WindyCityRails: My Presentation Checklist

Noel Rappin, Friday, September 11, 2009 @ 10:14 am

WindyCityRails 2008

Sometimes I write these just for me.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, tomorrow I'll be speaking at WindyCityRails, and I need a checklist of all things I don't want to forget, and all thing things I want to do to make the talk great.

Preparing the Talk

Figure out what you want to say first. The outline view in PowerPoint and Keynote is a great way to organize what you want to say without worrying about how it looks.

Determine a small number of things that you think are key items that you want the audience to walk away with. Mention them at the start, summarize them at the end.

The classic advice is not to put too much text on your slides, and avoid reading the text directly. A pragmatic way to manage this is to set your body text font pretty large (I use 44 point fonts for my body text if I can get away with it), and break up any slide that threatens to overrun.

That said, you can make the opposite mistake as well -- I find it tiring to go to a talk where all the slides are two-words and a non-sequitur picture. People may be viewing just your slides online, they need a little bit of context. Even people in the room often need a bit of context on the slides to help follow what you are saying.

Building up the slides during the talk point by point using animation can be a good way to keep from reading too much text on the slides. And it can help time a "punch line" by keeping it from the audience until you are ready. But don't use it everywhere. (I've always wanted to give a talk that used bullet points like Colbert does in The Word segment, as ironic commentary. But that's very hard, and I'm not sure it would work.)

I do like to separate off major sections of the talk with title-only slides. I've started tying these sections together by putting images on the title slide, and carrying those images in the background of the slides in the section at something like 20% opaque. It makes it easier for people in the audience to follow along.

Keep the number of moving parts to a minimum -- rather than switch to an editor to show code, copy the code into your slides. TextMate has a "Copy to RTF" bundle that preserves syntax highlighting, or take a screen shot.

Similarly, try to avoid having to run code during your talk. (Unless the interactivity is the point, as in a longer workshop).

Try not to depend on Internet access for a demo, you never know how flakey the Internet is going to be at a venue. At the very least, have a bunch of screenshots in hand as a plan B.

Practice. Do a dry run by yourself. If you see something wrong in your slides or missing in your talk, write it down. But do try and get a clean dry run at some point, so you get a sense of how long the talk is.

If possible, practice in front of other people. Nearly every talk that somebody at Pathfinder gives has a practice run as a company brown bag. This is invaluable feedback as to what is interesting in your talk and what is not.

In many situations, your last slide will be up for a while while you answer questions or something. Put something useful on there, generally either a summary or places to go for more information.

Doing the Talk

Make sure you bring everything you need. Laptop. Power Cord. Monitor Adapter. Remote Control. Don't assume that anything will be as you expect in the actual setup. As I type this I'm going to put my monitor adapter in my backpack. Put a copy of your talk on a thumb drive. Put a copy online using Dropbox or Gmail it to yourself.

If at all possible, scope out the space well before your talk. Where will you stand? Will you be able to see your own slides? Will you need a remote, or will you need to stand in front of your presentation machine?

Try and set up early if you can (if you are part of a conference program, you're limited because there's a previous speaker). Still, the less the audience sees you fumbling with cables the better off you are. It helps if you can check to see if the display resolution matches your slides.

Before the talk, shut down as many programs as you can on your laptop. Especially shut down notifiers -- you don't want an IM from your mom popping up in the middle.

I use a Mac utility called Caffeine to keep my computer from going to sleep in the middle of the talk, because it's annoying when that happens.

The point of all this is to reduce the amount of things that can go wrong so that you can be as relaxed and have fun during the talk.

Getting started can be awkward. Sometimes it helps to get the audience involved by asking a question or two right off the bat -- this can also help you gauge how much the audience already knows about your topic. It can also be an unobtrusive way to make sure that everybody can hear you.

At the end, if there's time, take questions. Get in the habit of repeating the question before you answer it. There's a good chance that most of the audience didn't hear the question. If you are miked and being recorded, the recording probably won't pick up the question unless you repeat it.

Stick around afterword if you can, often there will be one or two more people who have questions.

Related posts:

1. Artifacts of a Presentation
2. Ruby Code Audit Checklist
3. Windy City Rails
4. The Ten Commandments for Technical Requirements: VII: Presentation: The Art of Gladness
5. Bruce Johnson/Dan Peterson Presentation on Productivity

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