I just gave my third talk of the year, so this marks the half way point as I will do 6 events, total. This included my first opening keynote, and the largest audience I have spoken in front of yet (>700). Now I have a break until September. It seems like a good time to […]
I don’t like panels. I don’t like them as an audience member, because I find they are usually unfocused and boring – there always seems to be one guy who talks too much and says too little. I don’t like them as a moderator, because it’s a lot of work. And I don’t like them […]
I’ve been having someone else create my slide decks for a while now. Because I hate creating slide decks. Because I’m not good at it. Because I don’t want to get good at it – better to practise delegation instead. Because it forces me to think about message I want my slides to give, rather than […]
Preparing talk can be really overwhelming. As a rule, I expect to spend an hour preparing for every minute I spend speaking. When a slot gets over 30 minutes… that starts to look like very nearly a full working week. This is an intimidating amount of time to find and clearly being organised and starting […]
I put together this talk as part of Design+Exclusion. It’s about the ways in which women get told to be quiet, and some of the thought behind our approach to inclusivity with Technically Speaking. Watch it here. This was a challenging talk to put together because part of it involved looking up some of the […]
We’ve been relatively public with Technically Speaking about our commitment to inclusivity. We only include conferences with a Code of Conduct, and we heavily weight whether travel costs are covered in our consideration. There is something we haven’t talked about (although I touched on it a little in this podcast). A Code of Conduct is […]
In my friend Lara’s book, she writes about her first – and worst – public speaking experience. She was invited to keynote but… they invited the wrong person, and she realized that as they gave an unrecognizable introduction – just before she walked on stage. I don’t have a story quite that bad, but I […]
I’m working on a talk about running effective mobile engineering teams – I’d love to know what questions you have about this, what you worry about when it comes to mobile teams in your organization, and what you’ve found most helpful to communicate about them. Comments or email or DMs on Twitter welcome! Title: YOLO […]
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I got to read an early draft of Demystifying Public Speaking (Amazon) and it was exciting to revisit it and read the published version. It’s the perfect, to the point, read for those who are wondering how to get started public speaking, or facing their first talk unsure of how to prepare. The chapter on feedback is […]