At every large regular conference there are speakers who come every year, tell something new and always like the audience. It is very difficult to always be in the very top for a person who is not engaged in performing professionally (and why), but always producing confidently good material is real. One of the speakers who made several successful reports on both Highload ++ and RIT ++ is Ivan Kruglov from Booking.com.

A few days ago, Ontiko's blog already had an article on the preparation of speakers , devoted more to the presentation of the material, and today I would like to talk about another aspect of the training, which I mainly do in RIT ++ and Highload ++. Let us use the example of Ivan’s last speech to consider what is important and what we are working with in the preparation of the conference with speakers in the field of content.


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Slides here .
Of course, any report about microservices, or at least about SOA, automatically gets +2 to charisma, but the speaker should still be able to use it.

Disclaimer: about SOA only a sorted report, and not the article itself.

Plot

Formulation of the problem

True, among us there are some lucky people who are now developing their project from scratch, and already at the design stage did they put into it a microservice architecture? Ok, let a lot. Ok, even if not all of these people are lucky, because some have definitely laid the microservice architecture in vain and will get all the inconveniences associated with it right at the start, and before the problems that it solves , their project will never grow.

We will not think about these people, whether they are lucky or not, but about others, who are also quite a few. About those who inherited something big, monolithic, old and very fragile, and who are trying to cut it into microservices not at the behest of fashion, but because of hopelessness.

It seems to me that when all these people hear “adishche, monolith, PHP”, when they see an attempt to paint the whole architecture with two stacks of technologies (“old” and “new”), and this attempt is immediately recognized as unsuccessful, they actually receive a signal "You and I are of the same blood," or, less pompously, "I am the same person as you, and I have the same difficulties." This is an important signal, it gives the speaker additional credibility from the audience, and they immediately understand what kind of decisions to expect from the report.

Of the possible improvements, I will note the following: the problems to which Ivan refers at the beginning of his speech are very common. For better focusing it was worth narrowing them down. For example, the section on traffic control difficulties (a minute starting at 40:42 ), in my opinion, asks for the formulation of the problem, and not for conclusions. After all, it’s about how to manage traffic with the help of the envoy and samopisny control plane, the report goes.

findings

The main ideas that we want to convey to the audience, it is useful to repeat at the end, as in this case, the speaker does. This is necessary in case people during the story for some reason could not isolate the most important. Again, this important is quite a lot, it is useful to re-list.

In the conclusions of Ivan in this speech, I am confused by the fact that only one and a half follow from the story directly from the three points. See (beginning at 40:00 ):

1. Pay special attention to the interaction between the services, and all the buzzwords that are invented around this are not just buzzwords, but really necessary things. This is true, but it follows, rather, from the previous report (on RIT ++, here is the record ) than from this.
2. The pros and cons of approaches with a library or with a local proxy are summarized in the conclusions in much the same way as in the speech itself, and in much the same way. That is, this conclusion is more likely to repeat what was said earlier than to summarize it, so we’ll read it for half.
3. Envoy and Istio are useful, interesting tools with which you can establish interaction between services. Yes, the main part of the report is about this.

For those who watched the previous reports of Ivan, the conclusions should go fine, but those who watched only this one could feel some break.

Slides

Scheme

I do not get tired of reminding that the audience has a battery in their head, which is spent on understanding the speaker. This is similar to the principle of saving thinking: non-productive battery consumption must be reduced. Not all the power of the viewer's mind is addressed to the report. Someone got a sick child, another had a tooth, someone had a date scheduled for the evening, and someone else's food fell, and he just got this message. People's attention is divided between these important things for us and our performance. I would like them to at least not have to spend energy on deciphering what we are trying to say.

Complex schemes - one of the most energy-intensive types of content. Look at slide 36: is it true, you need a lot of strength to figure out what is going on here?



And now look, if not yet, how this diagram appears in the presentation. The story about it begins at 24:20 and lasts almost 4 minutes. In this case, it is always clear which element of the scheme Ivan is currently talking about, since the elements appear sequentially. The second bonus of consistent appearance is such that a dynamic occurs. When some events regularly occur on the screen, it is better than a static picture, as each new movement attracts the viewers.

Any scheme (ok, almost any) has an entry point, starting from which this scheme should be considered and told, and then the narration is somehow distributed according to the scheme. It is in this order that the schemes are opened in Ivan’s story, and we recommend everyone to do this when preparing reports.

Slides as an addition to the speaker

There is a good joke with a fair amount of truth: how to understand whether you have good slides or not? If you can figure out what you are talking about without them, it means that the slides are definitely bad. Many speakers try to make self-sufficient slides so that they can be read, and this seems like a good idea until it turns out that it is difficult to speak with such slides: they struggle with the speaker for the viewer's attention.

In this presentation, everything is fine: the slides are clearly designed as an illustration of the speaker's speech. For example, in “traditional” slides there would always be headlines, and in slide illustrations they only take up space. The third one has the title (and other attributes peculiar to the “traditional” slides), and the twenty-seventh next one, which has them.

This is correct: there is a story, the main element of which is the speaker, and there are illustrations to it, and not two competing versions of the same story. And if we want people to read something, let's write an article on Habr.

Projector and contrast

It is better to check the slides in advance in the hall where you are to perform. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, and in the Skolkovo business school, where Highload ++ and RIT ++ take place, the picture is different in different halls. If we come out with a projector, then it is generally better to assume that it does not give high contrast.

As a horror story, look at this photo taken just at the time of the report. In the left part behind the speaker can not see the slides. Of course, in reality, the screen looks a little brighter than in the photo, but you can understand the essence of the problem:



Screenshots from the monitorings are particularly affected on the projector, which for some reason all have color on a black background (I am sure that most of the controls have a bright gamma in the settings, but apparently the evil system administrators do not use it). That is, slides like number 44 have a particularly high risk of turning into a pumpkin:



Here we are confronted with a philosophical question, which is more convincing: a picture from a tru instrument, which, on the other hand, is hard to see, or obviously a self-made graph, presumably from the same data. But if for some reason it is impossible to replace the picture, then it makes sense to carry out the work that was done on the slide, namely: select only an interesting place, stretch the schedule as much as possible, get rid of the legend and, if it is important, manually make larger signatures to axes.

About rehearsals

Criticizing Ivan is also because he quite often interrupts himself to give a previously forgotten piece of information, or stops to pick up a wording, and this process often occurs out loud. These gaps, it seems, are not so much to prevent the follow up of the story, but it is enough that they are noticeable and slightly annoying.

This time at Highload ++ 2017 we didn’t have training activities quite as usual (experiment), and there was no complete run of this report with a record that could be viewed, and this would greatly help to make the story logic more continuous. .

Some experts do not recommend watching the recording of their rehearsal on the eve of the performance, believing that it does more harm than good. Harm can happen if during viewing you focus on the fact that it is still impossible to fix it in a day. I have seen the speaker more than once, when he saw himself for the first time in the recording, almost wringing his hands with a groan: “It was awful ... Solid uh, there, and how, what to do? ..” If you think about it live before the public, it really will only get worse.

One cannot get rid of uh-uh in one day (more precisely, I don’t know how to do it). The secret here is that in our speech we notice far more parasitic words than in a stranger. And in the opposite direction it also works: it seems to us that everything is terrible, and the outsider perceives us quite normally. Speech polluted enough to make it a real problem is quite rare.

Therefore, when viewing you need not to think about the white monkey, but look for holes in the logic. If you expressed it incomprehensibly or ambiguously or clearly could not formulate a thought right away, you need to stop recording and think over the wording. Of course, not everything that comes up will be remembered before the actual performance, but it will be much easier. Therefore, when preparing conferences, we provide speakers with, among other things, an opportunity to speak on camera, get feedback and then analyze their text. From this point of view, it is important to watch the record, since it is impossible to remember all the places where difficulties arose, directly during the rehearsal.

Come to participate

In general, if you want not only to speak, but also to improve your skills during the preparation process, then you should definitely apply for a report at the RIT ++ Conference Festival .