Stealing From The Professionals

By:

I've wasted a truly horrifying number of nights of my life sitting
in pubs watching comedy.

I've also attended a depressingly large number of awful talks at
conferences.

A cringe-inducing number of them were ones where _I_ was the speaker.

Hopefully this talk will help return the karmic balance for the bad
talks I've presented in the past.

When it comes to public speaking, stand-up comedy provides the most
ruthlessly darwinian evolution of speakers. A standup will do 3 or
more shows a week in different locations to completely different
crowds - and if you fail once, it's hard to get asked back there.
And then you don't get paid, and then you starve.

We can learn a lot from stand-up comics about public speaking - not
in terms of making with the funny (which is hard), but how to work
with a crowd, how to present yourself, and how to deal with a crowd
that wants to have you killed.

This talk will examine the presentation of talks, when viewed through
the distorted bottom-of-a-beer-glass lens of stand-up comedy. What ideas
and techniques can we steal from the experts when giving a technical
talk?

Stream: Education

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Anthony Baxter has been involved in the open source community for more than a decade, largely working in Python and, in the last few years, on Python. He's worked in the internet area and now in the telco space, where he gets to exercise his incredibly short attention span by working on far, far too many things at once. He's written or contributed to more open source projects than he can remember--mostly related to networking and protocol implementations. A lot of his time these days is spent on Shtoom, a VoIP implementation in Python. Anthony is currently also the release manager for Python. This is much less glamorous than you might think. His real job is at ekit, a telephone company focussing on the travel market.