Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Our Idea of the Week this week is another excerpt from Scroll: Code.

Ben Buchanan, Interface Architect at ansarada, has been as ardent a supporter of Web Directions as they come, for as long as we’ve been around. He wrote this article for us, describing how his Code presentation came about, partly to encourage people to get up and present.

A Talk is Born

by Ben Buchanan

When I was new to conferences, I thought the superstars must do something incredible to produce their mind-blowing speeches.

Perhaps they meditated in a mountain retreat to prepare; pondered the deep secrets of the web and learned from the master’s wisdom – “You must feel the web around you; here, between you, me, the server, the browser, everywhere, yes.”

Of course, these days I know speakers aren’t Jedi, they’re simply normal people who were game to step on stage. The big names seem practised and polished because they are – they’ll give the same speech at several events and refine it every time. Most still get nervous before speaking.

There are many reasons someone might do a conference presentation. One that seems common is they’d been holding forth on a topic at the pub when someone suggested they should do a talk about it.

I’ve seen many people give great talks because they were passionate about the topic, but also supported by the people around them. Often, people just need a nudge.

My talk at Code16 started as a running joke shared with friends at a meetup.

Whenever version numbers or dependency management were mentioned, we’d grumble about bad versioning and I’d joke I should get up and rant about it some day. We’d debate the merits of SemVer and SlimVer, or laugh at the brilliance of Drone-Ver. Yes, there is version number humour … Gil actually created a working implementation of Drone-Ver!

I held back from actually doing a talk because I wasn’t sure people really wanted to hear it. Even at a tech meetup, there are limits! Also, I thought it might be too simple – “if I know it, surely everyone else knows it already … right?”

At some point Gilmore Davidson and Jed Watson decided I should put my money where my mouth was. Cue Craig Sharkie calling for off-the-cuff Thunder Talks at a SydJS meetup:

Sharkie: “Does anyone have a five-minute rant?”

Jed and Gil, gesturing wildly behind me: “Ben does!”

Me: “Uh oh.”

Luckily, there was another talk before mine. I spent that five minute hurriedly writing some notes on my phone. I grabbed Sharkie’s laptop and threw a hasty “slide” into the first text editor I could find:

I don’t remember a heck of a lot about what I said, but it seemed to go over well and Jed’s quotes on Twitter got a few likes.

It was fun, it was chaotic, it was cathartic. I’d wanted to get it off my chest for a long time!

I didn’t think much more about it until I attended a speaker training night at Web Directions HQ. To prepare for the workshop, we needed to prepare a short talk “on any topic”.

While most people did a teaser of a talk they were submitting for Web Directions, the idea I was pitching didn’t compress very well. I decided to do a more polished version of the SemVer talk, as I already knew it could fit into five minutes.

Doing the talk again let me think about the topic properly, in terms of structure and presentation. The training gave me some great feedback about how I presented it. The different audience made me think of some new perspectives on the topic.

• Do I put in a bit about versioning PSD files?
• How do people judge a mobile phone OS update – do they understand the numbers?
• The “API contract”, version zero, version one.
• “Hauptversionsnummernerhöhungsangst” (Noun): Fear of increasing the major version number

I had to cut things back out to make sure it was still short enough.

After the speaker training, John suggested a longer version of the SemVer talk would be good for Code. I still wanted to do the talk and had lots of ideas for expanding it, but it was still pretty scary to see my name announced in the lineup!

The talk isn’t finished yet (when Ben submitted this article, it was six weeks before the conference – editor’s note). I know I’ll throw it all out and rewrite it at least once more before the day. I’ll have moments where it seems like a disaster and I’ll wonder what possessed me to sign up. I’ll repeatedly tell my partner the presentation isn’t working.

Then somehow it will come together and I’ll be ready to step on stage.

It’s possible there are speakers out there who have a better system, but I have a sneaking suspicion this is more or less how everyone’s presentations are created.