PyCon Recap, and a Request · Monday, February 26, 2007
PyCon has come and gone, and I had a wonderful time. The talks were, in general, less useful to me this year, but I think I valued my experience more for several reasons. First off, I had more opportunities to meet people, which I believe is probably even more valuable than the talks themselves. Secondly, I had the opportunity to speak, along with two other colleagues.
The keynotes were, by and large, uninteresting to me, apart from the opening keynote about the OLPC project which I found absolutely fascinating. While I am skeptical that the project will end up impacting the world as greatly as others seem to think, I am upbeat about the prospect of children around the world having an opportunity to reap the benefits of technology and programming. I especially like the fact that clustered wireless networking is built into the OLPC laptops, which will allow users of the laptops to connect with one another and collaborate. And, of course, I love the “View Source” button: what a great idea!
Finally, speaking at PyCon was not only fun, but challenging in ways that I did not expect. As a result of my experience, I am hoping to do technical presentations more often, and I would really like to hone my public speaking skills. That brings me to my request: if you attended my talk, I would greatly appreciate any feedback that you could give me. This was my first time giving a technical presentation and I would love to know what I did well, and where I could improve. Comments and emails would both be appreciated!
Comment
- I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of suggestions. I thought you did a bang up job. You were clear and engaging as a speaker.
But I was already somewhat familiar with TurboGears and the WhatWhat project from the TurboGears book. This may have influenced my perception of clarity.
I do have a suggestion about these comments ;-) I should be told somewhere on the form that email address is required. And if I don’t enter the email address, when I’m redirected back to the form it should be repopulated with my entry.
— Lee 1108 days ago # - I didn’t see your presentation, so these suggestions may be redundant, but here’s what I learned while getting better at speaking, and what I see technical people needing to learn:
1) Remember that you need to be entertaining. This means “playing to the back” (speaking loudly enough for the last row to stay engaged), moving around a bit, using big hand gestures, putting in some interesting visuals, jokes, etc.
2) Don’t get lost in the details. Your audience probably needs some big-picture stuff, even if you are supposed to be talking about details.
3) Your listeners are coming for answers. Try not to do the engineer thing and present them with lots of choices and design decisions.
— Ned Batchelder 1105 days ago # - And I never did run into you (at least not knowingly). Were you off drinking with the TG guys? ;)
— James Bennett 1105 days ago # - James – nope, and you were one of the people on my “make sure not to forget to say hello” list. Bah! Maybe next year :)
— Jonathan LaCour 1105 days ago #
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