Clojurians Log v2

Based on the schedule, each "slot" is 50 minutes, which is meant to give attendees time to switch rooms etc between talks. I think, in the past, speakers have been encouraged to aim at 40 minutes total and take questions out in the hallway if there's more than just a few quick questions.

Although I haven't spoken at a conference now for 13 years, I was a regular conference speaker before that, and it was always very hard to predict which talks would generate a lot of questions and which would generate none at all, so I generally aimed for the full talk time, and if I finished early, I'd take a few questions, otherwise I'd move discussion out into the hallway.

If you can find some willing "victims", walk through your whole talk with them a couple of times to get a better sense of how long it will take. My experience is that a lot of speakers have too much material initially and end up rushing and/or skipping a lot of slides.

Also, allow for demos to go wrong. Sometimes a demo can work just fine in practice every time, and then break horribly during the actual talk. It's worth making sure you know how to connect your laptop to an external display and project, and feel comfortable with projecting slides while also dealing with notes (either via the presentation software or on paper).