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>> Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman.
We're here at the Carribean Developers
Conference in the Dominican Republic.
We're here with Cecil, myself, Phil, Andres.
We are here blessed to be speaking with
this illustrious group of speakers from all over the world.
Lots of cool people talking about lots of cool technology.
So we thought it would be a good idea to do
a little mini-session on how to be an effective speaker.
So I thought I would bring three
of the most effective speakers that I know together,
we can have this conversation.
>> Sure.
>> So I want to ask a couple of questions here.
I think about the story arc first.
No matter what you're doing,
you've got to figure out what story are you trying to sell.
>> Sure.
>> Not to sell, but to say.
What do you want the audience to come away with?
>> Sure.
>> How do you design a story arc?
>> Sure. For me, there's usually points.
So when I give a presentation,
what is the thing I want you to learn about?
What's the thing I want you to get excited about?
What's the thing I want you to know about?
>> The takeaway.
I'm not going to teach you a tutorial or one- by-one.
I just want you to know about it.
I want you to get really excited about it, so
that when you do leave the talk,
you're excited enough to want to go home
and try it out, to Google it,
to Bing it, or
to install it and just play around it a little bit.
>> I think of myself as an edutainer.
I want someone to have fun,
to stay awake and then go back with,
"Oh wow, that seems cool."
Maybe I can apply that to my life.
So I may not have necessarily taught them something,
but I've got them excited like a documentary.
>> Sure.
>> A documentary makes you go,
"Wow, that's an interesting topic.
I will read a book on that."
How do you build your stories?
>> Same way as Cecil was saying,
I don't necessarily start with a story.
I start with the takeaways.
What is it that I want you to walk
away knowing that you didn't know
before and that's going to be applicable to what you're doing?
Then I look at, okay,
now that I have an idea of what I want you to takeaway,
how do I want to get you there?
>> So you work backwards from the finish line?
>> Yeah. Then I start to think about,
what's going to keep you in the chair listening to me?
What is the story arc about that?
There's, I don't know,
seven different stories in the world, different structures.
So sometimes I will actually,
literally, look up those different story arcs.
>> You mean like the hero's journey, somewhere to get Skywalker?
>> Or a tragedy, like
I was trying to build this app and everything went to heck.
Then I use containers, and now it all works,
like that sort of thing.
>> That's a great tragedy and the docker at the end.
>> How do you build your stories, Andres?
>> Well, in a way that I try to
do my presentation is that I go with what I want to learn.
>> What you want to learn?
>> What I want to learn if I were sitting in the other side.
It's like sometimes we want to [inaudible]
something, but probably that's not what people want to listen.
It's just also looking for what they want to see.
Especially, it happens to me a lot.
For me, it's important that when you leave the room,
you learn something that you want.
As you just mentioned,
it's not just giving a talk
because that's another gig that I like.
It's another gig that I like, and I propose
you to see it and probably you find it entertaining too,
so I will try to go with those.
For me, something I do,
that if I go late,
I'm usually changing my presentation
based on what people [inaudible] before.
For example, if I were speaking today,
I will see what people were looking,
what were commenting for yesterday's conferences,
for yesterday's thoughts, and I would adjust it.
My talk, usually would be the same talk,
but putting some of the things
that I know the people are willing to learn.
>> So you listen for the buzz,
the thing that people are talking about, and you adjust?
>> That's right.
>> I like that it all starts with the empathy, right?
Empathy for the audience,
that is going to be sitting there listening to us.
Then you bring that out with
what would they want to learn.
>> Exactly.
>> This is incredibly important.
I have to agree with all of you that the
number 1 thing that you
can do if you're going to be a presenter,
whether you're presenting to eight people at work during lunch or
800 at a big conference, is extreme empathy.
You may have been in software for five years, 10 years,
or 20, but the audience,
remember, might have been in software for a month.
Put yourself in their shoes,
come from their perspective.
Your three-letter acronyms, your TLAs, expand them.
Context, history,
you maybe talking to someone who's a different age,
or different culture, or different language.
Localizing your talks to the local buzz.
I like that. One of the things that
I've done that I think is okay,
since we're in the Dominican Republic, is I've
been talking to everyone ahead of time,
making sure all of my jokes, my GIFs,
my memes, those memes.
>> [FOREIGN].
>> [FOREIGN] are appropriate for
this culture because a GIF
of Neil Patrick Harris doesn't go over well in Russia or wherever.
You've got to find out, so I localize all my talks.
Localize doesn't mean translate it to Spanish,
but it means with empathy,
respect my audience, and make sure that everything is correct.
>> I think another thing that I like to do,
particularly with the audience is,
sometimes we were going through
a technology that we're just so used to,
so for us it's like a second nature.
"Oh, I know what this is, I know what these commands are."
>> Bingo.
>> I'll just intentionally put typos as I'm typing into
the or code in an exception.
Because as you're doing it in the real world, stuff happens.
It always doesn't go smoothly as it does in the marketing videos,
and in the blog post, and things of that nature.
So when your audience sees that,
"Oh man, Scott made a typo,
but he was able to come back and fix it."
That happens to me all the time.
I have exceptions, and I type the wrong thing.
Instead of docker, I might type rocker,
something weird and obscure,
and then, oops, got to go back and I got to correct it.
But in showing that, you have that human side to you, like
I'm not a machine. I'm not perfect.
I make typos. I make mistakes because we all do.
I think that just helps us connect with them so much more.
>> I'm known for doing that unintentionally,
but now I know that it happened.
>> It's a really good point. In fact,
you may do it unintentionally,
but you recover from it.
>> Yes.
>> Yeah.
>> But Cecil and I are very similar,
and that we both consciously make mistakes.
I'll make sometimes what look like
dramatic mistakes for the purposes of education.
Because if you go into a perfect hour and everything works,
do you think it's going to work for them? No.
>> It's not.
Not the same way.
>> So I consciously make mistakes,
doesn't compile or doesn't work,
throw an exception, and then the fun is in the debugging.
>> In fact, I would say
an important tip as a presenter is to stay calm under pressure.
When you do run into that, "Oh, demo fail."
I've had times where I've recovered and people said,
"You know that was the best part of your talk,
was watching you figure out how to recover."
But I've also had times where I've said, "Hey, look,
I'm going to have to move
on because I don't know what's going on here,
but you can follow up with me after and I'll let you know,"
because it turned out like the network had
proxy issue or something.
>> So let's talk about that. So first thing we heard is, empathy.
So if we popped up,
if we had our bullets here, we have empathy. That's number 1.
Next one is intentionality, being prepared.
So we intentionally make mistakes to move the narrative forward.
Yesterday, I had a computer lockup and
we can joke about why it locked up or tease the operating system,
but the fact is stuff happens.
So I was blessed enough to have another laptop,
but I'm also very prepared and very intentional.
I literally pulled the laptop out, boot it up,
had the slide in Dropbox, opened it, continued.
I think it took about 90 seconds,
and folks thought that was a useful thing.
I tweeted about it as a tip, and someone said,
"Well, not everyone has two laptops."
That's a true statement.
>> Sure.
>> How can we be intentional,
prepared if we don't necessarily have unlimited resources?
>> Well, for me, I understand that you
having the slides outside of your computer is the first step.
>> Bingo.
>> Imagine that you had two laptops probably and you had
the slides only in the one that broke, what would have happened?
So that's something very important.
Be prepared, be ready.
In my case, sometimes I do presentations when I
need to compare and it happen to me
everyday that I updated the IDE moment
before and myself said, "Never do that."
>> Never update the night before.
You're ready, you test it,
you know that it's going to run.
Do not do any change to that computer.
>> When I travel, especially internationally,
I go to Windows Update and I pause updates for seven days.
Never take an update within a few days of doing your job.
>> That's a good tip.
>> That's part of being ready.
>> So you save half the slides outside,
that means Dropbox, OneDrive, Google,
wherever so that worst-case scenario,
nightmare scenario, you take it out of
the audience and say, "Hey, can I borrow your laptop?"
>> Somebody [inaudible] borrow a laptop.
>> What about internet? Internet goes down.
What do you do when the Internet goes down?
I personally test my apps and do everything in airplane mode.
I practice on the airplane without
airplane Wi-Fi because you just never know.
So I always try to assume you have no Internet,
which is hard for a Cloud demo.
>> Right.
>> Do you practice for those eventualities?
>> I'm not sure. Now, that you mention.
>> Yeah, I had a talk once in Norway and I remember
that I just assumed
there'd be Internet connection in the room. I go in there,
there's nothing, no Wi-Fi.
Luckily, a gentleman in the audience had a MiFi,
and so he saved my day because I was doing everything against
GitHub. As a GitHub employee at that time,
I could have run an all local instance of it.
I would probably recommend that if you can run
a local instance or an emulator or anything like that.
>> Or even a video.
>> Yeah, a video is a good way to put a back up.
>> For big, important stuff, I record
a screencast of anything important and if it goes bad,
I can always play the video and talk to it.
>> Yeah.
>> So assuming there's Internet,
I've also had issues where I assume there'd be HDMI.
I rolled into a conference, and it was VGA.
So now I have a dongle for everything.
>> One of the things that I try to do now
is before I go to a location,
I just ask the organizers, well,
what's the environment that I'm walking into?
Things like what does the screen look like,
what type of plugs do I have? You know what I mean?
>> The resolution.
>> The resolution that I need to have.
What kind of mics do I have?
Am I going to be able to walk around,
or do I need to be stationary?
So at least then, as you're preparing
to be presenting in that environment,
you know what you're expecting as you walk in there.
>> That might seem obvious after the fact,
but so few people do that.
The simple thing that you're describing,
which is be prepared,
ask questions, know what you're walking into.
I am personally shocked and I don't mean to put anyone on blast,
but I'm shocked how many people just show up with a Mac,
no dongles, no idea for what they have,
and they just assume it'll work.
The problem is that if it works a couple of times,
then you'll assume it will work forever.
Is it 16 by nine or four by three?
Do they want PDFs, do they have a clicker?
Do you even have a place to put your laptop?
I've had times where I had a little box like
this and nowhere for my mouse and nowhere for my demo,
and then suddenly you
become a problem speaker because you're like,
oh, can I get another table?
>> Or the conference might want to run the slides of
their computers, and then suddenly
you don't have your sticky notes available.
>> Yeah, and then you'd surprise them because you say, "Oh,
I assume that I'd be doing it on my own.
>> For me the mic is very
important because it's the way I do presentations,
I like to move around because I like to be,
I mention before I leave [inaudible].
It's like being part of the people that are listening to me.
I've been in recent talks where
I'm stationary because I have a mic.
>> To type with one hand?
>> So be prepared.
So you as the organizer,
the type of mic that I'm going to be using.
Going to be something on the hair?
With my hair, there's some mics that they don't fit well.
>> It's very, very true.
>> So empathy, intentionality,
and then the last one I think is personality.
So I like to use humor.
I use the term edutainment because I was
a college professor and I always
found professors boring, to lighten it up.
How did you find your voices?
How did you find your voice and
decide who you wanted to be on stage?
>> So for me, I don't think I'm a funny person.
I'm just being honest.
In terms of me presenting,
I like to look at the content and I'm like,
"Well, what is it that's in here
that's going to get people excited," right?
Because most of the time, I'm speaking to
technical folks, and technology is what's exciting to them.
So what are the points within this journey that we're taking
together that I could really emphasize and show excitement?
All right. So I don't really use jokes.
I use like points of excitements to be like,
"Oh well, I really want you to pay attention to this thing."
Like, "Servers, wow,
this is super cool," and let me show you what I
built and then I get into the demo.
Or, "Oh man, this exception happened,
and this is what it looks like," so
now I'm showing different types of emotion now,
like I'm sad, I'm upset. But now,
how do we go forward and rectify those situations
or just to draw attention
to those things that we're trying to look at?
>> You say that you build excitement but when I see you present,
I always feel empowered.
I feel I come out more powerful than I did before because
I didn't know that, and now I
know it. You give me a sense of like,
"Well, he just did that.
I'm going to do that now, and I have more power to go to
my job or my project and make it better."
Your excitement makes me powerful.
>> Right. Because I want you to look at
it and be like, "I can do it too."
At the end of the day, that's the whole goal.
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah. I'd say to add to that, I mean,
I think you bring up an important point which is that
the content ultimately has to carry the topic, right?
It has to be a topic that people are
interested in and that they're going to learn something.
But you can't think even good content if you
don't at least give it a little bit of your personality.
Like, I can have a dry sense of humor,
so I will use a little humor at
the beginning and maybe three or four people
out of 100 will laugh,
but there's got be one of them.
But then after that part,
I want to really get into the story. What I try to
do is let my enthusiasm for the topic show.
I remember being given this one piece of advice,
if you feel like you're being a little bit effusive,
try toning it up twice as much because
the camera takes off 50 percent of that, right?
So be energetic,
go ahead and feel free to move around. You'll feel
awkward at first, but
it looks more toned down than you think in your own head.
>> That's a really important thing that I've learned.
I did a lot of musical theater in high school,
I did a number of musicals and plays.
Act it up, turn it to 11.
It might seem weird to have your arms out like this.
That's way too big.
No, like you play to the back row.
You want them to know what's going on.
>> I noticed you're doing that in your talk.
You were like-
>> It works though.
It's sparkle fingers.
>> Yeah.
>> You mentioned that being energetic, and that's my personality.
So for me, I just go on stage and I just be me.
I just put the energy of the subject that I'm talking about.
I make some jokes.
I try to, like you've mentioned,
is that localize the joke. Because I joked out, what's here in DR,
Dominican Republic that we are right now,
won't work in Montreal when I leave. Or it won't work
in Seattle or in any other place because of the context.
>> A humor in Montreal,
a humor in Seattle, a humor in here.
>> You try to pick that.
>> Fantastic. So we have learned about audience empathy,
we've learned about being prepared and intentionality,
and we learned about personality.
Some resources that we want to share with you on the back screen
here is, there was a talk we did called public speaking.
We had myself, Kendra, Maria, Casey,
Donovan Brown. This is up on Channel 9.
You can go search for public speaking
with any of those names and you'll find that, and
then another one, if you go to speakinghacks.com.
This is actually a video that I did with Rob Conery
that has actually a free PluralSight talk.
I went and talked to the folks at PluralSight.
It's totally free. You don't need to sign up for PluralSight.
They will teach you how to be a better presenter.
It's called the art of speaking.
Thank you very much, Cecil Philip, Phil Haack,
Andres Pineda. We're here at
the Caribbean Developer Conference, why aren't you here?
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