How to Give Talks as a Software Developer

To give talks is very challenging but also very rewarding. When we give talks and share our knowledge, we fill out the gaps from what we learned.

In software development, if you face this challenge to give a talk, you will expand exponentially in your career. You massively grow technically and in your communication skills. Also, you will become someone who can empower and help others and grow a lot on your personal side. Giving talks is the biggest fear of many people and when you face your fears, you become more confident which helps you in several other areas of your life.

Why Giving Talks?

By giving talks and adding value to others, you also are promoting yourself. This means that by giving talks, you are creating a powerful portfolio for yourself. Companies will automatically trust you, if they need someone who builds Java microservices and you are already giving talks about the subject, you are already trusted for the job.

Warren Buffet also says that communication will get you ahead very quickly when you improve your speaking and writing skills.

Another great reason for you to give talks is to face your fears. When we face our fears, we feel fulfilled and happy. When we don’t face our fears, we live our lives constantly trying to avoid them at all costs. Then we usually create a massive monster in our minds that gets hard to beat. Therefore, the sooner you give a talk, the better because then you will realize that it’s not that scary.

How to Start Giving Talks?

Nothing happens overnight, everything has to be built up. It’s not different when giving talks, you can start small, you can start giving talks to your co-workers, even to your friends. You can also be a co-speaker, this is excellent to get started because if you give the talk with someone more experienced than you, you will be covered.

Another great move you can make is to be more involved with Java communities or any other technology you like. Then once you understand how things work you can offer a lightning talk (5-15 minutes talk) about your favorite subject. If you are bold enough you can offer a full talk. Just make sure to give the talk before somewhere else.

What to Talk About?

Preferably, it’s better for you to give a talk about what you are passionate about. The reason is that firstly you will really know what you are talking about and you will be motivated to create a presentation.

You can also talk about something you are learning, you don’t need to be the very best in the world to give a talk. You need to give value, this is your highest priority. Also, remember that you won’t be able to explain a whole technology in a 45 minutes talk. Instead, you will give an introduction, or you will talk about some specific details from the technology or any other topic.

If you are a Java developer, you can talk about many things, for example, the Java core, best practices, cloud technologies, containers, security, DevOps practices, tests, and the list goes on and on. If you want to go granular in the technologies you can talk about, you can check out the following article, The Ultimate Guide of Microservices Technologies for Java Developers in 2020.

Don’t put too much information on your Slides

When you put too much information on your slides, what happens is that the audience will pay attention to the slides and not to you. Remember that the value of the talk is your talk, so don’t make your audience read the slides while you are talking.

Put key points on your slides instead and then expand it by talking about those points.

Understand your audience

Let’s suppose you are giving a talk for college students, would it make sense to present something really advanced? Probably not, right? To know your audience is key to give an amazing talk. If your audience doesn’t understand what you are talking about, your talk will be in vain. Therefore, it’s much better to adapt your talk to what will be valuable to your audience, remember that the talk is not about you.

What about the audience Questions?

Many people are afraid of the audience’s questions. They fear not knowing how to answer a question from the audience. This usually leads to procrastination because the truth is that no one knows everything. If you are worried about knowing everything or knowing all the answers, well this might never happen. The key is to know what to do in case you don’t know the answer right away.

If you don’t know a very specific answer to what the audience asked, you can always say to your audience to talk about the subject after the talk. You can even suggest a follow-up article you will create about your audience question so that you can help more people. You have also to be careful with answering difficult questions because you have to manage your talk time. If you talk over your limit, you will disturb the following speaker to get prepared.

Therefore, you don’t need to know all the answers, you need to know how to handle tricky situations.

Your Talk is NOT About You

I see this mistake very often when I go to conferences. I see speakers talking about their 20 years of IBM, 10 years of Google, 10 years of Microsoft, they talk about all the projects they worked on and the list goes on… Then the content that will actually help developers is often missing. What happens, in the end, is that developers don’t learn anything, the speaker thinks she did an amazing job and everyone loses.

To add an important point, you CAN talk about you, and you should but only do that if you want to give an example of one of your life story to help your audience. But if you are talking about yourself because you want to impress the audience, then that’s not good for you and for the audience.

Therefore, you have to think about who is your audience, what will help them? You can talk with the audience before you give your talk, you can understand them better. Then you can direct your talk in a way you will help your audience the most.

Tell Stories

For centuries, people connected through stories, nowadays this is no different. A well-directed story about you, about a friend of yours, or anything that will give a lesson to the audience is extremely powerful.

If you can tell a story of a situation, you struggled, you got frustrated, you failed, then you overcame the situation and learned a powerful lesson, you can pass on your wisdom to the audience!

There is even a name for telling stories, you probably already heard about it, it’s called storytelling. You can practice your storytelling skills with anyone at any time. When you tell a story to a friend of yours you are practicing it. When you write a story about yourself, you are also practicing it.

One action you can take to improve your storytelling is to pick 3-5 stories from your life where you overcame a tough situation and write it down. By doing that you will structure the ideas in your mind and telling the story will get easier and easier. People will enjoy even more your story if you can tell it masterfully.

Be Vulnerable

No one likes a person who pretends to be perfect because it isn’t real. A speaker who is not authentic doesn’t connect to the audience. It’s much harder also to pass the message to the audience if you are not being who you truly are.

You don’t need to show all your vulnerabilities but you can choose one that will pass a powerful message to your audience. If you are giving a technical talk, you can talk about the difficulties you had with that technology. To tell your vulnerabilities and show how you overcame your own limitation is always powerful. When you show your vulnerabilities, you show that you are confident enough to show that you are not perfect but even though you overcame the situation. By doing that you will inspire your audience to also get inspired.

I will give you an example of how to be vulnerable here. Since I am writing about how to give talks, I will talk about my vulnerabilities in this subject. To be honest, I never thought I would be able to give talks, I was always seen as someone who is only technical, therefore not able to give a talk. This was the way people were seeing me, maybe I was responsible for that because I always thought that what would help me the most in my career was my technical knowledge. Then with time, I understood that technical knowledge would help me until some point. I also realized that it didn’t face my fear of giving talks, I wouldn’t get ahead. With that in mind, I decided that I would give a talk, I would face my fears anyway. Then, I offered to give a talk in my job and I talked about technologies I knew really well. It was much better than I expected, people really liked it and I could help them to understand better the technologies.

There are many speakers who are afraid to show their vulnerabilities because if they do that, they think they won’t be respected. That’s a big mistake, and it’s pretty much the contrary when you show your vulnerabilities you earn the respect of your audience. The reason is simple, you are being real and authentic, you are showing that you are no different from your audience. When you do that you can inspire your audience to go to the next level!

Manage Your Talk Time

If your talk has 45 minutes duration, the ideal is to have your eyes on the clock. It’s also great to give a preparation talk to make sure your talk will fit in the given time. Also, don’t forget that the audience will want some time for questions. The ideal is that you can reserve around 5 minutes at the end of your talk for questions.

You can use your laptop, your cellphone, anything that you can track the time you are giving the talk. Otherwise, it’s very easy to expand a single topic during the talk and not be able to present the whole content. If you can estimate approximately how long each topic of your talk will take, that will be a great help for you to have more control during your talk.

Create a Follow Up

Help your audience, even more by creating a follow-up.  Remember that the talk is only the beginning. You can create a mail list on MailChimp to get started and then you can promote your future talks, you can send your articles, you can send anything you are generating to your audience.

Your Twitter handle is a way to follow up with your audience but it’s more difficult to connect to your audience with only a Twitter account. If you have a Youtube channel, this is another way to create a follow-up but still not as powerful as a mail list.

You can inspire your audience to take the next step by having them closer to you. You can make them aware always when you will give a talk so that you can help them as much as possible.