This episode gives you the full dose of BSDCan 2017 recap as well as a blog post on conference speaking advice.

Scott’s work for the Foundation will focus on managing and evangelizing programs for advanced technologies in FreeBSD including preparing project plans, coordinating resources, and facilitating interactions between commercial vendors, the Foundation, and the FreeBSD community.

Until now I’ve never had to sit down and ponder what I could speak about. Over the year, I run into at least one topic I know something about that appears to be interesting to the wider public. I’m positive that’s true for almost anyone if they keep their minds open and keep looking for it.

In the end I have to come up with a good pitch that speaks to as many people as possible and with a speculative outline. Since there are always many more submissions than talk slots, this is the first critical point. There are many reasons why a proposal can be refused, so put effort into not giving the program committee any additional, that are entirely avoidable.

...do passive research: if I see something relevant, I add it to my mind map. At this point my mind map looks atypical though: it has a lot of unordered root nodes. I just throw in everything that looks interesting and add some of my own thoughts to it. In the case of the reliability topic, I spend a lot of time to stay on top it anyway so a lot of material emerged.

Once the talk is accepted, research intensifies. Books and articles I’ve written down for further research are read and topics extracted. In 2017, this started on January 23. But before I start writing, I get the mind map into a shape that makes sense and that will support me. This is the second critical point: I have to come up with a compelling story using the material I’ve collected. Just enumerating facts and wisdom a good talk doesn’t make. It has to have a good flow that makes sense and that keeps people engaged.

I have a very strong opinion on slides: use few, big words. Don’t make people read your slides unless it’s code samples. Otherwise they’ll be distracted from what you say. You’ll see me rarely use fonts smaller than 100pt (code ~40–60pt) which is readable from everywhere and forces me to be as brief as possible.

I firmly believe that this phase makes or breaks a talk. Only by practicing again and again you’ll notice rough spots, weak transitions, and redundancies. Each iteration makes the talk a bit better both regarding the slides and my ability to present it. Each iteration adds impressions that my subconscious mind chews on and makes things fall in place and give me inspiration in unlikely moments.

In the past years I was blessed with the opportunity to test my talks in front of a smaller audiences. Interestingly, I’ve come to take smaller events more seriously than the big ones. If a small conference pays for my travels and gives me a prominent slot, I have both more responsibility and attention than if I paid my way to an event where I’m one of many speakers.

The first session is always just going through all slides, reacquainting myself with my deck. Then it always takes quite a bit of willpower until I do a full practice run again: the first time always pretty brutal because I tend to forget pretty fast. On the other hand, it rather quickly comes back too. Which makes it even harder to motivate myself to start. Ideally I’d have access to a video recording from phase 7 to have a closer look at what work could be improved. But since it’s usually smaller conferences, I don’t.

Whenever I travel to conferences I bring everything I need for my talk and then some. To make sure I don’t forget anything essential, I have a packing list for my business trips (and vacations too – the differences are so minimal that I use a unified list). My epic packing list for business trips. I print it out the day before departure and cross stuff off as I pack. I highly recommend to anyone to emulate this since packing is a lot less stressful if you just follow a checklist.

So this is it. The moment everything else led to. People who suffer from fear of public speaking think this is the worst part. But if you scroll back you’ll realize: this is the payoff! This is what you worked toward. This is the fun, easy part. Once you stand in front of the audience, the work is done and you get to enjoy the ride.