How to Talk the Talk (in front of hundreds)
By: Axiom Zen
Tags: Public Speaking, Engineering, Conference, Insights, Startup

Talking is simple. We do it everyday. But plop a group of people in front of you, and suddenly it becomes very, very difficult. Our inherent fear of public speaking is arguably one of the world’s great mysteries.

Does anybody truly enjoy public speaking? Some people seem to — but we can all agree that they’re weird and not to be trusted. That being said, I’ve been working on ZenHub for a few years now, and I’m always looking for new ways to grow and learn. I’ve learned the surest sign that you’re challenging yourself is when your stomach flops over and your palms get clammy. So a while back, when I decided it was time to target a new challenge, I thought about what made me feel uncomfortable. Top of the list was public speaking. So I determined that was exactly what I needed to do.

Sharing my journey

I hope it saves you time and spares you a headache. If nothing else, it should show hesitant speakers like myself that you can do it too.

To be totally transparent, at one point I did actually enjoy public speaking. At my high school every year each student had to write and deliver a five minute(ish) talk to the class. The best ones were selected to be given to the entire school. I was pretty good at it. Good enough that other students would pay me to write their speeches (what can I say, I’ve always been a hustler).

Since then I’ve forgotten most of my commissioned works, but a few highlights stick out. One, for a particularly petite friend, laid out an airtight case that sports are biased against short people. In another case, on behalf of a friend with terrible grades, I put together a thought-provoking treatise on why kids should drop out of high school. Somehow that one got selected as a standout that the entire school would enjoy.

A decade later, this upcoming presentation brought up much more dread. This was a more serious talk on a highly technical topic for a very specific audience. At fifty minutes, it was twenty-five times longer than my high school diatribes, and too lengthy a time slot to have something memorized. About a hundred people would be there, which is a considerable increase since the classroom-sized audiences I was accustomed to. Plus, it would cover my professional arena, so the stakes were higher than ghostwriting for pimply teenage slackers. Part of the talk would involve a live demo, too, so I needed to build something that I couldn’t accidentally break on stage with a live audience.

Despite (or maybe because of) my incredible nerves, I knew this was an important thing to do. I’ve got a lot of experience under my belt, and learning to share that knowledge for an audience felt like my next big challenge. With encouragement from my team lead Pablo, I got started preparing.

Identifying a topic

First off, I’d never given a talk before, so requests for speaking engagements and keynotes weren’t clogging my inbox. This girl needed to find a stage. And that meant I had to find something to talk about.

After some thought, I settled on Ramda, a library we’d recently incorporated into ZenHub. Although I’d have do more research, I already had a solid foundational understanding of the library. Plus, there’s not much material on Ramda out there compared to other JavaScript libraries, so I’d be able to get a good grip on it in a reasonable amount of time.

Armed with a topic, I applied to speak at DeveloperWeek, the huge tech conference held annually in San Francisco. I got accepted.

Once I got my breathing under control, I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on Ramda and watching previous DeveloperWeek presentations on YouTube. With that done, I had a ton of notes I needed to organize into a 50-minute talk.

So where to start?

To my surprise, information hierarchy proved to be one of the tougher aspects — I had plenty of material, but how should I shape it into something coherent?

I began by laying out the skeleton of the presentation slides. A central part would be the live coding demo (which would also take up a nice chunk of time). I needed to make the demo robust enough to illustrate my points, but not so complicated as to lose the audience or trip myself up onstage.

With my main points plotted out, it was time to add some flair to the technical stuff. I turned to Mack, our resident entertainer.

A hero and a villain

Ok. I already had those: noble clean code, the kind provided by Ramda, versus diabolical, complex, unreadable code. A battle waged since the earliest days of computing. I delegated an emoji to each as their avatar.

Once I had everything in good shape, I began practicing five-minute lightning talks at work and to friends. This was important; my co-workers could offer important technical feedback, while my friends outside the industry could give pointers on the talk’s delivery and clarity.

For my final dry run I gave a more substantial version of the talk at our office a few months later, cutting some of the novice intro material and beefing up the technical sections. At this point, everything was pretty much finalized.

Lessons already learned

In the months I spent preparing the talk, I discovered some surprising revelations. One of the biggest ones was that you need not be the foremost expert on your topic in order to speak on it. Sounds counterintuitive, but that’s a lot of pressure to lay on yourself and a great way to psych yourself out before you’ve even started.

A talk by Anjana Vakil from a 2016 conference dispelled the idea of topic mastery for me. Right up front, she admits she’s not a complete master of the subject, but that she’d like to share her journey with the audience. Whenever I started to feel overwhelmed in this process, I remembered Anjana. Pretty soon, I realized that an effective way to develop expertise on something is to commit to talking about it in front of a large group of people. Nothing motivates you more than sheer terror.

Another assumption was that I should have every line, beat, and quip committed to memory. Otherwise, I feared at first, I would stumble once, panic, and implode. However, it became clear pretty quickly that memorizing everything was not the best way to go about this. While I did have a solid script in front of me for reference, I made sure to leave room for flexibility. In the end, these more loose moments let some levity and personality shine through.

This isn’t to say I wasn’t incredibly nervous in the minutes before walking onstage. I pored over my notes again and again, ran through my coding demo repeatedly, and triple-checked my computer to make sure everything would run smoothly.

Then the time came. They called my name and I took the stage

I launched into the talk. It might not have been the world’s greatest presentation, but things went pretty well. For the first half I was nervous and it showed — but I quickly realized that wasn’t the end of the world. About halfway through, I took a deep breath and gave myself a pep talk. I reassured myself that I knew what I was talking about and had every right to be there.

My nerves began to dissipate, and everything smoothed out. I quit stressing about staying glued to my script. The tone grew more casual and relaxed, and I think everybody benefitted.

Early on, I’d worried that my topic was too basic, that ten minutes in, half the audience would be glued to their phones. But that never happened. After wrapping, there was a ten-minute Q&A packed with insightful, thoughtful questions — the sign of a successful and engaging presentation.

The biggest takeaway, for me, was that people are, at their core, good and kind. The audience laughed, they cried (okay, so nobody cried). My point is, they aren’t out to eat you alive. After my talk, several people told me they appreciated that I never tried to sell them anything, that I was there to share some information and insight. Two even said it was the best presentation they’d seen so far, two days into the conference. That alone made the entire endeavour worthwhile.

As you can guess, I’m so glad I did it. I’m proud I set this challenge out for myself and overcame it, and I’m looking forward to the next opportunity to speak. I hope anyone that’s thinking about it like I was will give it a try.

Written by Christine Legge

Edited by Grady Mitchell