Talks ​

I love watching interesting talks on various subjects. I also love making talks and presenting in front of people.

I once made TEDx talk on mindfulness. I only have a transcript of it here. I hope to give more talks of my own soon.

I mark talks that I found interesting here. For tech talks/screencasts I make, I like the format of showing it as pre-made tabs to go through (example talk).

Favorite ​

• Growing a Language - Guy Steele (1998) - Transcript. (HN)
• Malte Ubl - Designing very large JavaScript applications (2018) - Transcript.
• John Sundell - Sharing (2018)
• Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (2012)
• Drupal and the secret of my success | Steve Francia
• Apple WWDC 1997 Closing Keynote - Steve Jobs Fireside Chat
• Simplicity Matters - Rich Hickey (2012)
• MVC is Not Your Problem - Joachim Kurz (2018)
• 10 Things I Regret About Node.js - Ryan Dahl (2018)
• Make Data Structures" by Richard Feldman (2018)

Interesting ​

• How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day - John Allspaw
• A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS - Aditya Siram (2017)

Notes ​

• Giving a talk, it is often best to start with a Why?
• I love the virtual conf format of "play pre-recorded video while speaker engages with the audience in chat". As a speaker, I enjoy interacting with the audience this way throughout the entire talk, and being able to answer questions without losing any speaking time.
• Give a roadmap whenever you start speaking. Signpost every argument. Explicitly state the implications of your arguments. Good debaters talk about facts, great ones talk about framing.
• My number one tip for giving conference talks: you're telling a story. Don't just read bullet points from slides!
• The most effective presentation skill is backchanneling, which is where you shop your idea to each stakeholder well ahead of time and get verbal buy-in. Presenting then becomes a cake walk because it'll essentially be a formality.
• I've found that it's very useful to speech-to-text a stream of consciousness style overview of what I want to talk about, then ask chatGPT to summarize it. Then, I ask it to re-expand to three or four paragraphs. Like an autoencoder.

Links ​

• How to prepare a talk
• Ask HN: What is your favorite tech talk? (2018)
• Awesome conference practices
• Awesome speaking
• Your IDE as a presentation tool
• Really like this way of using a textual overview to present the talk
• List of talks that are worth watching
• Tech talks that'll change how you think (2019)
• Preparing for a Tech Talk, Part 1: Motivation (2018)
• Preparing for a Tech Talk, Part 2: What, Why, and How (2019)
• CodeTalks - Like Youtube, but for developers.
• Speaking at conferences 101
• Ask HN: What are some resources to improve speaking skills? (2019)
• Tips for public speaking
• How to quickly create a talk from scratch
• Speaking At Technical Conferences
• pretalx - Conference planning tool focused on providing the best experience for organisers, speakers, reviewers, and attendees alike.
• On Conference Speaking (2017)
• How to run an Effective Board Meeting and make an Effective Board Deck
• How to Speak course
• Alexis King's talks
• Speaking Tips (2020)
• Notist - Your public speaking portfolio.
• List of best talks (2020)
• Badass Conference Talks
• workshopctl - Tool for running workshops easily in the cloud.
• Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?
• Tech Talk Tips
• Notes on Speaking at EnthusiastiCon 2020
• Learn Improv - Improvisational comedy structures. (HN)
• Learn to be a great public speaker online in 8 weeks (2021)
• How to become a better public speaker
• Awesome Speakers - Awesome speakers in the programming and design communities.
• Ask HN: How to Speak Confidently? (2021)
• Transitions: The easiest way to improve your tech talk (2018)
• Ask HN: Best online speech / public speaking course? (2021)
• Demystifying Public Speaking by Lara Callender Hogan
• Best of 2020 in Tech Talks
• Presentation tips for performing professional Swift talks (2021)
• Reflection of Speaking in Public (2021)
• Public speaking tips I’ve learned through trial and error
• Best of 2021 in Tech [Talks]
• What is the best speech of all time?
• How to Read a Teleprompter without Looking Creepy
• Tech talks don’t have to be boring (2022) (HN)
• Lessons from taking a speech class
• Public Speaking Resources
• What’s the most mind blowing presentation / talk you’ve ever seen? (2022)
• Notes on Every Strangeloop 2022 Talk I Attended (2022)
• Public Speaking Best Practices
• FOSDEM 2023 - Talks (HN)
• FOSDEM 2023 Transcribed by Whisper (HN)
• Awesome Speaker - Curated list of awesome resource for public speakers, trainers and so on.