider this a social interaction, and the resistance to receiving information automatically decreases, attention increases. If the speaker turns around to the hall by the sirloin and starts reading the small text from the slide in a monotonous voice ... Well, you understand what I mean :).



Numerous experiments have shown that it is most convenient to speak by marking each slide in the comments as follows: the first line is briefly about this slide (which I am talking about now), the second line is about the next slide (where I want to have a conversation). If you use google docs for presentations (it works offline), then turning the notebook to yourself you can always have such a convenient hint before your eyes:



Well, and finally, about such a subjective thing as a psychological attitude. The installation works very well, “I do it first of all for myself, in order to become better, stronger and more competent”. Because it corresponds to reality.

Behind this all. Why did I write all this? Of course, for yourself to become better, stronger and more competent. Comments at your disposal, if I missed something, somewhere is wrong or you just have something to say - you are welcome.

The article was written based on my speech at the last Moscow Django meeting , you can watch the video and compare the options for presenting the material here:



about the author

Grigory Petrov is a Digital October technical evangelist and a serial hackathon organizer. He has a wealth of successful events both in Russia and abroad.

Gregory has practical skills in managing small and medium software development teams. His specialty is the development of desktop software. Gregory also worked for a long time with various development support systems, from time management systems to long-term project planning software. October 9, Gregory will hold a training on software development management . The training is intended for managers of development teams, both acting as Team Lead and specializing only in management. During the whole day, Gregory will share with you his own experience in the field of development management, accumulated over more than 15 years of work in IT.

Gregory has vast experience in organizing the process of developing a full cycle (from prototyping to releases and technical support). He is able to organize the software development process from scratch or correct the current process so that it meets the required metrics.