 How come? Ladies and gentlemen, we are from Women Who Code. So Women Who Code, this is our links, our web page, Facebook, like mailing list, email address. You can contact us at www.singapore-women-who-code.com and our website www.women-who-code.com.slash-singapore has a lot of information. It has all the pictures of leaders. If you see any of these faces, just approach any of them and that's what our Women Who Code tells you all about. So this is our mission, to inspire women to excel in technology careers. And this is what we do. We organize technical events such as this. And we have our newsletter code review. And inside the code review, we have the hashtag, her scholarships, conference tickets, giveaways, an office. So do sign up. And this is not limited to just Singapore. Conference tickets and scholarships around the globe. So if you are interested in any of the events overseas in Europe or even in the US, we also sometimes do subsidize your plane tickets. So do check them out. Hashtag, applaud her, is basically a way for us to applaud our successors, askers, if you get a new job, you get a promotion, you get an award, do let us know. If you know anybody who does that, your colleagues, your friends, do a hashtag, applaud her, tell us about it. The link is also on the newsletter. If you would like to put it on the newsletter as well. And we have our drop-bot. It's quite interesting where we kind of flip the way we do things and you tell the drop-bot what you want out of your job and we will give you a short list. Do check them out. I think we have one job course, a couple more coming up from Singapore. So, and thank you to our host, Espeed Roo. And thank you for feeding her. Hello, hi. Yeah, so, welcome to Singapore Power. This is, we're actually, here it's called Espeed Digital. We're like the digital technologies division of Singapore Power. So, we kind of like lead the charge in terms of the digital transformation efforts of the company. So, we help build software for the company. So, like, if you guys are using the Espeed Digital, Espeed Utilities app for checking your bills, they're actually built here in this very floor. So, yeah, we have two floors here. We have about 100 engineers right now, mostly Singaporeans. So, yeah, we've got software engineers and deaf arts people. We've got data science. We've got, we're always looking for people, mobile developers as well. So, if you are interested, you know, just, just hit me up later and then I can give you some more details. Yeah, yes, we're hiring, yes. And we want to thank our partner, Yao. Lovely. All right. So, without further ado, I'll introduce our next speaker, Chris Howard. She came all the way from Sydney to give us this talk. Thank you so much. Do you want to hook in on my neck? Can you hook in on the back, maybe? Maybe how about we do that? Can you just do it up there? Yeah, that works. And then I do that. And we're good. Yeah? Ready? Can you see me? Just want to, I don't have many notes, but just in case I do. Hi, everybody. Thank you for inviting me here today. It's the end of two weeks of travel. I was in Perth two weeks ago and then India last week for the first time ever and now back in Singapore, which I like. I've been in this group a few times. I remember being one of the very first meetings last year, which was really cool to be part of that. So what I'm going to talk to you tonight is a little, it's an excerpt from a bit of a longer talk. So I think you guys had a global diversity CFP day event. Did you do one in Singapore? It was this big thing, yeah, all over the world. And I ran the Sydney one. And so I had a lot more content around like coming up with ideas for talks and things like that. But I'm going to skip all over that. I'm going to assume at this point, pretend that the prerequisite here is you've got an idea for a talk and you actually want to now talk about writing it and delivering it. The best advice I can give to you is to look up this YouTube talk. So there is a man named Damien Conway. He's written books on Pearl, but he's a really great technical presenter. And so we had him speak at Yao a few years ago and we recorded it. And I'll tweet this link later tonight as well and put it on the comments on the message group. But he did a full 90 minutes and I was there and I was just taking notes feverishly. He also teaches professional speaking and I was lucky enough to get to go to a full day workshop with him. So if you ever get a chance to meet him, but the next best thing is to watch his video. Like it's so good, you will get so much out of it. So a lot of this is actually, I'm stealing from Damien, and one bit of advice he gives is he says that for him to produce a really top-notch presentation, it takes him 10 to 20 hours of preparation for each hour of talk, which I'm just saying the Agile India talk I did last week was about 45 minutes. 10 to 20 hours feels about right, quite frankly. Hopefully you do it further in advance than I did. So you know you have to give a talk. Now you have to write it. So I'm going to go through a few things. I'm going to go through what to say because that's obviously the hardest part is what are you actually going to talk about? How to come up with the points and the format that you should use. I'm going to give you a method that Damien actually taught me which is what I use now as my go-to when I'm writing a talk. We'll talk about designing your slides because I think that's the part everybody starts with that and we're actually going to do that second. We'll talk about finding images because using images that you're actually legally allowed to use is a really good thing to do. We'll talk about presenting code because I'm assuming some of you at least are going to be doing technical presentations and there are good ways to present code and there are bad ways. I should mention I went to 124 meet-ups last year. This is like my job. So I see a lot of tech talks. So a lot of this is coming out of I see bad ones and I see good ones. I'm going to tell you how to be in the good ones. And I'm going to give you the top secret that is used by preachers, stand-up comedians, and salesmen which are the sharp principles and we'll go through those as well. So the first task is to select what you're going to say and then work out how you're going to say it. So hopefully you are going to be speaking about a topic that you care about and that you know about. Sometimes you get assigned a top, maybe if it's a work presentation it might be something that you don't feel particularly passionate about. But here's the thing, being knowledgeable about a topic is not what engages an audience. An audience is engaged by your passion about it, by having an angle about it, by you caring about it. So you've got to find some way to care about the thing that you're going to be talking about. And so, for example, the Agile India topic that I was doing last week was called Building Software That Lasts. And it was, I pitched them an idea and then they came back with something that was slightly different and I was like, okay, I can work with that. But I had to figure out a way to actually make that interesting to me. And I was just telling Michael, I have a website that I've been running for 22 years now. So I basically used that as my way into the topic. And I also then thought about the fact that I really like hand crafting. I like knitting and sewing. And I was thinking about the fact that one of the reasons I like them is as a technologist I don't often get to make things with my hands and make something that actually is valuable and lasts longer than just the next few months. So I kind of, those were the angles I took to get into the material. So whatever topic you're going to be speaking about you kind of have to find a way to care about it. Now most people start with, what am I going to say? And Damien pointed out that actually human beings are really good at like filtering material. So he suggests a method for you to actually think a bit more, to think a bit more deductively about it. So this is the method that he suggests. And it starts with write down everything you might possibly say about a subject. Don't worry about organizing it. This is like mind map territory here. Do it by hand, do it. I often use Evernote for this. I'll just have an Evernote doc for each talk and I will just, over the course of, you know, perhaps a month, any time I think of something that I might want to say, a topic that I might want to research for the talk, chuck it in there. I also usually have a file of bookmarks for when I come across something related to the talk. I'll chuck that in there too. The idea is just, just get a huge pile of everything you might possibly say about the topic. He says, don't worry about organizing it. It's like a stream of consciousness. Then what you're going to do is you're going to select five points, no more than seven tops, because the problem here is that human beings have really terrible short term memory. And so most people can only keep like seven plus or minus two things in their head at any given time. So you don't want to have more than that. So he reckons keep it simple, go for five. You'll note I have five bullet points on this slide. So five possibly seven things at most. You don't want to overwhelm your audience. Now, he has fit into narrative structure and what he means by that is that human beings naturally like to tell stories. It's a really easy way of organizing information. It naturally follows a hierarchy. It can help you figure out where there are gaps where there are things missing. So he suggests you use that format. So you find your five to seven points and then you fit them. You find a way to make a narrative around them. Now, possible narratives you could do, for example, in five points you could do, here's the problem, here's the current way we do stuff, here's why the current way is bad, here's my proposed solution, and here's how we get there. That, for example, is a story and you can easily fit points into that. So something around those notes. This, the talk that I'm doing now is a little bit of a story and that we're going to talk first about writing and then about presenting. So that sort of temporarily is a narrative. So anytime you can fit them into a story, it's going to help you remember it. It's going to help your audience remember it. It's going to help people feel like they know what the structure is. Now, throw away what doesn't fit. It's hard because you're going to have some good ideas on that piece of paper that you really want to get in there and you've got to be brutal. If it doesn't fit within those like chapters that you've got, get rid of it. You might even need to massage those chapters a little bit as well to fit into there. So often what I'll do is I'll start crossing things off my big sheet of paper. I'll start grouping them together into groups and those are my five chapters of the story as it's going to be. Yeah, chuck out everything that doesn't fit. Sometimes you just can't get it all in there. That's actually a good thing. It's talking, using less than you know about a subject and your talk is a way to be more confident about it. So you don't want to have your talk be everything you literally know about a subject. Ideally you want it to be way less than that, maybe like 10% of what you know about a subject. So don't worry about having to throw stuff out. And then fill any gaps. And what that means is that as you start working on this flow now, you're going to realize that actually going from point three to point four is kind of a big leap. And maybe I need something in there to beef that part up. It will start highlighting the parts that you need to fill out. If there's anything you've left out of your mind map that you need to work in. So a narrative is really good at helping you identify those big jumps and where you need to fill them out a little bit. Then you can start working on your slides. And ladies and gentlemen, I'm about to show you what has been judged the world's worst PowerPoint slide. Ladies, brace yourselves. You ready? This was judged by the New York Times to be the world's worst PowerPoint slide. It was actually used in a briefing to the commanding general of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to explain U.S. counter-insurgency strategy all on one slide. No one can understand this thing. It's terrible. Basically almost all slides are way too busy. Which means your audience gets distracted. It's opportunities for them to start playing with their phone. Or they stare at it trying to figure it out. You really don't want to have that happen. So keep things as simple as possible. Also, if you are going to have bullet points Damien says no more than five on a slide ever. And they should be short. Ideally no more than five words. You don't want to have a lot of text. Using a really big font size helps with that because A. cuts down on how many words you can actually fit on a slide but it's also great because that means the people in the back can actually read what's on your slides. Damien also gives advice and sometimes I break this rule but I've tried not to in this presentation which is not to mix your media on slides so don't have bullet points and a picture or a chart and some text. If you're going to show an image, show an image. If you're going to show text, just show text. He advises against mixing them so I've tried to adhere to that. But again, none of these rules you can use your best judgment. He also suggests you don't use charts at all because most charts have way too much information. If there are any UX people here, I saw fantastic talk recently on designing charts and it's really hard to make a chart that is just well understood by everybody in the room so unless you're very confident about your ability to put a chart in, do not just copy something out of Excel and paste it into your slide. It's not going to look good. He suggests that if you want you could put a little piece of a slide that you can use like the trend line or something is something to talk about but do not try and cram a lot of data on a slide. It's just going to overwhelm the audience. Projectors, projectors suck. Colors are terrible so that's why Damien suggests you keep things as simple as possible. He actually advocates just using the plain black or the plain white theme which sucks because there's really cool themes and I've seen them and I want to use the one that looks like spaceships or whatever but no he says keep it simple bare bones and boring he says that the red bulb on a projector is the first one to burn out which is why the red colors often look terrible so don't use red or don't use it for anything important like highlighting something on your slides actually when I did my training with him I had some beautiful sort of maroon like the color of your shirt in the slides and he was like that is awful that looks like no it's just terrible so don't use red he actually says that you should no it's a beautiful color but on a bad projector it's not attractive and he reckons you should test your presentation on you know projectors that have like the crappiest projectors you can find basically see what it's going to look like because especially if you've got images the number of times I've stood up to give a talk and realize there's not enough contrast on my images you can't actually see what I'm talking about is really painful he suggests that you use color as a way of telling people what's important or different so I don't know if you noticed when I had that heading about writing your talk that was on a different color background and so I've done that for the sort of chapters in mind so that's a way of providing people you know a little bit of a hint you could also use it to let people know where like if you're entering a different part of the talk like the Q&A part you could put that in a different color he also suggests you think about the emotional you know context of the colors like if it's happy talk maybe you want to use happy colors for a serious you know talk maybe that's where you use the black background it tends to you know evoke a terminal so I use it for a lot of the tech talks and I prefer it to the white the white I don't like the white background but he does you can use that he also gave me an interesting point which I have never used but I find it really really kind of fascinating is like if you're then going to go back and reiterate a point from earlier in your talk he suggests you dial back the color to like 90% on that it's like a flashback like when you're looking and reviewing a previous point you've made which I found really interesting I haven't done that one myself but it's when I still got in my little arsenal for pictures make pictures big make them full screen the only exception to that he suggested is books like if you're going to be talking about a book he says on and find a picture where it actually looks like a 3D book because it makes it clear to people that you're talking about a real book but if you're looking at images these are my three favorite sources for free images so unsplash.com totally free you you can credit people you don't have to they're all nice looking they're all sort of vaguely Instagram me you know what I mean like they're nice you're not going to find everything in there but you can find really good ones the next one women of color in tech chat this was a group of women at companies in I believe New York City like Twitter and a couple of other tech companies they paid to have a photographer come and take pictures of all the women engineers and leaders and they put them all up on Flickr with a creative commons license so if you need a picture of an engineer Michael in your next talk why not use a woman of color in it so it's just fantastic and so I really urge everybody to make use of this resource it's fantastic and then if you need any icons or sort of symbols like that the noun project is really good and has free free ones that you can use for that so those those are my my key for those if you're going to do a big full screen image it's nice to put at least that slide on a black background because you know how sometimes you get the little white outline around the edges so yeah put big full screen images on a black background and if you do need to credit your images use either a small bit of text at the bottom of the slide or a slide it's perfectly fine to have one slide at the end that has all the credits on it together as well so if you're going to take this code this gets really fun so one thing that's very interesting about human beings is we notice things that move a lot better like for spotting differences it's a lot easier if you show one and then blink and then show the other than if you show two things side by side so if you're going to talk about how we're going to take this code and change it actually animating that showing code temporarily rather than actually animate the code blocks if obviously this is sort of advanced you know keynote and power point wizardry here but it will be so much more understandable to your audience than showing here and then being like and now we're going to go to here people don't necessarily follow that quite as easily so animating code demos can be really really really handy if you are going to show one thing and then show it on another slide again make sure you line the same lines up in the exact same spot you don't want to have a line of text jump from slide to slide that's really distracting so I spent a lot of time on trying to make sure that I duplicate those slides exactly and then you use highlighting to talk about the line never use this thing this this laser pointing thing I think I just say another never use that okay they're terrible no one can see where you're pointing at you waste time what you should do actually is dim all of the text except the bit you're talking about put an extra rectangle over the text black one with opacity and use that to dial it back so that you kind of dim the text in the background and then you can just repeat that slide and then change the bit that's in focus so you can actually highlight to everyone the part you're talking about you don't have to use that stupid little red dot in fact I've seen instructions online for actually disabling it so you're not tempted to use it make your text big I cringe every time I go to a meetup and someone opens like Adam or whatever and the text is this one oh you guys can't see that oh hang on let me figure out how to make the text bigger and you waste 30 seconds and the people in the back still can't read it it's terrible so make the text really really really big it's also good to use appropriate styling like this is a screenshot obviously but if I were going to put code in here I would actually want it to look like it was in a code editor now depending on what you use keynote or powerpoint there's also utilities that can paste in code and actually retain the formatting because I've done it the hard way I've done it via screenshot which is annoying because then when you change something you've got to regenerate them all and I've also done it by laboriously coloring the different words there are utilities now there's one up on a gist and there's a little utility that you can install with homebrew that will actually do what I think is called highlights and I think I've seen some that might work for powerpoint as well depending on how you use it so paste in your code make it look like code italicize the comments that can be really handy for people too and lastly if you are going to do a live coding demo record your demo ahead of time like physically record it with video because conference wi-fi conference wi-fi is always terrible there is no guarantee that it will work also you're going to be nervous up there you're going to type your password in wrong plain text thing for everybody in the room to see just record a video and then narrate it while it plays I've seen this and it's so much better also it's kind of like a cooking show if you have any parts of your step that take a long time you can actually fast forward which is really nice so ok now here I'm going to kick off this build and now I'm just going to fast forward ok now next step so record the demos even if you still want to do it live you've at least got the backup if something goes wrong you can always switch over to the one you prepared earlier ok the sharp principles I promise you this is the top secret of anyone who is going to try and sell you something so each of those letters stands for something and the S well S stands for stories which we've already talked about human beings love a narrative we're like evolutionarily wired to tell stories to each other and so if you can put your talk in the form of a story it's going to appeal to people to different stories different forms of narratives so figure out one and use it to organize your talk you can also use your own personal anecdotes because everybody finds really handy as well H stands for humor some people find it easier to crack jokes in front of a crowd than others you know yourself but if you can find an opportunity to be funny it goes a long way it will loosen up the room it will get the audience on your side so if you think you can be funny try and work some humor in there the A stands for analogies not everybody in the room is going to be as technical as you not everybody is going to have the background necessary to understand what you're talking about if you can put it into a way that they can understand it if you can relate it to something else that they do understand they're going to get a lot more out of your talk so make good use of analogies R is references human beings love appealing to some of others so if there's a perfect quote or if someone has said a tweet or whatever that perfectly encapsulates your point use it it sort of bestows additional credibility to you that you're able to then share that with the room so references are a great thing to do and pictures we already talked about pictures we're visual creatures we can put up a nice big picture it is worth a lot of slides of text in your presentation aim for consistency Damien used this phrase same thing should look the same and different things should look different so if you're going to have an important point call it out put a different colored background on it he suggests that if something is really important make it different in two ways maybe make the background and color and bold it or something like that he also suggests don't be too cryptic don't set up puzzles for your audience don't use a picture that's sort of kind of related and then everybody's sitting there trying to figure out why she's put up a rotary telephone when she's talking about an app you don't want people to sit there trying to solve the little puzzle you've concocted don't make things too difficult for them sometimes it can be nice if you can find a way to make the image like a joke for certain people in the room but you don't want the rest of the room so don't be too cryptic tell them what you're saying don't bother with a bio if you're in front of a room if someone has said that they want you to speak you don't need to justify your position being there for everybody else it's really annoying to sit in a conference and have the person spend the first five minutes giving you their CV you don't need to do that someone has said we want you to talk great I'm up here I'm obviously know what I'm talking about so yeah you can put a little bit of a bio at the end for where people can contact you but yeah don't start off with a big long bio section it just kills us no slide numbers slide numbers turn your talk into a death march everyone won't be sitting there going oh god we're in 17 of 84 just leave them off don't do that it's just bad and avoid lots of logos I go to a lot of conferences having a lot of logos on your slides and maybe you're a sales person and unless you are a sales person in which case that's fine but for the rest of us you want to look like you know what you're talking about you don't have to sell people on your company every single slide so don't worry about that now it's time to actually present the talk that you've been working on you should never give a presentation for the first time ever ideally you'll have rehearsed it hopefully like two or three times hopefully even before a real audience meetups are a great place to practice talks every meetup organizer I know is constantly looking for people to volunteer to give talks also maybe your company does a brown bag or a lunch and learn or whatever you call them do it in your company like that'll give you feedback from them before you put it in front of the general public ideally you want to rehearse it the way you're going to give it so when I was rehearsing my Agile India talk last week I was in my hotel room standing up with my clicker actually doing it because if you're just sitting at your dining room table with your Latin that's not how you're going to give the talk you want to try and get your body used to the conditions of it as much as possible Damian even says if you have children or pets or stuffed animals you can set up to pretend to be an audience you should because that will help you or a full screen picture of an audience especially if you're very nervous about speaking it'll start getting you used to having people looking at you while you're talking if you're worried about saying um which I do say um sometimes the best way to get over that is to have a friend sit and ring a little bell during your practice every time you do it you will get over it for me if I know the talk very well I don't do it it's when it's new so the more you practice it the less you'll do it your word might be different I often say so so and everyone has their own little crutch word that they fall into and once you record yourself you'll start hearing these things and it's just terrible um but you can get past them it just takes a lot of hard work but nobody's really unless you're doing it every five seconds nobody's going to notice the goal of all of this practice is to just make it seem natural for yourself to be standing in front of an audience everybody gets nervous everybody gets nervous I have met a lot of speakers I've only met one speaker in my entire life who doesn't get nervous at all and that was Guy Kawasaki I worked at Canva in Sydney and he was our chief evangelist and he came and gave a brown bag to us on presenting he is not from this planet that man does not get nervous he just stands in front of the room he's got about like five talks and he'll just like blenderize them in his head and combine them together and I bet you his heart rate doesn't even spike like he tried to give us a brown bag on public speaking it was a waste of time because none of his advice was applicable to people from planet earth so for the rest of you nerves are going to happen it's not like I'm not nervous it will happen the ways to get over that being well prepared helps a lot like I said presenting less than 100% of your knowledge will also help you feel more confident it will make you feel less nervous one thing I do is try and reframe my nerves excitement I literally will stand off stage before I go up and go you're not nervous you're excited you're not nervous you're excited and because the adrenaline response is the same you just have to train your brain to think that you're in a good state instead of like a flight state and I know it's been debunked but I still do the power posing you guys know about that there was a Ted talk in a book this woman wrote Amy Cuddy is her name where she talked about how doing certain poses like the Wonder Woman can actually lower your cortisol and make you feel more confident and powerful and so she's got a whole bunch of them I like the Wonder Woman but there's a whole bunch of other ones if you look up the Ted talk on power posing and yeah it's junk philosophy science whatever but even if it's psychosomatic I do it anyway I think to myself you're not nervous you're excited you are Wonder Woman you're not nervous you're excited you're Wonder Woman and talking to audience members ahead of time can help a lot because I know some of you people I've chatted to some of you in the lift that means I'm not standing in front of a bunch of strangers I'm standing in front of people that I've talked to I know where they come from I know what level if I were giving a technical talk I might have tried to like suss out what level of experience you have so that I can maybe pitch my talk at the right level but overall that's a way you can feel a little bit more confident a lot of the reasons I rehearse is pacing I have a tendency to talk really fast and sometimes when I'm speaking to non-native English speakers that could be really really bad so I really try and work on my pacing I often put go slower at the top of my speaker notes Damien says you should aim for 10% under the time that they've given you that gives you a little extra time to play with if you know things go wrong if you end up going a little bit slower than you expected problems with your equipment at Agile India last week I saw a poor man whose laptop ran out of battery during his presentation by the time he got that plugged in and sorted the power went out but having a little bit of extra time is not a bad thing as you rehearse and you are looking at your timing and I love in Keynote there is a rehearse presentation mode I use that a lot work out the milestones like you've got those 5 points in your talk make a note when you hit this one that I should be about 15 minutes in I should be about halfway through I often put that in my presenter notes once I've done it, once I've run through it a few times I know okay when you hit here I'm actually delivering the presentation if I'm significantly over under I can adjust how I'm going make sure you can see a clock or timer you don't want to like it'd be really bad if I was standing up here and I was constantly checking my watch that sends a very bad signal to the audience so ideally you have a here I've got a clock I also always keep one up when I'm doing presenting so I can see how far along I've been and some final tips for presenting work on your body language you ideally want as little between you and the audience as possible when you are nervous the impulse will be to put things in front of you so like there's a lectern and you just kind of sink behind it you know, you just grip death grip on that lectern but it makes you look more confident if there's nothing between you and the audience this is one I really struggle with but one of the things Damien pointed out to me is that gestures with a closed palm look stronger than gestures with an open palm never ever, and I'm going to do it anyway point with one finger it's just a really aggressive movement and he suggests if I need to point I point with my whole hand together like this also depending on where you're giving your talk there might even be gestures you use that could be considered rude in that culture so it's always a good idea to work that stuff out ahead of time try not to clasp your hands in front of your body as I am doing right now that's obviously one that I work on a lot of women will do a lot of women will stand with their hands together or it's another way of putting something between you and the audience of having just protection it's a way of protecting yourself from the horde of people staring at you and here's another one that I'm breaking Damien, and it's because of the setup of this room and this is real advanced level like next level presenter stuff but if you have the choice try and set your laptop on your left is because when people are recalling things they tend to look to your left if I ask you what you ate for lunch you'd be like hmm and when they're lying they look to the right just in general and you don't even pick up on it you don't think about it but you the audience would somehow psychologically he said that they would subconsciously pick up on it so if you have a choice he recommends put your computer on the left you probably all think I'm lying but it is true truth only look at your slides if I want the audience to this is the thing I hate watching people they present by just staring at their slides the whole time or they're constantly doing this I try and only look at them when I want you to look at them when I'm drawing attention to them the other thing I would do is I would mirror the responses that I want you to do so for example if I want to say okay how many people in this room are engineers please put your hands up I am actually mirroring the response that I want from you if I wanted to gesture to the slide I could look at it and then draw your attention to it so you want to be really deliberate about that stuff with your body language don't apologize for mistakes this is my number one one that I work on because you all don't know what I was going to say you don't know what was supposed to happen unless you've seen me give this a talk before so unless I go oh crap oh wrong slide oops sorry you don't know and so a really great presenter can recover from those mistakes because they don't even let on that they've happened I've only done this I've only pulled it off like once or twice but it makes you feel like such a boss if you can like you know you get the wrong transition and you're like you just seamlessly get it back on track feels so good clicker have your own clicker this is really it like it just makes you feel a bit more professional you'll notice mine is a sticker on it that's because I went to presentation where everybody had the same clicker and I picked up the wrong one I went to present that that didn't work well so get your own clicker and label it so that you know that it's yours have a separate login on your laptop how many times have you seen a notification pop up when someone's presenting really embarrassing one or they go to open the browser and you see their browser history you know they see they got 99 tabs of you know Reddit open or whatever like Damien recommended and I now do it I have a separate Chris presenting login on my MacBook which has everything turned off all the notifications turned off and what I always do is when I got presentation I'll drag it over to that account and I will present from that account and the last point I'm going to talk about is wardrobe and I think I have a fantastic example for ladies in the room right now because of this the way that most microphones are set up for speaking sucks if you're not a man with pockets and we all know that women's clothes don't have pockets because of the patriarchy so you actually need to think about this it is a big deal that if you're presenting and you don't have a place you're going to end up with that hanging off your back or down your bra strap or something like that and I've seen this trip up a lot of women so once you've worked out a good presenting outfit stick to it something that actually either has no has short sleeves or you can roll up your sleeves is good because being able to see your gestures is important so you want to be able to see your hands simple dark colors like Damien actually says we're boring stuff this is not I want to look pretty for you guys because I know you but like if I were presenting a conference I wear something a little bit more bland and corporate something that has my arms free so that you can see what I'm talking about you can focus on my presentation and not on what I'm wearing and that's everything I have a few resources here I wrote up some of this in a post on LinkedIn which if you look me up you can find it on there and actually smashing magazine wrote up a nice article after global CFP day that has a lot of tips for speaking on here so if you'd like them have a look and again I'll share these on the notes so thank you anybody have any questions truth none so I wrote this talk I did this I help organize the Sydney Technology Leaders Meetup and we had a speaker pull out at our January Meetup like the day of the Meetup and I was like crap I can do 15 minutes on public speaking I'll do it so I did a lightning talk and it went over really well and I was like everybody was like oh could you write up your notes so they turned that into the LinkedIn talk then two weeks ago I was in Melbourne for Measure Camp which is a data science and analytics meetup there and it's an unconference where anyone can put up a talk and I thought perfect opportunity to practice for women who code I'll put up a talk on writing better presentations so I whipped this up for that event on the day today I went in and no one gives the same talk more than once I went in today and I tweaked it so I went in today and I tweaked it which is why I didn't have it quite memorized but for a meetup that's good enough yes I have a question on panel discussions so you know like yeah because when you're giving a tech talk like to people just like one presenter versus having like five people and that's a moderator yeah do you have advice for like the moderator and then also like the panel of people I had to moderate I've moderated a couple panels and I actually bought like an e-book on moderating panels because it's a really hard job to do well and I think so many people do it poorly and you know you let someone ramble they're not asking a real question like you gotta just cut that stuff off you know so as a facilitator I think there's plenty of materials that you can find for that as a speaker it's hard I think it sucks when you're the speaker up there and clearly everyone else is like just jamming in every word they can say to sell their thing like some people are not in good faith when they're on a panel I don't know what you do about that to be honest with you as the moderator do you like hopefully the moderator should be stepping in on that because they can just stop them the moderator should be making sure everyone has an equal time to talk but if your moderator is not doing a job that's when it gets difficult I wanted to give a quick mention if you don't mind while I'm up here so yeah I didn't actually do my bio because I said not to do my bio but I work for a company in Sydney now called Yao Conferences and we do tech conferences and events around Australia and as of last year Asia so last year we did Yao Singapore for the first time which was in September last year did anybody go anyone yay some people did so it was small last year we're gonna do it again this year and we're changing it we're gonna iterate we're gonna change it up a little bit and what we're doing is we're making it a one day conference instead Saturday so you don't have to take the day off work and it's gonna be cheaper and we're bringing over I can't say any speaker names right now but what we've done is we've lined up Perth Singapore and Hong Kong in a tour and we're gonna be bringing a hand-picked group of international engineering rock stars so if you'd like to go right now is the super early bird that is the absolute cheapest you're gonna be able to get a ticket so if you think you want to go convince your boss buy the ticket right now because you're not gonna give you guys a discount code later as we get closer but it won't be as cheap as right now so right now is the best that's it it's gonna be on September 8th if you want to go hopefully I'll be here thanks