Building a Talk for Community Events
Recently, I teamed up with Farrah Campbell, Lian Li, and Ant Stanley for the Mentoring team of ServerlessDays. With this team, we aim to help the ones who are hesitant about talking at any ServerlessDays also in a Serverless meetup. We are receiving a nice amount of resources but it really feels good to help people overcoming their obstacles to become visible in the community. Mostly, people are reaching out to ask how can they change their existing talk proposals or slides to make it more interesting. Recently, we got a request for asking all the things from scratch:
- How to pick a good subject
- How to write a nice proposal about it and get accepted
- How to create a good slide deck
- How to present it
We thought that it’s good to curate the response to this person as a blog post and help others who didn’t reach us. Yet :)
Here is my response to the email asking “how to build a talk” :
It can differ from person to person widely but I can talk about my personal experience preparing for a talk proposal that can be expected, getting ready for it and finally talking in front of the public.
Picking up a topic is the hardest part, IMO. You should first ask yourself which topic you grasp enough and you can simply explain it. Believe me, this is not necessarily an advanced topic. You can just talk about how serverless enabled you to deliver better software as a junior software developer and this would be a totally awesome talk that I’d really want to listen to. The key is you really need to have the confidence inside you to talk about that particular subject. Turning back to my experience, I was thinking that I can give talks on the subjects which I’m dealing with every day as a part of my job. That’s why, I talked about chaos engineering in serverless a lot because I already read tons of things, designed a feature and shipped, wrote documentation. All this made me competent to talk on this issue but I really enjoy 100 level talks a lot better than my super rocket-science subject.
After you pick up a topic, it’s better if you deepen your knowledge of this subject by reading more and watching somebody else talking about the same or very similar subject. I’m not talking about plagiarism here but this can really help you understand how you can construct a talk on that topic. You may also realize some perspectives that you never thought of. It’s really beneficial to spark new ideas and write a good proposal on that subject.
Now, it’s time to write the proposal. Note that I’ve never met with someone whose presentation and all talk material is ready before writing the proposal. You just need to curate the proposal as a promise to yourself to talk on that topic. Just setting expectations. Getting accepted to the conferences can be linked to many different aspects so it’s hard to generalize what kind of proposals you should write. I would say put a catchy title and elevator pitch but at the same time don’t make it look like pure marketing. I personally don’t like these and most of the committees don’t like it as well. In my experience, the Notes section is very important. You need to tell the conference committee why you are the best person to talk on that particular subject.
Preparing a presentation is an art that I’m no close to being a master of it. There is no perfect presentation because there’s always something that can be done in a more elegant way. You can either go like Yan Cui type and prepare 150 slides and go fast or go Andrew Clay Shafer type and take the attention to the talk itself, not to the slides. Both are perfect according to your way of talking about that subject.
To conclude, you don’t need to be a seasoned speaker or a comedian to talk in a community event but you need to understand that topic that you want to talk really well to explain it simple and elegant way. We are very happy helping people step forward and talk in ServerlessDays and Serverless events. If you need any help at any stage, just shoot us an email: mentoring@serverlessdays.io
