Forked from https://gist.github.com/jdjuan/9201987241225d4eabd0c955df217280
We wish all our talks to be "fire" 🔥. We're confident that you know what you're talking about and have spent lots of time researching. We don't want anything to distract from you shining on the day. Here are our guidelines to help you get there! Read them carefully:
First, we want everyone to be able to enjoy your talk fully:
- ⚓️ Strive to be as clear as possible, you'll be speaking to an audience that may not be attuned to your accent so speak slowly.
- 📢 In case of live coding, narrate each piece of code or command you type, this will help everyone follow smoothly
- 🔉 If you show pictures do your best to describe them completely as you explain them. Especially if people with vision impairment join us (I'll confirm later)
- 👌 [Optional] Add transparent descriptions to your pictures. It will be invisible to the audience so it won't interfere with the picture, but at the same time visually impaired people will be able to read it using screen readers later when you share your slides
- ⭐️ Introduce yourself, who you are and what you do. Let people relate to you
- 🌍 Show the audience how long you have travelled. Using a picture like this one really helps.
- 🤵 The golden circle is often a great way to explain a topic, use it at your convenience:
- Why: Why is your talk relevant to the audience. What problems it solves. Why do they need it.
- How: How does the technology solves that problem
- What: What is the solution
- 😇 In general keep your content neutral, non-violent, non-political and non-sexual
- ❌ Be careful about cliche references, by all means learn some Jamaican words, but your presentation time isn't the time to showcase the Jamaican badwords you've learnt. Also, not all Jamaicans have dreadlocks, smoke weed and listen to only reggae music.
- 🌍 All talks and workshops should be presented in English
- 🤙 Avoid asking questions as soon as you hit the stage, people can be shy 😳 (at the beginning). Build confidence first, talk for a while, get them to know you.
- 🤓 Don't challenge the audience to see whether they know a concept or not, instead, encourage participation through simple polling with easy questions, for example: "Raise up your hand those who have used this technology..." 🙋
- 🤔 Keep your content interesting and accessible for a wider audience. Complex scenarios that only apply to certain rare cases can/should be discussed offline
- 😴 Keep your audience engaged, make sure most of them are following you, if they look dead-eye/sleepy, chances are that they got bored/lost. Take a deep breath and try to gain their interest again.
- ☝ We will be using a constrained approach to questions and answers (QA), we call it lightning QA. During the talk, attendees will submit questions via a "digital collection system", the questions are then collated and moderated by a host and presented to the speaker. The speaker will then be required to answer the questions in 5 minutes or less.
- 📊 People love visual aids, images, diagrams, memes, gifs (especially gifs). They can help people grab concepts much faster than long complex paragraphs.
- 👀 Be generous with your space. Use big font sizes and fullscreen pictures. Make sure everyone can clearly see your content.
- 📝 Strive to use text for titles, quotes or lists only. Long paragraphs are generally a distraction.
- 🌈 Using a big font size can be helpful but using the right colors is key. Probably you don't even know your color palette, that's ok, just make sure you use high contrast colours to differentiate your content.
- ⚓️ Your hyperlinks should not be visible in the screen unless they are small enough for people to remember them. Instead, attach hyperlinks to your texts or images. When people get access to your slides they will be able to click around.
- 💾 You need to show a few lines of code? Cool, just don't use more than 20 lines of code. And if you do show code, make sure you are taking advantage of the whole screen, the bigger the font size of your code the more readable it is. (The contrast here is key as well).
- We highly recommend you to use: https://carbon.now.sh
So you will dive through the code? That's bold! 😎 Here are a few things to have into account:
- 💡 Switch your editor to a high-contrast theme, light themes are preferable over dark themes in stage
- 👀 Increase the font size of the editor
- 💻 Collapse any tabs or panes. Your code need protagonism (Use zen mode in VSCode if you like)
- 💬 Don't make assumptions about your audience. Assuming they know a concept already can be misleading. Relate to your audience, get to know them.
- 👏 Never leave the scenario until applause has finished. In fact, stare at the crowd directly as they do it
- 🙌 Change your voice tonality often to stress key points.