Tag: speaking

My slide deck tool ( rst2pdf ) produces PDFs, and I use pdfpc to present the PDF slides. It shows the current and next slides, my notes, a timer, and it probably does other things too that I don't use! I've used it for years but it was really designed for "in real world" presenting with one or two screens. Recently I discovered it also supports some great options for remote presentations, but I had to look up how to do that so here are my notes (mostly in case I need to look it up 1 minute before I go on stage again!!).

For most of my career I've been a software developer, but now I'm mostly a communicator. As a manager, I give the right level of detail to many different audiences, and I deliver that in words they can understand. As a Developer Advocate, I explain complex technical concepts in useful, memorable, and occasionally entertaining ways. However the best software developers are lazy and I'm still always looking for ways to get things done with less effort on my part! For writing, the best process I know feels like unnecessary overhead, but it's always worth it in the end so today I'm sharing my secrets: create an outline before you start.

How do I ensure that I keep my attendees' attention when I'm presenting virtually?

I don't.

I'm a Developer Advocate (you might also hear job titles like Developer Relations, Developer Evangelist) and I'm constantly asked what that means. What do I do? The answer is different for every one of these jobs but there are some common themes. After 18 months of practice at answering this question, I think I'm ready to give it a go.

I'm not a huge fan of the live demo in conference talks - it's really hard to do well so I see a very large number of bad ones. Also, it's super hard work to include them in my own talks in a meaningful way because they are so difficult to pull off. I could write a very long list of reasons not to ever live demo (nobody wants to watch you type, now you are talking to your laptop, conference wifi rarely works, you could tell me three much more useful things in the time you've spent doing this ...) but in truth as developers we love the "new shiny" and it can be super helpful to get an actual walkthrough of how to do a particular thing. So if you absolutely must live demo, here's my own general plan and tactics:

UPDATE: I presented at one event using reveal.js and have since rebuilt all my presentations in my original toolchain (rst2pdf). One presentation completely resized itself (I used rem units but that didn't help) so code samples were unreadable/missing. Also each presentation has all the dependencies INSIDE the presentation folder, so any backing up or syncing to dropbox becomes impossible (I ended up tethered to my phone with 250k files to sync ...). I like backups AND I like my Dropbox to work. So, no more reveal.js, it's just not fit for (my) purpose.

I create my slide decks from ReStructuredText, which is a text markup format. Working this way makes it easy to add into source control, fast to work with, and also accessible since I don't use a mouse or other pointing device so traditional slide deck creation programs are kind of difficult. Text-based wins every time for me. While working on a new slide template, I ran into some difficulties and had to figure out how to inspect what was going on. I seem to struggle with this every time so I am writing my troubleshooting guide here for when I need it next.

This post is an adaptation from an email I sent to a friend who is doing their first few conference talks. I was asked to share more widely so here it is

The microphone is your friend, honestly :) Even if you think you can be heard, there are some definite benefits to using a mic if it's available:

• you actually can be heard

• even people with less-than-excellent hearing can hear you

• the video recording can hear you as well

• you now have the option to employ some vocal variety: exclaiming, pausing, stage whisper ... it all adds interest and colour to what you are saying

There are a few different types of mic and each one has its own quirks!

I've been a conference speaker for a lot of years now, which doesn't make me an expert but it does mean that people ask me for advice pretty regularly! With the Call for Papers open for PHP North West at the moment (awesome conference, first weekend in October, CfP at …

Every document I create these days is written in rst (ReStructuredText) and transformed into something useful using rst2pdf. This includes worksheets, reports, handouts and slide decks. Along the way I've learned a few tricks, and I try to write them down so I can look up how to do something. If this helps you too, then great :)

As a conference speaker, I've read the books on how to be a good conference speaker, and coached quite a few people to raise their skills in this area too. However recently I've been meeting more virtual audiences, both delivering virtual training and doing virtual events such as DayCamp4Developers, and I thought I'd share my take on what works well in a setting where people can see your slides, and hear your voice ... and nothing more.

If you're interested in becoming a Zend Certified Engineer and are local enough to make it to the next PHP North West User Group meeting on Tuesday, 5th March in Manchester (UK), then come along! I'll be giving a talk and welcoming questions and discussion around becoming ZCE, why you …

I don't mean learning to talk, I mean learning to address an audience, coherently and without dying of fright (actually I think I have clinically proven that it isn't possible to actually stop living as a result of fright). There are a couple of things that I'm involved with that may help you, if you're looking to improve your successes in this area.

In July, I'm speaking at OSCON. Actually I have a few interesting speaking engagements coming up, and I haven't got around to adding upcoming dates to my blog yet but I'll be at phpDay in Verona next week with a talk on API Design and DPC in Amsterdam in June with a tutorial on Web Services and a talk on what OAuth is actually for.

OSCON is special because I have always wanted to go and never imagined it would actually happen. Every year I read the list of sessions from the year before, and decide that I absolutely must submit to the call for papers, regardless of how small I think my chances of being accepted are! I've submitted a couple of times in the past, excluding last year because I was newly freelance (OSCON does not cover any speaker expenses at all, they just give you a conference pass. That's kind of hard going for those of us self-funding halfway across the world, and last year, I just couldn't do it. This year I still can't really justify it but I'm going anyway!)

On Monday 19th March I'll be speaking at PHP Leeds. The topic is all things git and github; as an open source project lead I see lots of very capable programmers taking their first steps with github. In this session we'll talk about how you can use these tools to …

I am delighted to announce that I'm speaking at the upcoming DayCamp for Developers in early March. The idea behind the daycamps is to bring important but non-technical skills to developers everywhere - so the sessions are virtual and so are the speakers! This time around the topic is Business, so …

At the weekend (yes, this took all week to write), I was on my first ever visit to Poland, in order to speak at PHPCon Poland. They contacted me early in the year to ask if I would consider going along to give my talk Teach a Man to Fish.

A few weeks ago, while attending the delightful OggCamp, I was approached by someone asking me to speak at PyConUK. Well ...

I'm updating my web services tutorial session at the moment for the PHPNW Tutorial Day. I switch the order of the topics around every time, in an effort to make it more digestible, and I thought I'd share.

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be speaking at OggCamp this year. This is an event that I've attended both previous years, and one that I always seem to get a lot out of. It's an open source, anything goes, unconference kind of event. Except that this year there is …

I am a female speaker, and a software developer, which puts me in a fairly small minority at the events I usually attend (I'm a PHP consultant based in the UK, to give you an idea of what kind of events those are). Recently I've been asked my opinion more than once on the issue of women speakers being in a minority at technical events, and I've also been the "token" women speaker at a technical event.

The worst thing you can do is find some random, underqualified person who represents the demographic you want to include, and put them on the stage. Although gender is often the issue we hear most about, the same applies to anyone who isn't a young, white male; it's just that gender is easier to see and talk about than either age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or anything else, and also since I'm a young, white female, it's the only aspect I can comment on.Women are in such a minority that they are, almost by definition, representative (see http://xkcd.com/385). Anyone who sees your randomly-selected woman speak will simply go away thinking that women aren't really good at speaking.

We might still be in the thick of the summer conference season, but there's an event coming up this autumn which has me very excited: PHP North West 2011.

This is a regional PHP conference based in Manchester, UK, and I've been involved with it since it began (I'm surprised to find this is our fourth edition, it still feels like a shiny new adventure!). This year the dates are 8th and 9th of October and with an added tutorial day on the Friday, it is bigger (and of course better) than ever. In case you missed the announcements, here are the main things you need to know:

I received "Confessions of a Public Speaker" as a gift this winter (you know who you are, thankyou!), and it's been on my bookshelf waiting for me to have a reason to sit still long enough to read it. A series of long flights presented exactly that opportunity so I brought the book along to read, which was perfect as I was travelling to give a tutorial at the PHP Community Conference in Nashville.

My first observation was that although I thought this would be a pretty serious book, I was laughing! Not just smiling, but actually giggling on a fairly small plane of people doing the short hop over to Amsterdam. I saw a few people trying to read the cover to figure out what this great comedic tome would be :)

If you are attending my Web Services tutorial at PHP Community Conference (if not, probably nothing for you to see here) later this week then you might like to download the sample code. I'll be referring to this and inviting you to "play along" as I go creating services during …

Recently I've switched how I prepare and deliver presentations, using LaTeX to mark up the content and producing PDF slides from that. Which is great but I miss having some of the during-presentation functionality of LibreOffice such as a timer and being able to see what's on the next slide …

Since starting to create (a large number of) presentations using LaTeX, I've been impressed at how easy this is to pick up and also how quick it is to work with marked up content rather than dragging objects around in Impress or equivalent. With that in mind, I thought I'd outline the very basics of the markup (with probably more snippets to follow as I discover them).

Conference season approaches and in May I'm on a trip to take in two of the most high-profile events in the PHP conference calendar: DPC in Amsterdam (19-21 May) and php|tek in Chicago (24-27 May). The two events have historically been a few weeks apart and I've always complained at having all the fun for the year in such a short space of time - but this year the events are literally back-to-back, there are a small number of speakers attending both and we're pretty much all on the same flight from Amsterdam to Chicago!

This spring/summer, I'm giving quite a few talks at conferences, and I have a number of my own clients that I'm writing new training materials for. That's a lot of content in total and so, inspired by Dave's article about LaTeX and powerdot (and with some help from Dave himself!), I've started to write my own presentations this way too.

Getting started was a struggle, I've never really used anything like it before and if there's one thing LaTeX doesn't do well, it's error messages! The blog post I linked above has a sample presentation in it and I used that as my starting point. The source code goes in a file with a ".tex" suffix, e.g. presentation.tex. I then installed the texlive-latex-extra, latexmk, vim-latexsuite, latex-fonts-recommended and texlive-fonts-extra packages from aptitude, and generated a PDF by running:

Next month, I'll be heading out to Nashville for the PHP Community Conference. This is wildly exciting for a few reasons; this is the first in what I hope will be many episodes of this event, and I'm speaking in a lineup that blows every other conference schedule I've seen …

This post is probably only relevant if you're interested in PHP and UK-based. In the next few weeks I'll be at some user groups that I don't manage to visit often. On Thursday, 3rd March, I'll be at PHP East Midlands to talk about Design Patterns. On Tuesday, 12th April …

Last weekend I was at the PHPBenelux 2011 conference in Antwerp. As conferences go it was pretty awesome, completely surpassing my expectations in many ways! The schedule was published in advance but I somehow forgot how many friends I have in that part of the world and what a wonderful …

In June 2011 I'll be speaking at a rather awesome event called DIBI at the Sage in Gateshead (if you're a southerner, then Gateshead is near Newcastle, which is "up north"). DIBI stands for "Design It, Build It" and has two tracks, one focussing on development and one focussing on …

Have you got your tickets for PHPBenelux yet? If not then I hope you will do so because I would love to see you there!

I'll be delivering a keynote at the PHPBenelux Conference in Antwerp in January alongside my good friend Ivo Jansch. Between us we've got plenty of …

This weekend I'm presenting at DayCamp4Developers, a virtual event comprising a full day of workshops for developers of all disciplines to improve their soft skills and move forward in their career. I get to attend since I'm speaking, but even after I've given my slot I know I'll be online …

Three years ago, I had never spoken in public (I have video of that first attempt and all I can say is that I've come a long, long way!). Since then, I've done rather a lot of it. I've submitted countless conference talks, had the minority of those accepted, and prepared and delivered those that were. Not many talks have been given twice, but some have, and now some are getting rebranded since I am working for myself and can choose my own slide branding these days. All this adds up to a lot of content to keep track of!

Earlier in the year I gave a talk at PHP UK in London entitled "Best Practice for API Design". I really enjoyed giving this talk, since I work so much with APIs and enjoy sharing my ideas. The audio is now online so if you missed the talk, feel free …

I gave a talk at the weekend which talked in outline terms about Return on Investment or ROI. It was a keynote so I skated over the details, but I wanted to include a specific example to illustrate what I meant.

Imagine the scenario where, given 3 days to work …

Last weekend I gave a talk at PHPNW10 in Manchester, entitled "Teach a Man to Fish". This is a keynote about teams and how to use the resources around you to create a team where individuals and the whole team continues to learn and develop. The slides are not very …

In October I will be speaking at the PHP London user group on Thursday 7th at the Theodore Bullfrog pub in London. I'm giving a new talk called "The Source Control Landscape", looking at the products currently available in the source control arena, how the distributed systems have changed the …

I'm very excited by a new virtual event which is coming up, and at which I have been invited to speak. This is Day Camp 4 Developers, an event aimed at developers of all disciplines and focussing on the soft skills that sometimes we miss in our pursuit of technical excellence. I'll be giving my talk "Open Source Your Career", which looks at how being involved in open source outside of work can improve our professional development. The event is on November 6th, and you can buy tickets here.

There are a number of things that really appeal to me about this event:

This weekend I'm at froscon in Germany, giving two talks. One had no slides (but may have video, if I see it then I will post the link here) and the other was "Working with Web Services" which I gave this morning in the PHP room. My slides are here …

A couple of weeks ago I gave a lightning talk at the PHPNW user group entitled "Geeks Can Write" or "Can Geeks Write?" - basically shooting down the worst of the excuses for not writing that I've heard and asking everyone to give it a shot! If you are interested, then …

I'm slightly surprised but mostly wildly excited to announce that I'll be the keynote speaker at the PHP North West Conference in October. It is held in Manchester in the UK, which is about an hour from where I live in Leeds, so it is definitely my "home" conference, and …

In August I'll be attending FrOSCon in Germany for the first time, and speaking there. It's a mixed technology conference, with rooms set aside for separate scheduling for various projects and technologies. I'll be speaking in the PHP room, delivering "Working With Web Services", a talk which covers how to …

It's official, PHP North West 2010 is definitely happening ... and for that we'll need some people to pop along and give a talk! As in previous years, we'll first of all deal with selecting the papers for our main conference day, 9th October. Talks can be 60 minutes or 30 …

In this post, I am asking for your help and input, although it might seem like a post about nothing in particular to begin with. Please keep reading!

Last month, I gave a talk at TEK-X entitled "Open Source Your Career". Personally I think that a lot of the high …

I'm subscribed to a number of women-in-tech mailing lists because, well, I'm a woman in tech. Every few months or so a thread will come round about a technical conference with no female speakers. The issues around this are many, lengthy, and not something I want to write about here …

Its been quiet around here recently, partly because I have been really busy and partly because I was in Chicago last week for the wonderful TEK-X conference. It would be very cool to get to go skipping around the world to conferences, however people paying for my airfares do seem …

This is a podcast version of my rant-in-the-bar advice to anyone thinking about speaking, or wondering how to begin. Personally I think many more people could be sharing their expertise at events than actually do so, and I would really like anyone who wants to get involved to have a …

Last weekend I went to Liverpool (my first visit there!) to attend OggCamp for the second year in a row. This isn't a part of the software community I normally interact with, but I accidentally went to a LUGRadio event once a couple of years ago and have been hooked …

Next week I'm speaking at the PHPNW User Group in Manchester on Tuesday Evening, 4th May - full details of the event are on upcoming.org. The talk isn't directly about PHP though; I'll be giving my "Open Source Your Career" talk, discussing how contributing to the community can really help …

Next week I will be making the trip to my original home town of Birmingham to speak at the PHP West Midlands User Group, on 6th April. They are an active user group and although I haven't managed to organise myself to attend their meetings before, I do keep meeting …

I'm really late with this post, but I wanted to write about the PHP London Conference which was held in London last Friday. The event was in a great venue and had hoards of people - this was my fourth year in attendance!! They do, however, have the longest twitter tag …

Last night I travelled to the northeast of England to speak to a thriving technical community up there called Supermondays. They contacted me some time ago asking if I could get there to speak one Monday, and last night was the night! It was a very civilised gathering, with sandwiches …

Last weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Since Ibuildings is partly a dutch company I combined this with one of my regular trips to meet with the people there, visiting both our offices in the Netherlands and catching up with a bunch …

I'm delighted to announce that the people at SuperMondays in Newcastle have invited me to speak at their event on 22nd February. For this I'll be writing a new talk entitled "PHP and Web Services: Perfect Partners" - looking at how PHP is a good fit for web services and how …

If anyone is able to make it to the PHPNW User Group meet in Manchester next Tuesday 2nd February - I'm the speaker there! I'll be giving a talk entitled "Best Practices for Web Service Design", which covers lots of information about web services and how to write one that your …

I'm always pleased to be accepted as a speaker but I'm especially delighted to hear that I'm speaking at TEK·X in Chicago this May. They had a crazy number of submissions for the number of slots available, and I really wanted to go since I spoke there last year …

I'm pleased to announce that this year I'll be speaking at PHPUK in London in February. I've attended this conference for the last three years, and attend its related user group, PHP London whenever I can find a reason to be in London on the right day. My talk this …

I'm delighted to announce that I'm speaking at the inaugural PHP Benelux Conference, to be held on Saturday 30th January in Antwerp, Belgium. The talk will be "Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World"; I gave this talk PHPNW09 in October and it was well-received there, so hopefully I …

I've been updating my conference details recently, in order to submit my talks for php|tek in Chicago (the call for papers closes on Monday - get your submissions in!). One thing which I struggled with is my biography, I used to have a paragraph which sort of said "Lorna is …

I spent the last few days in sunny Spain at the PHP Barcelona conference as a speaker. Happily the most reasonably-priced flights gave me some time while I was there to get into the city, I was very keen to see it because I haven't been before. The trip was …

Next week I'm taking the plunge and attending a LUG (Linux User Group) meeting for the first time when I attend the Bradford LUG meeting on Wednesday as a speaker. I'll be giving my talk "Working With Web Services" which I'll give at PHP Barcelona a mere 36 hours later …

Last weekend was the second annual PHP North West Conference, held at Manchester Conference Centre and attended by 200 people. We kicked off our weekend on Friday night, with a pre-conference social in a pub near to the conference venue. There wasn't really enough space but it contained geeky things …

Thanks to a wonderful combination of slideshare actually working and conference wifi being rather excellent, the slides from my talk "Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World" are now online, you can find them at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/passing-the-joel-test-in-the-php-world.

If you were there, please leave feedback for …

I'm delighted to announce I'll be speaking at the PHP Barcelona Conference in October. This is a new speaking topic for me, although I've been working and blogging in this area for a while, with a talk entitled "Working with Web Services". Its a very technical session looking at different …

With increasing numbers of speaking engagements, I've decided that its time to add a dedicated page to this site just to list talks I've given and wil be giving, and link through to slides, blog posts, and perhaps some photos of me speaking (not sure about that last one). So …

I have experience of PHP conferences from all possible angles - as an attendee, as a speaker and as an organiser. At PHP North West this year I will be taking this to new heights and combining all three roles into a single one-day conference. I have a speaking slot at …

I've been giving a few talks in the last few months and I'm increasingly realising that although I love my thinkpad, its overkill for anything where I don't really need the hardware, or where I don't want to be carrying a full-size laptop all day. So I'm increasingly taking just …

I spoke at the FOWA Tour event in Leeds yesterday, as their local speaker (they set aside a slot for each place they go). It was a great event, good atmosphere and I really enjoyed the both crowd and content. I can't imagine what the logistics for something like this …

Last week I was at the php|tek 2009 conference in Chicago. This was a really exciting trip for me - only my second conference as a speaker and the first time I'd attended any of the MTA conferences. I was absolutely delighted to have three of my sessions accepted into …

The slides from my talk at php|tek are now online - Linux-Fu for PHP Developers. Thanks to everyone who attended and left feed back for me on joind.in. Feel free to leave a comment if you were there or if you have any questions about the slides!*

* Unless the …

I'm currently attending the php|tek conference in Chicago. Today is tutorial day, and I delivered a half-day session with Matthew Weier O'Phinney of Zend. Our session was entitled "Practical SVN for PHP Developers" and the slides are online. The session seems to have gone over pretty well - this is …

I'm surprised and delighted to announce that I will be one of the speakers at the rather excellent FOWA Tour even in Leeds on 28th May (two weeks today!). The day is like a roadshow version of the famous FOWA conferences, with a morning of (free!) cloud workshops and an …

This is a mini-primer on using xrandr to configure a second screen under Linux, but first I'll start with some background.

I've been a linux user for a few years now but when I started working for Ibuildings I started giving presentations, either as a speaker or when delivering training …

This year I'm excited to be heading to the php|tek conference in Chicago (May 19th to 22nd), and even more excited to be going there as a speaker. Over the course of the conference I will present or co-present three sessions; one tutorial and two talks.

The tutorial session …

Next week I'm passing through the Ibuildings office in Utrecht on business. During the 36 hours or so that I'll be there, the Dutch PHP User Group, phpGG have kindly extended an invitation to speak at a one-off user group meeting they are arranging. Well, I have a talk that …

I was delighted to discover recently that Open Office have released a working version of their long-anticipated Presenter View. Both Powerpoint (from Microsoft) and Keynote (on the Mac) have these views which allow someone giving a presentation to see the current slide, the next slide(s), any notes associated with …

On 18th February, I'll be making an appearance at Geekup Leeds, to give a talk entitled "Linux-Fu for PHP Developers". Basically this is a tour of some of my most-favourite command line tools available in Linux, and its a pre-cursor to the talk I'll give later this year at php …

The OSCON Call for Participation is open for another couple of days and I've finally got over my nerves and submitted some talks to them. I haven't been to this conference before, and couldn't afford to send myself - but I took a look at last year's schedule and knew I …

I'm delighted (and somewhat stunned) to announce that I'll be speaking at php|tek in Chicago this May - you might also like to see the full timetable. This is one of the big events of the year and I was so desperate to attend that I gave the organisers a …

I was recently interviewed by Cassandra Clark from Sun about PHPWomen - they've put the interview live now and you can find it at http://blogs.sun.com/SDNChannel/entry/introduction_to_phpwomen_org

Speaking at conferences is a great way to share ideas and meet people - but actually getting the opportunity to do is a little more tricky and usually involves proposing a talk. In the last year I've attended IPC in Germany and PHP London, spoken at DPC in Amsterdam, submitted talks …

Last night I gave a talk at the Leeds Girl Geek Dinners entitled "Professional Development for Girl Geeks" - and you can find the slides on slideshare if you're interested.

Most of what I said wasn't on the slides, but the gist of it was along the lines of:

• Use the …

My employers, Ibuildings, have been running a series of seminars where we invite a few people (and it is a few, they are generally small events), bring some of our developers along, and have some technical tutorials, demonstrations and general discussions, and some food. The previous events have all been …

The slides for my talk "PHP Deployment with Subversion" at the Dutch PHP Conference last weekend are now online, you can find them at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/php-deployment-with-svn/. If you have any questions or comments then either drop me a line or add a comment below.

Edit: I …

A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the excellent Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. I haven't done anything like this before and I did a lot of preparation - as you'll know if you read this blog regularly.

My talk was entitled "PHP Deployment with Subversion …

Well, its a misleading title because the day is only half over but the Dutch PHP Conference 2008 is well and truly underway! Today I've been in the Zend Framework tutorial given by Matthew Weir O'Phinney, which is a full-day session. Its been excellent - with some concepts, some examples, and …

Today I leave for Amsterdam, to visit the Dutch PHP Conference where I will be getting my first experience as a conference speaker. It would be fair to say that I'm very nervous - its a high profile event and the other speakers in the lineup are pretty amazing!

When I …

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at the PHP London group, giving a talk entitled "PHP Deployment with Subversion". This is the talk I will be giving next week at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, and giving the same talk last night was the last step in …

Last night I attended and spoke at the First Sheffield Geekup held at the Fat Cat in Sheffield. My talk was entitled "Deploying Web Projects with Subversion" and you can see the slides for that at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/deploying-web-projects-with-svn/.

Overall I think the event was well-organised, there …

I was very pleased to hear that Sheffield is getting its own Geekup event, and that it starts next week on 7th May and will run on the first Wednesday of every month. I was even more pleased to be asked to speak at it - I'll be giving a 20 …

I did mention recently that I had arranged to speak at the local GeekUp group. Well, the event itself was last night and although I did have speaking nerves I think it went OK.

I've uploaded the slides I used to Slideshare, so you can find them here. The talk …

This week I will be giving a 20:20 talk at the GeekUp event in Leeds, entitled "Enterprise Web Development". The 20:20 talk format allows talks with 20 slides, with 20 seconds allowed for each slide. Wish me luck :)

If you're local to Leeds, I'd love to see you …