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Speakers' Package

The following is a general starter package for giving presentations at Code & Coffee. They are suggestions only with the exception of the Talk Requirements. Feel free to adapt them to your particular topic or presentation style.

Talk Requirements

The following are rules every talk must respect:

  • It must be related to the tech industry (even if loosely related).
  • It must not sell or pitch.
  • It must not be used as marketing.
  • It can not be a recruiting tool.
  • It must respect our code of conduct.

The Community Stage Format

At Code & Coffee, we generally have up to three 10-15 minute talks. It may not sound like it, but this is a short amount of time. The idea is to give the audience a taste of the topic, pique their interests.

General Overview

  1. Introduce yourself
  • Who are you?
  • What do you do?
  • Why are you interested in this topic?
  • Humanize yourself: what is something else about you?
    • Are you a coffee snob, play in a metal band, or have a particularly lazy cat?
  • Feel free to self-promote (as long as you don't do a recruiting pitch for a company)
  1. Situate the topic
  • Give a very high-level overview or analogy to sum up what you're going to talk about
  • Was it a fun project or experience?
  • Is it a product that is gaining popularity? Why?
  • Are there competing technologies or ideas? Why choose this one?
  1. Introduce the main ideas
  • This is the main body of the presentation
  • Most people budget for about 4-6 minutes on the main topic
    • You need to leave time to wrap up later, and you spent some time in the introduction
  • Keep the slides simple, preferably images, analogies and examples
    • Speak on the details
      • Feel free to bring cue cards or use the speaker's notes feature in Keynote or PowerPoint
      • If you prefer, you can also ad lib! Totally up to you!
  1. Time check! If you're at 12 minutes, it's probably time to start wrapping up!
  • If you need an extra few minutes, don't sweat it. Just try to keep as close to 10 minutes as possible.
  1. Summarize the talk
  • Did you learn something important?
  • Where can people go to find out more?
  • Can people come find you afterwards if they're interested?
  1. If you're open to it, provide a way for people to reach out about further info
  • Twitter handle
  • GitHub link
  • Email address

Advice & Gotchas

  • The audience at Code & Coffee is very diverse, with a wide set of backgrounds and levels of experience
    • Assume that people have not had experience with this topic before
  • We have found that having slides is helpful for framing the topic, and to provide visual example
  • Use animated gifs whenever possible. Seriously. People love animated gifs.
  • Live coding can work well, as long as the examples are kept short and simple.
    • Don't forget to bump up the font size way up for the projector!
  • Do a dry run at home to get a sense of time and flow
  • This isn't your one chance that you must get right. You can speak many times!
  • Quite a few of our members have spoken. We know that it can be intimidating. Don't worry! We're rooting for you!

Video Recording

We do our best to tape our presenters and put the videos up on YouTube under a MIT license. If you are not comfortable being taped, please let the organizers know.

We also ask that you record your screen if you have slides or live coding. It makes putting the video together much easier, and the overall quality is higher.

We have had success with Capturer on OS X (available for free on the App Store). If possible, please also record the audio. We can provide a Mac with Capturer and Keynote.

Past Examples!

As mentioned above, we have recorded past talks! They are available on YouTube.

You can find the titles of all previous talks listed here.