Clojurians Log v2

Doesn't work for my brain... I keep hand notes in pocket / lectern if needed. Because I only ever do live demos, I need all other screens to show exactly what i'm seeing on the laptop screen, otherwise my brain gets super confused.

I prefer having it, yeah, but it's often a safety net I only use once or twice in a talk if at all.

yeah indeed, a safety net. does it usually work the way you expect it to when connecting to a beamer/projector - as in, can you rely on it to work? I often use the slides themselves as my "notes" and then talk around that, but it might be better if I have some more notes for myself rather than on the screen for some slides

If you've never tried it, I'd suggest doing a few dry-runs to get the brain / visual system adjusted to the difference.

yeah for sure

writing separate paper notes is a reinforcing activity for me ... normally, the hand-notes help me stay on course, even if I don't use them during the talk abnormally... if the tech glitches, i have a good enough sequence in hand, and can even move to whiteboard if needed, or go fully extempore

but then again, i'm the kind of person who will carry a print-out of his flight ticket, even though the fancy eTicket is on the phone

the mba-suit days, it was customary to print hard-copy hand-outs, with slides + notes, and distribute them to meeting attendees (especially if exec / board-level people were present)

and last bit: in that same vein, for functional conf 2025, I simply hosted my deck on my site and handed a link out to attendees, and it was linked to the parent blog post which went into a lot of detail about the topic this deck: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch/deck.html this post: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch/index.html this talk: https://youtu.be/YEHVEId-utY i think this will be my new default method, going forward ... it covers all needs --- live reference for audience, live notebook for me, and detailed notes for everybody to copy/paste from

It's really useful to tip-remind me of • the e.g. 3 things about what I want to emphasize while this slide is shown - either I write 3 keywords, or 3 bullets in the notes with some words in bold • the e.g. clever way I planned for transitioning to the next slide (in bigger transitions, I find prepping the audience in advance for being interested or curious about the next topic step is really helpful) • the time in the talk at which an optional slide is OK to be included in the talk, or must be skipped (IOW at some key slides I add what time I expect it will be shown, and this reminds me to check the time; otherwise, the time part of my brain is completely off while I talk).

> does it usually work the way you expect it to when connecting to a beamer/projector - as in, can you rely on it to work? Yes, though it's common to need to tweak the settings around the same time I'm being fitted with a mic. One time (perhaps for my CLJD experience report?) this process was not smooth and caused minor stress. I think it was only once?

> I often use the slides themselves as my "notes" and then talk around that, but it might be better if I have some more notes for myself rather than on the screen for some slides Exactly my feeling. A separate place for notes to myself makes me feel more free with slide design.

Write the presentation slides the day you give the talk and you wont have time to forget anything 🤣 I did this many times and It worked well. Once I just ignored the slides and ran a discussion with the audience for nearly two hours. All the live videos were unscripted, although they all had a topic and most of the code worked out in advance. I have also given a talk with just 6 web browser pages (tabs). It was a last minute talk as another speaker fell ill. Of course these approaches only work if you already have a clear story or message you want to share; and are possibly masochistic or giving presentations far too often 🤣 It also depends on what you are presenting and who the audience is.

I've been thinking about this talk for a few weeks now, maybe I'm overthinking! I could just drop everything and then the day of the presentation resume work 😆

> do you use presenter screen Yes. At http://linux.conf.au in 2006-ish I saw a great meta-talk which advised us to keep visible slides clear, concise, and punchy, rather than filled with words. The theory is people want to hear the words from you, not read them on screen, I think. So now I try to keep a very short (sometimes one word) summary of what I am talking about on the screen, or an image, and the actual text goes on the presenter screen, which I reference or read from. In 2018 at ClojureXchange in London was I think the first time I just read directly from the presenter screen rather than trying to remember everything and sound natural, and that talk was well received (they asked me back again) so I started doing that for all future talks.

WRT reading out a pre-written text, a lot of famous orations have been this format which I think is a good sign.

I tend to write in the notes section of Google slides, use the presenter screen, and then as soon as I start my talk, I'm too focused on giving the talk so I don't end up utilizing the notes or the time. Ultimately, it still works since I practice so many times, but it feels nice to have the notes there anyway, as a safety net.

If you haven't spoken through your full talk, and recorded it, you're missing out. It's the best way to make sure you can keep a coherent narrative and stable pace while moving through your slides. I do this several times, leading up to a conference, and I listen back to each recording and take notes about which areas have a weaker narrative, which areas feel more like the slides are guiding me versus my overall conversation with the audience, and so on.

I want to echo Dave's suggestion to put more data in your notes and less on your slides. For the most part, I find a talk works best in a conversational style, but reading from slides is anything but that. So my slides tend to have 3-5 words max, which just centers the audience on what I'm discussing, but everyone's attention should be on my voice, not the text.

For anybody who has not watched this yet, definitely go watch this (How to speak, by Patrick Winston): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

I could just drop everything and then the day of the presentation resume workFor me, even if I do the right thing and prepare well in advance, the day before presentation day has a remarkable ability to cause full rewrites of the whole talk.

You know @jeaye I'm a big proponent of a ton of practice runs (https://www.deconstructconf.com/blog/how-to-prepare-a-talk) but recording the practice runs never came up. Good idea.

I use my presenter screen quite a bit. I also customize it before giving a talk, so that I have the timings, my notes, and everything there. Normally my slides are quite clean (and I have a fairly good grasp on what I’m talking about) but it’s really nice to have the notes available to me if I should loose my train of thought. I really like to have the next slide available to me, this helps my story telling quite a bit.

Y’all can be the judge of whether that’s working or not.

Is what it looks like, the timer will show the time used.

I also tend to have a “opening slide” which can be visible before the talk starts, and I always have an end slide like here so that we don’t just jump into whatever your presenting tool is a good thing.

notes don't work at all for me unless it's super limited (e.g. pacing). stopwatch + next-slide super valuable though

Dave, that blog post is excellent! I hadn't seen it before, but it aligns almost exactly with what I've ultimately arrived at myself. Even the conversational bit: > Talks aren't blog posts or books or even slides; they're verbal performances. But yeah, recordings are a super valuable addition to all of the practice runs. I'll be saving this link to share with others. 🙂

i also think you need to read the crowd. at best you can have bullet points for yourself. but you can't have a fully prepped speech that will hit the nail as good as impro.