Because we're meeting in different places, it's hard sometimes to satisfy the rider of all the speakers. When bands are making performance, they have a list of things concert organizers should have in order for concert to be successfull and on a good level.
Don't get surprised that it's easier to hook up MacBook with MDP than your Lenovo laptop. It just is.
Neither one of mentioned points is criticizing or trying to fix an ability to speak in public. Instead, all the points are purely technical. No matter how well you can speak, slides that people can't see, inability to use your laptop, or an outage during live-coding session may ruin your talk.
After seeing common patterns, we've decided to make that one:
Checklist for speakers
- if you any hardware requirements (your laptop doesn't have battery, or you need wired / wireless network), let organizers know about them
- if your computer is not MacBook with MDP (Mini Display Port), let organizer know about it (VGA, DVI, HDMI or anythign else may be difficult to hook up)
- if you have slides, make sure that your font has a color that's contrasting with your background. In our (humble) opinion, best combination is dark font and light background. You can use dark background and light font, but it's discouraged to write majority of your slides like that.
- if you do some live-coding, make sure:
- you know how to make the font larger in shell or text editor
- you know how to change contrast (invert colors, available in "accessibility" in all operating systems)
- your code works out of the box, you have only to write it. if you copy-paste things, make sure you know how to copy them fast (usually done with keyboard), it's very painful to watch person selecting things on a trackpad
- when you connect your computer to projector, there's no browser tab open with your private correspondence... actually, anything that's not related to the talk is discouraged.
- always prefer PDF format to something that runs only in browser (even if you lose fancy 3d animation)
- always have a back-up of your presentation in cloud or on flash drive
- ask audience about the language you should present in (in case of likelihood of multi-lingual audiences)