Øredev 2024

Written from a bean-bag near the Stardust stage during the conference. Final half-day. Good conf.

A person I've chatted with in a swedish dev community I enjoy asked me at one point who I would recommend to speak on Phoenix LiveView for the Øredev conference. Sweden's probably biggest developer conference. With the utmost certainty and confidence I recommended ... Sophie Debenedetto because that's the correct answer. Unless you want Chris McCord I guess. I guess she said no or was outside the budget because they came back to me some time later and checked if I could do it. And within Sweden I think I'm a decent choice. I occasionally self-describe as the loudest Elixir developer in Sweden. I think that is sufficiently accurate without being particular self-aggrandizing.

I said yes which meant I had to prepare a talk for a general audience on Elixir and LiveView. I went for pitching the entirety of Elixir through the lens of web development. My general Obsidian notes are publicly available and I didn't keep the talk secret as I developed it. Heck, here are the slides if you want to check them out (depending on your OS some emoji might not render, MacOS was the presentation tool).

Anyway, as I've done with both my in-person talks so far I focused way too much on writing and wording. It is kind of great because I can make really punchy statements that hopefully capture people's imagination. See the intro between COLD OPEN and TRANSITION. It is meant to be delivered with a driving intent. Any waffling from the written thing risks losing momentum. I have a few places where I formulate similar bits. Later when I drive home the value of LiveView I try something similar, see "This is time to market" for reference.

The really bad side of this is that I have to memorize and practice a bunch of exact or near-exact formulations and the way I write makes them overly complex. I really should edit down more. This all puts pressure in practicing and prep.

I have a very easy time with improvised speaking on topics I know. I could probably make a talk from just slides with bullets on them and still get it kind of cohesive. I've never done a talk like that. I think I probably should try it though. Find a more energry-efficient way to give a talk. Not everything needs to be a big production.

I did do one thing that was simpler than my usual MO. I repurposed my ElixirConf talk as a few minutes long demo. Just going through the absolute fundamentals and high level of what it is for. I changed the design a bit. I did my slides in Google Sheets this time, not inside a LiveView project. I had a lot of talking to do, 40 minute slot, and it was not about inspiring people that already know about Elixir. It was about telling new people about it.

Assuming you write a talk kind of the same way I do you write up the exact text you intend to present. Aside, please accept that you will and should vary how you say things, skip paragraphs, cut parts for speed if need be, you can't and shouldn't be exact in final presentation. Anyway, with your text in a first draft form, practice should begin. At least daily I'd read through the thing, out loud, end to end. Formulations that I always stumble on get edited, things are overly verbose get edited. Things that are missing or that don't punch enough, edited.

You start building the slides. It is very good if your slides match the sections you want to cover in your talks so that they can prompts you to what part is next. I only half-did this for this talk and the parts that I stumbled the worst with during the presentation was remembering what came next inside of a particular topic.

When you have slides, do the read-aloud practice with the slides. As soon as you can start putting the notes away and try to make it flow from memory. I am not saying this is how your should do it. This is how you "should" do it if you want to mimic how I do it and I don't know that this is a good idea. It might be the worst idea.

The week leading up to the event I did morning and evening reps. I wasn't at the point where the entire material bored me to go through so I knew I didn't have it down. I was also hit by a bit of fever and stuff shortly before the conf which was bad for practice. Overall I got reasonable practice in but not what I'd consider ideal. I did a few reps in the hotel room as I was speaking day two of the conference and it felt good enough.

In the presentation I even got a clicker, that was convenient, I should own one. I didn't manage to get the speaker notes to a good visible size which was a mistake on my part and there are a few stumbles where I barely find my way by squinting at my laptop. I also ended up going a bit long during the early part of the talk and had to summarize the Nerves section a lot. Which is easy enough to do when I've repeated the contents of it so many times. I hit time almost perfectly. I delivered the ending spiel to my satisfaction.

During the talk I heard some laughs where appropriate, I saw people nodding with interest. Some people expressed interest after. Overall I think it went well and as this is a general presentation of Elixir and LiveView to a general audience it might be the first talk I actively re-use. You never know. My brain craves novelty but the prep is frankly tiresome.

I really enjoy the creative aspects of giving a talk and I try to respect the craft of performing the talk by putting in real consistent practice time which is not a strength of mine overall. It is a super worthwhile challenge and if you have considered doing it, I strongly recommend it. Being one of the speakers at a conference is also an immense shortcut to connecting with a bunch of interesting and enthusiastic people.

Any further questions on how I tackle public speaking? You can reply to this email or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org, I enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your attention.