Weights & Biases' Alex Volkov uses a playful 'swyx Talk Scale' to preview his upcoming talk on whether engineers should read code

lots of folks prepping talks next week (congrats!). Some thoughts from RLing on thousands of hours of engineer- and researcher- focused talks:

- AI generated svgs > AI generated imgs. MAXIMUM 4 ai slop images in your slides, I don't care how pretty your mom thinks they are (exception ofc if your talk is ABOUT imagegen) - Be pointy. Better to have 1 message with 5 surprising applications, than 5 messages with no concrete examples. - Put code on screen. Engineers like to see code. Especially if they can nitpick it to death over things that aren't the point. - Don't forget to Entertain. Being actually funny, or good at telling relevant anecdotes, is more important than adding yet another bullet point. - Have a Thesis. every talk gets ONE "if you remember one thing from this talk, it is this" card. 1) SO MANY PEOPLE DON'T USE IT. 2) SO MANY PEOPLE DON'T PLAN FOR IT. you get one. use it well? - Have a Thesis Slide. you've been in that talk where everyone gets their phone out to take a photo of the slide. Because people see 1000x more images than videos, you are much more likely to have a viral talk/slide if you have a single viral slide. You are much more likely to have a viral slide if you TRY and most people do not TRY. Struggling? Collect examples from talks you like and adapt their format to your thing. Your slides have a power law - don't spend 5% of your time each on 20 slides, spend 80% of your time on 1 slide and have the rest build up to that 1 slide. - You might not need slides. live demo in IDE, off the cuff rambles, pull audience member up to roleplay, do call and response with the audience, sing/perform, voice over vibe videos, I have seen it all. higher risk/effort, higher reward when done well. - Be pleasant to listen to. Talks with bad/no visuals still can be listened to. Talks with bad audio are DOA. Be confident, project, remember vocal variation, evoke emotion. - Design the emotional journey. Start strong, end strong, have a peak aha/laugh/thesis moment in the middle. Everything else is buildup. - Data driven talks are underrated. Present pretty charts and surprising, authoritative numbers. Use the stage authority to infer from the data to support the broader thesis. Done well, it will feel like my obvious conclusion from objectively looking at the data you presented, not you feeding the conclusion to me. - How to shill your product/company without feeling salesy: teach me everything I didn't know I should to know about the problems you solve, and then you shall have earned the right to convince me you are the guys to trust to solve it once and for all. - Actively watch a lot of talks. like with anything you both need a lot of reps AND you need to explore to find the styles/role models that you shine in. Passive = no introspection after watching, just mindlessly autoplay next video. Active = trying to articulate why a talk was good/bad after watching. If you want to REALLY hone it, think about how you feel about a famous talk and then TRANSCRIBE the talks and read the words on the printed page, and then compare with a "normal" talk and define rules you will follow for yourself to improve.

thanks to @dexhorthy for organizing the AIEWF Speaker prep meetup tonight. we should actually do more of these....