What you as a speaker at the Orchard Harvest conference need to give an awesome talk.
- If you're new to giving talks, check out the great guides below. And be sure to practice your talk sufficiently, especially that it fits into the allocated time.
- Watch this video by Chris Anderson (the curator of TED) about his insights and tips on giving a great public speech or presentation.
- 11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation
- Tips for Preparing for a Technical Presentation
- The 2020 Guide to Creating Quality Technical Screencasts, Presentations, and Remote Meetings
- Prefer live demos over slides.
- Sessions will be recorded and published, but attendees may want to get in touch with you or check out links you've shown earlier. So, please prepare to share such info in the chat immediately before or after your talk. Include e.g. your contact details e-mail address, social and GitHub profiles, links for further reading.
- Make sure that you can use a stable and fast internet connection.
- If possible, please prepare to turn on your webcam too.
- Install and set up Microsoft Teams. After you register as an attendee, you'll get a calendar invitation with a link to the event's room; if you open that, you'll see the installation options too.
- Set your screen resolution at most to full HD (1920×1080px). The recording will happen in this resolution too.
- While people won't be sitting at a distance from you, they might follow the event (or watch the recording) from a smaller or lower resolution screen (or just on part of their screen). So, keep the text larger. During demos, this also helps attendees focus on what's currently relevant.
- The goal of each talk is to share knowledge with the community. So, please keep this in mind. It's fine to introduce what you do and your company (actually it's a good way to add some depth to your talk) but please don't make it into a commercial.
We have prepared a presentation template for you, see the repository root. You can use this if you don't know how to start, or if you'd like to match the event's design. However, if you're already using your own template, you don't need copy everything over if you don't want to.
What to check just before you go on stage?
- Shut down Slack, OneDrive, etc. that can interfere in the background and that people can use to call you or write messages to you (we don't want private conversations to appear in a notification!)
- Disable night light/Flux, or anything that distorts the color of your screen.
- Mute your phone. You can use it to display a countdown for your allotted time.
- Open every software you'll use, build solutions, start Orchard Core instances, so you don't take time waiting for these to load.
- Clean up your desktop and taskbar to get rid of everything not necessary for the session. Even better you can use virtual desktops (a built-in feature with Windows 10 and later) for just presenting and if you make the taskbar hidden.
- If you have to do a lot of demos in a browser, then use Chrome's Guest mode. That way, your personal browser history and form auto-fill values won't be visible.
- When browsing around in Windows Explorer, not to show other folders and the “Quick access” menu that might contain private info, hide the Navigation Pane.
- If you show code, increase the font size of the code window to >130%.