Episode 12 - The Talk (slides and delivery)

Code Cafeteria

In this fourth and final episode of our mini-series on public speaking we're covering the final few meters on your road to a successful first conference talk: creating your slide deck and delivering the talk itself.

We start with talking about the slides and how to create the content of your talk. There are a few fundamental rules such as avoiding walls of text and just reading everything that's on your slides. But outside these extreme situations, the content and structure of your slides depends a lot on your personal style and the content and type of the talk.

It also seems that slide decks have changed over time. 10-15 years ago you'd generally have seen more text-heavy slides at conferences because the audio and video recording of talks was less common so that slide decks were the only reference people could have a look at after the event.

We also talk about some of the common theme slides in a slide deck: Title, Agenda, About me and a closing slide. Which of them do you need? Which of them do we like or dislike in talks and most importantly: what should you put on them?

The second part of this episode is about actually doing the talk. Practice a lot, try to warm-up on the day and have fun. Well, there's more - but you need to listen to the episode to hear that.

Finally, here are all the links to the previous episodes of this mini-series in correct listening order:

1. Getting Started
2. Submitting and the selection process
3. Writing your abstract