So I’m back home and finished with all my conference speaking engagements. It was an interesting learning experience to say the least. Some things I learned:
- I was pretty uncomfortable giving a non-technical talk at technical conferences. It’s not unheard of, but I felt like I had to explain up front to the audience that this talk was non-technical and yet it had important lessons worth listening to.
- Working on slide flow is vital to keeping a talk interesting. One talk I saw had the speaker talking for 2-3 minutes while the slide just had one word on it: “Manifesto”. The talk was quite good overall but that was probably its weakest moment: there was too much talk jammed into a slide that didn’t reflect the content at that moment.
- I need to work on making good looking slides. My template was pretty ugly and text heavy. I think I’ll try to use more slides with less content in each in the future. Keeping the slides changing every 30 seconds gives the talk inertia and keeps the speaker focused. There’s less possibility of tangents.
I’m booked to talk at the Raleigh, NC Ruby User’s Group in October and I’ve got a proposal out for a talk at RubyConf in Orlando, FL in November. If accepted, I’ll write a whole new (technical 
talk for that conference.