I love impromptu speaking when I get to do it, and Write the Docs had open signups for lightning talks. I wanted to explain the thing I keep teaching founders and all the awesome people I keep coaching: No one cares. No one cares about the thing you want to tell them about as much...
I used to say that technical writing is an endless series of research papers, and if I had realized that when I started doing it, I might have studied harder at the Java class I flunked. But not really, because the thing I loved about research papers was reading the primary text, and a bunch...
I can’t make it parallel. I tried. We just have to live with an imperfect world of non-parallel headline items. I was talking to another speaker the other day, and she asked me how I knew I was ready to give a talk. As with so many other things in my life, I have a...
This was the year that I got more organized as a speaker. I took up Airtable as a way to track all of my conference proposals, and so I actually have a record of everything I submitted. Summary Attended 27 conferences, spoke at 24 Spoke at 3 user groups, 2 podcasts, 1 video interview, 1...
I don’t write code for a living, and I never have. Developer has never been part of my job titles, and my Github history won’t impress anyone. I think that’s why people are surprised that I speak at developer conferences — next month I’m going to RubyConf, PyconCA, and Nodevember. When I started speaking at...
Once you get a conference talk selected, you’ll want to put together the talk. There are speakers who can give entire talks without any visual aids, but most of the rest of us count on having some pictures to look at and prompt us. There are entire books written on slides – I liked Presentation...