NOEL: Hello and welcome to Episode 42 of the Tech Done Right Podcast, Table XI’s podcast about building better software, careers, companies and communities. I'm Noel Rappin. In this episode, we're talking about technical speaking with Saron Yitbarek. Saron runs the CodeNewbie Podcast and community and organizes the Codeland Conference. Saron and I both have some thoughts and opinions about how to deliver a good technical talk and this episode has a lot of tips about how to prepare, what to do at the start of a talk, how to engage the audience, why emoji are better for slides than videos. Basically, how to give the talk that only you can give and how to get the best performance that you can? Before we start the show, a few quick messages. Table XI is now offering training for developer and product teams. Topics include testing, refactoring Legacy JavaScript and career development. For more information, go to the web at http://tablexi.com/workshops or email us at workshops@tablexi.com. I haven't mentioned at the top of the podcast recently, if you like the show, reviewing us on Apple Podcast would be really helpful. Thanks. Now, here's my conversation with Saron. Saron, would you like to introduce yourself to everybody? SARON: Hello, everyone. I am Saron Yitbarek. I am the founder of CodeNewbie, also a developer and a podcaster. I host a bunch of different shows, including the CodeNewbie Podcast, Basecs Podcast and Command Line Heroes from Red Hat. NOEL: All of which, I have enjoyed. SARON: Yay! Wonderful. NOEL: All recommended. We are not here to talk about any of those things. We are here to talk about technical speaking and tips for how to do a good job in technical presentations. Now, the first time I saw you present, I actually remember very strongly, it was at RailsConf here in Chicago in 2014 and you did a fantastic job and looked like you've been doing it for a long time. I guess my first question is do you have other public speaking experience that you have brought to bear in your technical speaking? SARON: That RailsConf talk that you saw was actually the very first time I did any sort of public speaking. Before that, the closest I'd come to public speaking was doing a class presentations in college and that sort of thing. When I was younger, I did a lot of dance and theater, so I don't know if that counts but I'm used to bright lights, where I can't see anyone in the audience and I'm hoping no one is scowling at me. NOEL: Comfortable with being the center of attention. I have a little bit of a high school and college theater background and especially, a little bit of high school and college doing stand-up. SARON: Oh, neat. That's intense. Stand-up? NOEL: Well, I guess. I mean, it's like a college coffee shop. It wasn't exactly hardcore but it does get you in the mood. It does get you used to being looked at by an audience. I guess, that's one of the things that people need to get over. I want to talk to you in part because you just wrote a post on Medium about a very, very technical topic in terms of presentation, about managing transitions and I want to kind of lead up to that, though. What kinds of things do you look for in some other presenters or do you try to do specifically, when you are presenting, what are some of the things that you try to make sure that you accomplish in the performance of a technical talk? SARON: Yeah, and that's a really good distinction too because I think in all talks, there are two parts, the content and delivery and the first step in putting together a good talk is recognizing that it is a performance. That's definitely number one. With the performance part of things, I think one of the big things that I really try to focus on is to get people on my side early in the talk. I think, all of the talks I've given, I never position myself as the expert. I never position myself as the teacher here to share this amazing information with you and change your life, like, I never put myself in that position. Early on, both structurally and in terms of performance, I try to connect with the audience emotionally. In terms of content, that means sharing a little bit more about my story, a little bit about who I am as it relates to the topic but I think it also means making a few jokes right off the bat. It means being a little bit more vulnerable. It means using my voice, my body language, my pauses to appear endearing, friendly, accessible, those kinds of things. I try to quickly make an emotional connection with the audience and then, when I get to the more serious stuff, the more factual stuff or maybe just the new stuff, the audience is ready to receive it. NOEL: One of my stand-up tricks when I was a college stand-up a bajillion years ago was I would walk out with a tape recorder, explain to everybody that I was recording it for my parents and ask them for one really big laugh -- SARON: That is amazing. NOEL: -- At the count of three to start. SARON: That is so good. NOEL: It gets people on your side and it kinds of primes them to do it and people do things like that in technical talks too. I've seen people say like, "When I get a drink of water, everybody should applaud," and that kind of thing. I think it's very important to start from position of trying to make that connection with your audience. Open with a joke is sort of cliché presentation advice. I usually say like, "Open with a joke but make sure it lands." SARON: Yeah. When I speak at OSCON, it was two years ago I gave a keynote there and I don't remember how I connected it to the talk but I started by talking about nervous pooping and how nervous pooping is a very natural part of the speaker journey and if you're going to do any type of performance or a speak, you will probably nervous poop at least once. For me, it's twice, before every presentation. It's normal. I thought it was funny. I thought it was kind of a low-brow icebreaker. But it got a way better reaction than I thought I was going to, like a way bigger reaction. I almost feel like the thing that people liked the most about the whole talk was the nervous pooping. All my tweets, all my mentions, notifications afterwards were all like, "Oh, my God. The nervous pooping was the best," and I was like, "Oh, okay. That works. That's something I keep in my back pocket. Now, that I know that developers like talking about nervous pooping." NOEL: Yeah, I think in that case, part of it is the surprise of that being a topic. It would not be what I would be expecting to get in walking in the room. NOEL: How word-for-word memorized are you normally in a talk? What do you recommend to do? SARON: That's a great question. I know that common speaking advice is don't memorize your talk. I think memorizing is a great thing to do, especially if you’re new to speaking. What I do is I start by writing a rough outline of high level of what I want to say and then, I go in and I write basically word-for-word, every single sentence that I want to say and it's from that script, that I end up creating the slides and I kind of pull out which of these points needs its own slide, which needs its own bullet point, what point needs to be seen versus heard. I use that script to plan out the visuals of the slides but that script is also important because it's when I write it down that certain themes become a little bit more obvious. It's when I write it down that I find a couple of phrases or a couple of sentences that are really, really powerful. It's through that writing process that I can kind of suss out like :I need to make sure I use this word." Or "I noticed that I actually keep coming back to this idea a few times. "Let me move that idea to the top." It's not until I can see the script word-for-word that I can really get a deeper sense of the flow and the feeling of the talk but I rarely do a talk that's purely memorized. I will go back to that script, I'll memorize it to the point where I don't really need to say it word-for-word. I memorize it to the point where I know it so well that I know the essence of the talk and I can freestyle the delivery of it. I remember like every single point. There's certain transition phrases that I try to actually hit every single time but the idea is that you know the script so well, you don't have to actually use it. NOEL: I definitely think the most important part is being comfortable enough that the presentation that you can adjust on the fly a little bit. I don't write things down word-for-word anymore, although I used to. I find that, at least for me, I can't match the cadence of my talking in writing and I think maybe, it's because I'm used to being my writing voice being like super explain-y. I usually write an outline in Deckset., so it's going right into slides and then I just talk it through over and over again until it feels stable to me. But I feel like the only thing that I tell people about memorizing stuff is that you have to be comfortable enough that you're not actually repeating it word-for-word because most people are not skilled enough performers to read something word-for-word or recite something word-for-word and make it sound like that's not what you're doing. SARON: Yeah, I think that it also depends. I've seen very well done memorized talks and it's like if you have to choose between a memorized talk that sounds scripted, it's pretty clear that you memorized it but you still have control over your voice and you're pausing at the right time, your voice goes up and it goes down and you're able to do those things versus kind of winging it and just having it be all over the place, I'd rather have a scripted organized talk versus a charismatic -- NOEL: Yeah, I think a lot of this, eventually comes down to what makes you most comfortable in that situation. You hit on something that, I think is really important which is your voice goes up, your voice goes down and you pause. One of the things that causes people to check out of a spoken presentation is monotone, consistency and rhythm and if you change your pitch and change your tempo and things like that, then people are much more likely, I think, to hang on. I think you can sometimes get a lot of attention just by a really long pause at the right time. It can be really effective. SARON: Yeah, and one things that, maybe even easier than that is to react to your own words. I produced the Codeland Conference for two years now and I personally coach all the speakers, all the workshop leaders and one of the things that I kept saying to everyone was, "Tell me how you feel. I want to know how you feel. Tell me how you feel," and there's so many places where, for example, if you're writing a talk about what it feels like to get stuck on a bug and you just can't figure it out, the talk will read something like, "And the bug was really hard and it needed to be figured out," versus, "I had a hard time with this bug. I was frustrated that I couldn't figure it out." You know what I mean? It's really simply changing it from the fact that it happened to how I responded to that fact, immediately makes it more interesting and more personal. NOEL: Right. It's back to the emotional connection you talked about at the beginning. It's giving people a reason to listen because you're telling a compelling story. SARON: Yup. NOEL: What other kind of things do you commonly wind up telling people in the coaching sessions? SARON: When people give a talk, I think unlike a blog post or a Twitter or anything that are very visual, I don't know where I am in your talk, so one of the things that I tell people all the time is to give me some direction, give me some clue, some sense of where I am in your talk. This is very, very simple. This is as simple as saying, "Next, we're going to blah-blah-blah," or to say, "But..." You're just adding the word 'but' in there and the next thing you're about to say is in opposition to the thing you just said. One of the things is just signaling. Just give me some sign post, some idea of where am I going, where am I right now, are we still within that same point that you have been making this whole time? Have we moved in a totally different direction? Are we onto a new segment? And sometimes, that's the slides. That's simply adding numbers instead of bullet points. That's color coding things. If you have, for example three parts of your talk and each part has five points, then when you introduce a new part, a new section, you use the same background color. NOEL: Or you use the same outline slide with the point you're in highlighted so you can track -- SARON: Yeah, exactly. That level of consistency. Then now, when I'm within the section, now maybe I'm back to my white background with my bullet points. Just little visual clues like that are so valuable but then also in the words that you use. How do you transition from one idea to the next? A lot of times I'll work with the speaker and halfway through, I'm like, "Wait. Where are we? Where are we headed? Where are we going?" and it's not that you want to give away the ending. You know, sometimes if the ending is surprising or interesting, you do want to maybe be a little bit more obtuse but in general, you never want to have your audience feel disoriented and when you're giving a talk, it's a lot easier to feel disoriented. NOEL: Yeah, that's a really good point. I feel like it's easy to underestimate how long a talk is relative to a blog post. If you think about a long Medium post is like a five minute read. We consider that like a long read and a talk is a six or seven or eight of those put together and so, you do have a certain responsibility to make sure... the cliché advice is always, "Tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them what you told them." It doesn't have to be that structured but if people can look up from their laptops and see a hand from the slide that sort of where they are in the presentation, that can be very helpful. SARON: I also feel like one of the things that makes talks really hard is a lot of times, they're just too long. They're way too long. Like in Codeland, our talks are 15 minutes. Even our keynotes are really only like 30 and that's as long as I ever want a talk to be. Most talks do not need to be 30 minutes. Most talks can be 10 to 15 minutes. Especially as a newer speaker, if you only have 15 minutes and it doesn't feel like a lot but you realize, if I'm really disciplined and really purposeful about the points that I make, I can put a lot of information in that 15 minutes. I think part of what makes a talk hard is if you have a 30-minute time slot to fill up. You end up filling it with fluff then you ramble and you tell me all about your life and your cat and how you like to make socks at home, like all kinds of unneeded, unnecessary, uninteresting things and irrelevant things to your talks. I think part of it is dealing with just feeling up with the pressure to fill up the times slot. NOEL: Yeah and again, that sort of filler makes it harder to have the audience to follow you on the through line. I have mixed feelings about that. I definitely feel like I've been at 40-minute talks that could've easily in 20-minute talk. On the other hand, I like talking in front of people. SARON: Yeah, that's the other problem. I feel like a lot of time that I listen to speakers, I'm like, "You're just here because you want to hear yourself talk." It's not really for me. NOEL: I mean, I'm not _just_ here to hear myself talk. That's a bonus. I mean, I'm here because I think I have something useful to say, I hope. I also think like focusing very clearly on why you're there to bring this to a serious point, as opposed to me wanting to hear my own voice, to be thinking about like, why are you giving this talk, what information are you really trying to convey, what do you want people to be able to do or know at the end of the talk that they didn't know at the beginning, is a really good way of structuring talks. Also, a really good way to structure an abstract, by the way. SARON: Also, the other side of that is not just what is it that you want to say but who are you saying it to and that is huge. Like the audience itself, it's a huge thing that I feel like a lot of speakers don't think about enough. One of my favorite examples when this happened really well was that this year we had Jen Simmons give a talk on CSS Grid and Jen is a pro. She's as pro as pro gets. She's amazing, an international speaker, an award winning speaker, she's great and I was working with her on her talk and she had given a talk at a different conference that was comparing CSS Grid with the history of CSS Layout in general. I watched that talk, then we had a couple of conversations about how to modify it for this audience and how to tweak it so it was just more relevant and just easier to chew on and digest. When she gave her talk, I was just blown away at how great of a job she did on, not just having a really great talk but really, really paying attention to the fact that my audience is new developers and new speakers... Oh, not new speakers but well, I guess, new speakers too but new programmers and people who haven't spent years working on layouts and don't really have that context. Because I knew what the original talk looked like, I knew all the work that she'd done to tweak it and adjust it and make it an amazing fit. It was things from just removing certain buzzwords and jargon to just herself, kind of playing, I want to say more of a student role, whereas in the previous talk, she came off as like, "I am the expert and here is what I'm teaching you," whereas with our audience, it was more of, "Let's have fun and let's figure this out together." It was an amazing example of how to modify really interesting content but make it so relevant and so engaging to a very different audience. NOEL: I think that it's is even more important to an audience of relative beginners to make the point of explaining the 'why' of the topic, in a way that sometimes you can assume the experts are going to come in and understand why you're talking about the thing you're talking about. Actually, I just had a weird experience where I gave a talk on Ruby Testing that I'd previously given at a Ruby Conference in front of a polyglot audience that really was not any Ruby developers. It only kind of dawned on me as I was starting that the audiences were going to be very different and I had to adjust on the fly the definitions and also calibrate their expectations as to the kind of thing we're talking about, you know? It’s something that you definitely have to pay attention to. SARON: Yeah, I like the point about focusing on the 'why' because I'm primarily focusing on new developers but if you're talking to a very senior typical audience, you can probably skip a lot of the context and you just kind of get right to the code but I think the default should always be to explain what is the problem that we're trying to solve on a high level and then, present the solution. What I find so often is that talks tend to get to the solution first and they're really excited about their demo or their app or the tool that they built and the whole time I'm sitting there, I'm like, "But why do I need this? Where would I use this? Is it even for me?" If I'm a Ruby developer, "Is this for me, is it for you?" You can clarify a lot of that just by starting with, "I had a hard time doing blah-blah-blah, so I made blah-blah-blah." Okay, great. context set, I know where I am, I know why we're here, I know where this is going, so setting up the problem first is huge and something that I feel like a lot of the speakers miss. NOEL: I think there's an internal feeling when you're doing stuff like that that is just setting context or even just sort of doing wayfinding in the speech, in the talk that you feel like you're over explaining because you already know it and that's the internal voice that you really want to not to pay attention to. It's very, very rare that I see a technical talk or somebody over explain the context. SARON: I don't think I've seen one. NOEL: What kinds of things do you like to have on slides? SARON: I'm actually a very minimalist slide designer, so I don't really have a lot of stuff. I have, at most maybe three bullet points. Each bullet point is a couple of words. I rarely use images or graphics. I'm not really one of those people that does a lot of GIFs. I like people who do a lot of GIFs. I just don't do it. But my whole thing is I like to use slides as my backdrop. Generally, when I'm speaking, I want people to pay attention to me and to connect with me and I try to make the slides as quiet as possible, frankly. I use a slide to make sure you know where you are, to make sure you know the context of the talk and if there are certain words or phrases that I really want you to pay attention to, then I'll write that. I'll put that on the slide but in general, I use maybe one color. Besides black and white, I only use one color, one font and I tend to have actually, a lot of slides because I go through them very quickly but I put very, very few information in my slides. NOEL: I actually feel very similarly, right down to the 'I want people looking at me, not the slides' during the presentation, which I've always attributed to being a former stand-up ham theater kid and I think that sometimes, people make louder slides because they're uncomfortable a little bit in the idea that people are looking at them and they want to, if you have a funny GIF up there, that at least you have a funny GIF and people are going to laugh at it, which is fine. If that makes you comfortable, that's fine. I broke down and I put a small video in the most recent talk I gave and it did get the biggest reaction to anything I said during the talk and I did feel a little bit bad about that. SARON: The other thing is I don't think that speakers appreciate that the more information they put on the slide, the less they're paying attention. I don't think they realize that the audience is making a decision. They almost always have to pick between you and the slide and if you open up with a slide that has a paragraph, the first thing the audience is going to do is try to read it as fast as possible before you change the slide to make sure that they did their job, like you've basically given them homework. Every slide that you put up, the more stuff you put on there, the more homework you have given your audience. Especially when I'm working with newer developers or newer speakers, they just don't understand that. They just don't understand that you've given them an assignment. They cannot read the paragraph and listen to you at the same time and they're going to almost always pick reading the paragraph and then listen to you. That is the compromise. Once you know that, I think it becomes easier to say, "You can't do both? You can't read and listen? Okay. In that case, let me just put where you actually need to read and then you can listen to it." NOEL: I think that's a really good point and if I am remembering it correctly, one of the points in the Medium post on transitions was to time your slide transitions, so they're minimally invasive to the text of your talk. SARON: Yes, exactly. I think that bad transitions are a huge source of disconnections. There's all these moments where the audience disengages, walks away from, has to re-orient themselves and that's the thing I'm trying to prevent the most. Every time that you have a slide with a lot of words on it, for the two seconds, three seconds, maybe even a minute, depending on how much is on the slide, your audience has disconnected from you and now, they're just focused on reading. Now, they have to come back to connecting with you, which is hard because they don't know what you just said. They're not sure where you're going. You could be in the middle of an idea. You could be at the end of that idea and they just missed it. There's a disconnection there and that is the thing that we're trying to prevent. With slide transitions, it's the same idea. When you finish your idea, you click to the next slide and then the next slide is a whole new idea and you haven't really thought through how to bridge the gap. Now, the audience is re-orienting. It's like, "Ok. We just finished that. Wait. What's his next thing? What’s on the slide? What's she's saying?" And there's a disconnection there. If you work on the bridging the gap but then also clicking at exactly at the moment when the second slide matters, there's no opportunity for the audience to disconnect. NOEL: That's the kind of thing that takes a little bit of practice to get right. It's one of the things to work on and practice. One thing that I found that I put on my slides a lot more than I used to and a lot more than I actually expected to is emoji. SARON: Emojis are great. NOEL: Emoji in part because they can cue reactions and they don't have 'I'm reading homework' response from the audience. I've done a couple of times where different topics in the talk will be kind of keyed to different emoji and so, I can put the emoji on the slide and it helps orient you to the talk. It's also good in using the slide as punctuation. I say something and I go to a slide that has an emoji reaction shrug or a forehead slap or something like that. SARON: Yeah, absolutely. I think emojis are great and that's something that I find myself using more and I'm also recommending more because a lot of times, there are talks where the idea has shifted away from the slide that you're on but you're not quite ready to introduce the next idea. You don't really want to give people words to read but there's this gap where you want to, maybe set the mood a little bit, kind of establish a tone for what you're about to say and that's a really great place to have an emoji where it's kind of ambiguous but it's still recognizable. It's not this new thing where you're like, "What is that?" You see a smiley face and it's like, "Okay, whatever is about to happen is probably in the happy category." It's just enough info but it's not overloading. NOEL: Right and then, you're deliberately playing with the idea that the audience is shifting attention between you and the slides. I have long wanted to do a talk in a Stephen Colbert "Word" mode, where the slides were running commentary in what I was saying but it is so hard a form to pull off. I do not know, whether I'm good enough writer or presenter to do it and I have not ever tried it in public but it's something that I've always wanted to do because it seems like it could be a lot of fun if I did it right. SARON: Yeah, it's a good challenge. NOEL: Yeah, just as a writing challenge, it's deceptively hard to do something like that. SARON: Yeah, I believe it. NOEL: The couple of times I have seen people give talks where they try explicitly to break the mode of 'I am this speaker speaking in a conference room' and trying to do something that feels fictional or much more performative, I respect that tremendously. Because it seems very, very hard. SARON: Yeah. NOEL: Let's talk about beginnings and endings. We mentioned open with a joke, don't open with a joke. I have come to not opening with my name and I try to do like 30 seconds or a minute of something that is actually compelling and then I stop and I say, "Hi, I'm Noel." I don't know how you would like to do it. SARON: Yeah, I really like that. My talks are usually based on my own personal experience or something that I've either done or seen or that kind of thing. For me, it usually makes sense to start with something like, "Two years ago, I learned how to code," and then I kind of use a little timeline in my bio to introduce why this topic is important. But in general, I think one of my biggest speaker pet peeves is people who have a slide for their bio when it's not related to the talk at all. It’s kind of like this obligatory, "This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I do for fun. This what I don't do for fun. Now, let's start the talk," and that is one of my things I hate the most because I feel like the first few minutes of the talk is the most precious. It's the most precious time. It's a time when your audience is most excited. They don't know what's coming. They have no idea what you're going to do or you're going to say -- NOEL: -- You haven't disappointed them -- SARON: Exactly. You haven't disappointed them yet. They're excited. They're most open to receiving what you're going to say, so when you do this bio again, one that's not related to the talk and you just don't need it, it just feels like a waste of that precious opportunity. I generally recommend people to just get right into the talk. Just start it. Just literally start it. Start it from, "Two years ago, I blah-blah-blah," or, "The other day..." you just literally get right into it. Just the way that you would a novel or a movie and that's the thing. When people think about what a good talk looks like, I think they assume it needs to be similar to a lecture, like a college lecture, when really it should be similar to a book or a movie, you know? What movie have you seen when the first minute is spent with each character standing in front of the camera and going, "Hi, I'm Bill. I am a lawyer and in today's movie, I am going to murder someone." That's not how that works. That would be a terrible movie. You realize that Bill's a lawyer because you're in a law firm and you see him go to work. You picked up on -- NOEL: One thing to say, "I used to work on NASA Cassini space probes and then I'm going to you about quality control," and it's another thing to say, "I like scuba diving. Let's talk about JavaScript." SARON: Yes, that's perfect. A lot of times, it is relevant to talk about your background. A lot of times, as you said, "I work in NASA for 10 years and these are the kinds of projects I worked on and one of those projects is this and this is what I'm going to talk about." That makes a lot of sense. I've seen that a lot of and whenever I give this advice to speakers and say, "Consider not introducing your bio at the beginning if it's not necessary," the main piece of pushback I get is the concern that if you don't explain who you are, then people won't take you seriously. That's the one thing. Honestly, I get this more from women, frankly, where they say, "If I don't establish that I'm a hard core engineer right at the beginning, then no one's going to listen to what I have to say," which is kind of like sad. That's kind of a sad thing that people will think about but it makes sense if you're speaking to an audience and you want people take you seriously, I get it and to that, I usually say, "If the audience is in the room, they have already decided that your work is what they do. They've already voted for you. They've already hit the check box of, "This person knows they're doing and I'm excited to hear what they're going to say." They've already made that decision. If you're already on stage and you have a mike and you're about to start your talk, you don't need to reconvince anyone that you are worthy of speaking. That part has already been done. It's already happened. NOEL: Then if you put your contact info on the slide at the end, it stays up for a couple of seconds and for instance, if you're me and often promoting a book with a URL and you wanted to hang in there for a minute, then you put it at the end. SARON: Yeah, exactly. A lot of times, hopefully in the talk that you're giving, you should be displaying your expertise throughout the talk. If you are kind of relying on just that first slide to show that you know what you're talking about, then to me, that says there's opportunity throughout the talk to kind of wiggle that in to say something like, "We built this feature when I was working at NASA." I mean, you can bring in your bio in ways that are actually, contextually relevant at the talk and not have to do it at the beginning and kind of get rid of it. NOEL: Right. Maybe scuba diving becomes important later in the talk. SARON: There you go. NOEL: What do you like to do at the end? I find that often a struggle with the end of a talk that I wind up putting in kind of a mishmash of takeaways like, "Here's the kind of three things I sort of want you to remember from this talk that I just said," I often feel like I haven't quite hit the ending of it the way that I want. What do you like to do at the end? SARON: This is where a script becomes most handy for me because when I am writing the script for the talk, I'm usually fleshing out the meat of it. If it's, "Here's how I built this tool," then usually, the script is mostly how I build the tool and what's Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, that kind of thing. But I don't want to end on, "Let's summarize these steps," which I've done before and frankly, I don't think it was a very good ending. I want to end on something more meaningful, a little bit deeper and it's hard for me to figure out what that deeper thing is without seeing the rest of it. What I usually do for the ending is I'll write out the script and write out everything but the ending and then I'll review the script over and over again and I'll see ok, is there something deeper here? Is there a more interesting lesson? Is there a twist? Is there a theme? Is there something I can pull out that's not as straightforward as what maybe the talk might imply? Once I review the script a couple of times, usually I'll be able to pull out a theme or a lesson or something and then I build my ending. My ending usually has two parts. The first part is the summary you mentioned, so I'm sure, it took 10 people, three years or whatever the summary is and then I'll say something like, "But if you really think about it, this is a story about teamwork," and I'll try to make it a little bit deeper, a little more meaningful and I usually like to pause at the end of that and then, I'll click to the contact slide. Usually, I'll have my Twitter handle, some CodeNewbie info and I'll just leave that up during the applause and stuff, to say if anyone has questions and wants to reach out and here's that information. NOEL: Yeah, I think one of the side effects of my writing method, which is essentially to just keep muttering the talk to myself over and over again, one of the downsides of that is that you don't cover the end as much. I think that's something you can often see in a speaker that they've practiced the first half of the talk a lot and the second half of the talk not as much. SARON: And the talk just kind of ends. NOEL: I'm not saying here anything that I haven't done. If you go to look at the videos of my talks, there are a couple where you can clearly see that the last 10 minutes just are kind of there. It's a wrap up of the information but it's not anything more compelling. Hopefully, I've got you paying attention by then but I wish I had a better mechanism for doing that because I think on some level what I would say is like, well then start midway through the talk, when some of your practice runs start in the middle but I find that very, very hard to do. SARON: Yeah. It's much easier to practice the first half of the talk than the second half and you're right. I do the same thing too. I'll write the script and I'll just mutter it to myself over and over and over and over again and it's between reading the script over and over and muttering to myself over and over, that's usually when I'll say, "There's something more interesting, deeper, different, more high level here that can serve a good ending." That might be also the time to ask people. If you're kind of stuck on how do I end this, what is that deeper message, that might be a great opportunity to mutter it with someone else and see if they -- NOEL: I will say that, I think practicing in front of people is great. I have no problem muttering my talk to myself. I have no problem delivering talks in front of dozens or hundreds of people. Delivering a talk in front of one or two people, I find excruciating. SARON: Oh, it's the worst. It's absolutely the worst. I have so much respect for people because I know that that is a very, very good strategy. I know it's a good strategy to practice it. Sometimes it's like a brown bag lunch at work with a couple of people. Sometimes, it's your partner or the person you pair with. Sometimes, you will go to a local meetup, practice it in front of a slightly bigger crowd, maybe with 10, 20 people but I'm really comfortable alone and I'm really comfortable with bigger crowds. Anywhere in the middle, not so much. NOEL: Ten or 15, it kind of depends on the group but there's an area where the energy that you bring to a big room talk just feels silly in front of one person. It's like, "How's everybody doing today?" I'm fine, Noel. SARON: "People in the back, raise your hand." It's just one in the room. NOEL: I had a couple, like a specific piece of advice to people. Like do you do the thing where you look for the person who's nodding along? SARON: My husband travels with me to most of the conferences I speak to, so he knows to sit at the very, very front. I'll usually call him out during and I tell him like, "Your job is to smile the whole time and if I freak out or get nervous or anything, I'm looking right at you." That's my secret weapon, for sure, but when I gave that talk at RailsConf, the first talk I ever gave, I had a nodder. Her name was Vera, I can't think of her last name but she's actually one of the keynotes and she came to my talk and I remember so vividly, the thing also is that if you haven't spoken before, it might throw you off is when you're on stage, especially in a really big room, the lights are blinding. NOEL: You can't see more than -- SARON: You can't see the audience and it's so weird. I'm used to it now but, oh my God, it used to really flip me out. But she sat in one of the few seats, where you could actually see her and I remember the light shining across her face and she just looked so happy to see me and she was nodding and beaming and I was so nervous. Oh, my God, I was terrified and I found her and I said, "Okay, Vera, this is for you and I just focus the rest of my talk and my energy on her and it's so helpful. NOEL: I feel like that is helpful not only because it makes you feel good to know that one person is nodding along but also, I feel like delivering it to a specific person helps with that connection that it sort of grounds it in a way that if you just kind of delivering it to the back of the room, it doesn't feel like you're actually talking to somebody. It helps to feel like you're talking to somebody. SARON: Yeah, if you can't find that nodder, it's helpful to, at least, know who's going to be in the room. Maybe, it's a friend. Maybe, it's a co-worker. Just imagining that person and I've done that a bunch of times. If it's someone that I really like and I really respect, I'm like, "I'm doing this to impress so and so," I kind of just have that in the back of my mind and then I feel more anchored. It's becomes easier to say, "I'm doing it for this one person. The rest of you just happened to be here," but finding that one nodder or that person -- NOEL: And it's funny that we both say that we like reaching for the one person in the room of 100 but then, we hate performing for just the one person. SARON: Oh, yeah. Also, the eye contact thing is weird too with just one person, so I'm like, "Do I just look you in the eye? Is this really just an over the top conversation?" I just don't know what to do with myself. NOEL: How do you feel about your moving physicality during a talk? Do you like to stand behind the podium? Do you like to be out and moving? SARON: That's a good question. I'm always afraid of tripping. Especially if I... like I got some new shoes since last year. These lime green sneakers that are now my official conference sneakers and the first time I wore them, they were a little bit thicker than I was expecting because it's the first time I ever wore them out and I just said, "Just don't trip. Just don't trip. Just don't trip," like that was my biggest worry. It really depends on, if I have a clicker and if I have a confidence monitor. If I have a confidence monitor, which is basically a screen at the bottom of the stage that shows the slide I'm on and the next slide -- NOEL: I can tell you, you done this a million times because you knew to define confidence monitor before I even -- SARON: Yeah. If I have a confidence monitor, I do prefer being able to walk around. I gesture a lot when I talk and it's much more comfortable to do that and I am a natural pacer. I like it as long as I have my clicker and my confidence monitor. If I don't have either one of those, I am sticking to the podium and I will not move. I feel like part of emotionally connecting with people is people being able to actually see you. When you're behind a monitor, especially depending on how tall you are and how high the podium is, a lot of times they can't really see you. You're kind of off in the corner. You're probably not that well-lit, so it is just harder to make an emotional connection. NOEL: Yeah. I feel super blocked off when I'm behind a podium and I do also tend to pace to the consternation, I think of the camera people, if they're recording the talk. I also don't like being behind... When I was in high school and I was doing the stand-up performances in high school and part for drama class, we were practicing for it and I had a couple of ticks of movement where I would kind of sway and one of the things that they did to break me of it was they made me watch a video of myself in fast forward. SARON: Oh, interesting. That must have been traumatizing. Was that traumatizing? NOEL: Well, it's been 30 years and I can still remember it very clearly, so perhaps, yes. You do have to be careful. If you're going to get out and move around, you do need to be careful because if you have some kind of quirk like that, people are going to pick up on it and I definitely do and people definitely do, so I say that again, as something that is an issue that I have but yeah. I just don't like being behind a podium. I feel like I'm just a head. SARON: Although there are times like when I do a new talk, being behind a podium definitely feels safer. It's like if I mess up or if I look confused, people are less likely to see it. I kind of feel a little protected, a little shielded, especially if I'm giving a talk that I'm already comfortable with, I like being able to just use my whole body and use the whole stage and do that. What's interesting when you said that you saw video yourself recorded, I hate watching videos of myself, especially when I speak, I hate it so much but I watched only because it was really short. I watched like a three-minute short reel clip thing of a talk I did recently and what was so interesting is I did not sound the way that I sounded in my head. Meaning that, when I remembered giving the talk, I thought I was using my voice way more. In fact I remember thinking, I'm overdoing it. Let me scale it back, in terms of my inflections, in my pauses, and is my voice going up and that kind of thing. When I watched the talk, it wasn't as exaggerated as I thought that it was. In fact, I said to myself, "You need to do it more. You need to use your voice even more," and so one thing I highly encourage people to do is if no matter how painful it is, if you have a recorded version of your talk, actually go back and watch it because people say this all the timed, they always say like, "I thought I talk really fast." And I'm like, "No, you talked the perfect pace," or they'll say, "I thought I talked really slowly," and I'm like, "No, you actually talked too fast." You know, it really hard to see how it comes off when you're giving it and it's much easier to notice those little things that can make a huge difference when you're playing it back. NOEL: Yeah, I completely agree. I try to watch all my talks, at least once, specifically for stuff that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. As far as talking speed goes, I usually tell most people that they could stand to slow down, especially because your normal tendency is to speed up when you're nervous. If you think about what you're doing enough to slow your talking speed down, first of all, you come off as less nervous, which is usually a good thing. I remember seeing Ira Glass gave the advice that he said that when he was having trouble like reading a script, that it just wasn't catching for him, that one of his own tips is to really deliberately try to slow his voice down in order to sound... I don't know. I don't remember the exact... I mean, I'll try to find it but the act of being aware of your talking speed helped other aspects of the presentation. SARON: I think it's hard for people to talk slower but I think it's easier for people to pause. It's easier to just remember like, "After the sentence, I'm going to stop," and you can even do that in your speaking notes. You can put the word 'pause,' so if you have trouble -- NOEL: And just don't read it out loud. SARON: Just don't read it out loud. Oh, man. That would be funny. But if you are having a hard time figuring out how to slow down or you think you're slowing down but you're not slowing down, it might be easier to just focus on pausing, just taking a beat. Because even if you talk a little bit fast, if you give your audience a time to digest what you just said, usually that's what they need. That's the purpose of slowing down anyways. That might be a strategy that might work. NOEL: We are coming up on time, so if you have one other thing that we haven't talked about that you might want to give a piece of advice. SARON: I think that one of the biggest things that I've seen with speakers is I don't think that speakers understand how important they are to the talk, whether it's coming up with the idea or figuring out how to structure it or figuring out what points to make, I see people try to be really technical and really smart and they kind of forget that their opinion, their feelings, their version of the story is honestly, the most important and the most interesting part of the talk. I think that a lot of talks end up feeling more generic than they need to be and so, my one tip and advice is figure out how can you tell the story through your experience or your perspective? How can you make yourself the hero of your own talk and I guarantee you, that will make a much more interesting talk than it would otherwise. NOEL: How can you give the talk that nobody else can give? SARON: Uhm-mm, yup and it's as simple as just starting with you and your experience and your context and just going from there. NOEL: Saron, if people want to reach you in other places to continue this conversation or other conversations that you have online, where can they find you? SARON: Definitely Twitter. I'm pretty active on Twitter at @SaronYitbarek. Also, follow all stuff CodeNewbie, so on Twitter we're actually @CodeNewbies, with an 's.' NOEL: Great. I'm really glad we were able to put this together. Thank you for being on the show. SARON: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. NOEL: Tech Done Right is a production of Table XI and is hosted by me, Noel Rappin. I'm at @NoelRap on Twitter and Table XI is at @TableXI. The podcast is edited by Mandy Moore. You can reach her on Twitter at @TheRubyRep. Tech Done Right can be found at TechDoneRight.io or downloaded wherever you get your podcasts. You can send us feedback or ideas on Twitter at @Tech_Done_Right. Table XI is a UX design and software development company in Chicago, with a 15-year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to story brands. Find us at TableXI.com where you can learn more about working with us or working for us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode of Tech Done Right.