| There are quite some people who are writing full scripts. That's also what I prefer. It goes like this: Before creating a single slide, write down sentence by sentence, word by word, what story you want to tell. You can use tools to get a very rough metric of how long your written text will translate being spoken. Stop when you reach your talk length. Once you are done, you can start creating slides. Choose what you like the best and what fits your story. Few slides, many slides (e.g. Pecha Kucha), no slides. I would never do live coding but show small videos instead. I have seen live coding fail more often than being a great success. But if you want to do so, have a fallback video at hands. Now your rehearsal: Not 1 full, not 2 full rehearsals, do as much as you can!
For my last and very first talk for a conference I did like 20 full rehearsals, 5 of them in front of people, some in the living room, some in front of the mirror. I bet this can be less in the future but it got me super confident. Rehearsal matters! Don't be lazy and you will be amazed how confident you can go into your talk. When you black out during your talk, don't panic because you have a full script which you could theoretically read word for word. That always calms me down. Good luck and have fun. |
It has all the same difficulties as a regular talk, but with some added handicaps:
- no ability to make eye contact with your audience and feel the room
- no way to talk over small errors, if you get stuck on a bug it can take you 10 minutes to find your way back out
- very difficult to keep the audience’s attention since all they see is a wall of text
- talking and typing at the same time is really hard, you get to enjoy stammering your way through fumble fingers
In short: only try a live coding talk after you have a lot of presentation experience.