Speaking at JSConf Last Call is an amazing experience, and not for the reasons you might think. While the experience is still fresh in my mind I wanted to set down my thoughts and observations. If you are finding this too long, skip to the end for my “lessons learned.”

In case you were not at JSConf Last Call here are the pertinent details… I, Glen Goodwin and Todd Gandee gave a talk together entitled “We are Hacks and have been Stealing code for Years.” The talk was about how we all steal code because it is part of the process we use to learn new things and how it is our responsibility to make sure others in our community learn this process. We were very well received mostly due to Todd and I styling the talk as a quick back and forth dialog, hitting the major points we wanted to hit along the way. The audience enjoyed our presentation style, laughing a lot, but listening when we got serious. It was an awesome audience. The video is coming soon. This was my first ever talk at a technical conference and Todd’s second (but largest) technical talk. We are both super grateful to JSConf for giving two unknowns a huge chance on a relatively unknown subject.

So that’s the back story. Now here is where I tell you about everything else. The rest of this article details how we came up with the idea, our process in creating the talk, what is was like to give the talk, and most importantly what we learned from the process.

HOW IT ALL CAME TO BE

So the story of how our talk came to be begins with a Tweet. Todd Gandee, Chris Aquino, Eric Fernberg, and I had all met at JSConf 2013. And every year since then we’ve all tried to make it back to the subsequent JSConf events. Each year when JSConf announcements are made, a tweet goes out among us asking about who is going. For JSConf Last Call this was no different and I asked everyone who was going to go?

Todd replied that he was thinking about putting a talk together.

To this I replied offering to co-speak with him or help out.

It was a pretty big move for me to offer to co-speak. I had always thought about talking at JSConf but never really felt like I had anything worthwhile to say. (See Kevin Old’s talk about Imposter Syndrome) So my desire to speak was there, but I lacked what I felt was a really big idea. But more than that, the idea of speaking scared me a whole lot; not because I am afraid to speak publicly, I have little fear of public speaking, but more because I was afraid to put myself out there. I remember agonizing over even sending my offer to co-speak or help Todd, but eventually I just decided to risk it.

Todd’s answer came back four hours later and we were on the phone talking within a day. He was in.

The good news was that Todd had a good idea for a topic: The great news was when he told me it I got excited. I knew I was excited because my brain kept coming up with new ideas, new angles, new thoughts. When I can’t shut my brain up, that’s a really good sign and the longer my brain keep spinning on a subject, the better the idea.

So we opened a google doc and started spit-balling ideas.

SUBMITTING THE TALK

There were going to be some barriers to working together on this talk; primarily distance. Todd lives in Atlanta and I live in Baltimore, about 700 miles apart. Yet we knew the internet was full of tools for collaborating and we could employ them to our advantage. Initially we started with a Google Doc into which we put our ideas. Then came Google Slides for actually building our slide deck. Eventually we turned to Google Hangouts and ScreenHero for rehearsing together, but that’s getting a bit ahead in the story.

I want to tell you that Todd and I got together every couple of days and constantly refined our idea, worked out the story we wanted to tell, built the slides, etc. I want to tell you that but it would be a complete lie. Life is hard and gets in the way a lot. We are no different, so there was a fair number of stops and starts and really long breaks.

Initially we started by coming up with the JSConf submission form answers we were going to need. After all, there was no real point in working on a talk if we didn’t get accepted. So we crafted a Mission Statement. Well, really more of a presentation abstract, but I really wanted to fit that Jerry Maguire link in there. Then we massaged the abstract into the JSConf submission form.

We had a lot of questions though… Would JSConf allow a pair speaker presentation? Could they even technically support two speakers? Was what we were proposing a good topic? We emailed our questions to various JSConf people we knew from past years. I reached out to Chris Williams, having met him a number of times in mutual local community events. Todd reached out to Derek Lindahl whom he was friendly with from prior JSConf events. We wanted to know if we even had a shot and we wanted to be clear that we were willing to work with JSConf. We didn’t want the fact that we were going to have two speakers put any additional financial burden on JSConf. We were happy to pay our own way, so JSConf didn’t need to comp us extra because of a second person.

The results of our contact with the JSConf staff met with mixed results. I knew Chris was really busy with real life things and was not surprised when he never got back to me. Todd had a little better success with Derek, but it fundamentally came down to Derek saying, “Just submit it. If it’s good it will get selected.” That quote, from Derek, by the way, is the answer to always tell yourself if you are thinking about submitting. Just stop second guessing yourself and go submit it already.

So, on the last day of the submission deadline, after going back and forth a few times on our answers, we submitted our talk idea.

Here’s our initial submission abstract:

Two intrepid developers, who met at JSConf, examine the relationship of sharing code, community, and developer growth throughout the short history of making programming more art than engineering.

In this talk, Glen Goodwin and Todd Gandee will walk back from the present day to the “ancient” past of Babbage and Lovelace discussing how the act of “creative borrowing” influences learning and understanding for computer programmers; how we learn by observing and deconstructing the work of others to make it our own. This includes an examination of past and current models used for “stealing” the (mostly) freely shared knowledge and past work of others like Github, StackOverflow, View Source, and Byte Magazine. Our talk emphasizes the importance of inclusive conferences like JSConf in the growth of junior and senior software engineers. Programmers’ tools of today illustrate the apprentice/mentor relationship more akin to the arts than engineering.

On October 20, 2015, we were officially notified of our acceptance. It was a glorious moment, getting accepted. Rachel White in her own JSConf Last Call talk said she ran around the building screaming upon being accepted… There may or may not have been some happy dance moves on my part; I admit nothing.

THE FIRST DRAFT

And then it sunk in… Now we have to write the damned thing.

Initially we started just coming up with ideas. We had the basic theme of our talk in the form of our title “We’re Hacks and We’ve been Stealing Code for Years.” Great title, but what did it really mean, what does “Stealing Code for Years” really imply. Also, we knew that this being JSConf’s swan song meant something special to us and that we really wanted to show that. In the shared Google Doc we just started throwing out ideas, snippets really, that we thought might be relevant, possibilities.

And then neither of us touched it for weeks. Like I said, life is hard and things get in the way.

Yet, the thing about an exciting idea for me, is that my brain never really lets it go away. So while neither Todd nor I talked about it or added anything new to the Google Doc, my brain was constantly spinning things around, you know, like in a background thread.

Then one day, while sitting in my favorite lunch spot, having my favorite lunch (beer), I had a moment, a vision, an inspiration. “We should totally open the talk wearing ski masks, like we’re trying to protect our identity.” So I pulled out my iPad and proceeded to write this down. I knew that in order to pull off a ski mask based gag, the dialog would need to be very quick, so I decided to approach it like a theatrical scene using a script. And once I started writing it, once I started working in the script format, the words just poured out of me. It helps that I was an English Literature major in college and writing comes very, very easy to me.

So, yes, the first ten minutes of the first draft of the script was written in a bar, on an iPad, while consuming beer.

Explains a lot.

THE SECOND DRAFT

After some initial conversation with Todd about this new script, we again stopped working on the project for a few more weeks. While the first ten minutes of the script was done, the rest wasn’t really coming to me. And what little I did add after the initial burst was a little disjointed. We had all these ideas, but we lacked an organization for the ideas.

And then inspiration struck Todd.

Todd is a very visual thinker where I am a very textual thinker. He thinks by drawing stuff out, where I’m more of a writing stuff down kind of person. They are two different approaches, complimentary at times, but in-congruent at others. So Todd was having trouble thinking about the talk because we hadn’t organized it visually; I was having trouble thinking about the talk because I couldn’t figure out where to go next. And we were both stuck.

And like I just said above, inspiration struck Todd. He called me up. “I made a Trello board to just write down all the slides we need. I need to organize how this is going to go.” So we fired up Trello and we started to work. We first outlined the major points we wanted to hit, like talking about the history of Code Stealing or the section on Community. Those became our Trello columns (Trello Boards). Then in each column, we put the specific points we wanted to make like talking about NodeSchool or Women who Code. Then we could move the Trello columns around to come up with the best way to present the story we wanted to tell, the progression from Stealing Code to Community.

I cannot stress enough how much what we did in Trello saved our talk. It was so instrumental to just organizing what we wanted to do. And once we had that, the script I had to write became super easy to do. I literally copied all the column names out of Trello into the script as section headers. Then a copied out the specific points of each section into the script. A little bit of refactoring on the introduction part, and the script pretty much seemed to write itself.

The Script was completed three days after we did our work in Trello. Well, the second draft was completed. The final draft of the script wouldn’t be done until about two days before our talk was to be given. It probably would have been tweaked right up to minutes before the talk, but we had to pull the slides out of Google Slides and into Keynote to protect against conference internet latency. That meant Todd had the latest copy so I was prevented from rewriting anymore.

TODD MAKES SLIDES

The plan was for me to write the script and Todd to work on the slides. But in order to make the slides, Todd needed a sense of where the slides would go, how they would fit into the script. So we decided that as I wrote the script I would put slide changes in as scene notes, like this:

GLEN: That’s my point… We have an entire industry of tinkers, it’s baked into what we do. [SLIDE: Tinkering, or breadboard in state of repair]

Also, since the script had a certain flow I had an idea of what slides I thought we should use. Plus I knew there were just some slides I had to have in the talk because I love the images, like this IT Crowd one… Mandatory for any talk in my opinion.

So once I really got started on the script, Todd got started building the slide deck out. He started collecting images and putting them in order. I am firmly in the camp that you should never make your audience read your slides, so we agreed to minimize that. Use the images to enhance what we are speaking about, so the content of the talk is the focus, not the images. Turns out when you throw a bunch of humorous slides and make people laugh that also kind of pulls their attention away from the content, but we’ll talk about that later.

Of course, while all this slide work was being done the script was constantly being tweaked, the slides were getting tweaked as well. I was making sure to re-read the script 3 or 4 times a day, fixing typos and refining the flow. Todd was continually adding more slides and I was continually offering more suggestions.

The entire process was very iterative. I’m not sure how much Todd started to hate me at this point because I kept changing the ground out from under him. I tried to minimize the impact of my changes, but it happens. There was also a lot of places where I would change his slides and he would change my script. We had to completely throw out the idea that while I wrote the script and he was doing the slides, neither of us owned our respective parts anymore; everything was shared.

Meanwhile, we both set out to memorize the script. Big mistake.

REHEARSING OVER THE INTERNET

See, the script I wrote was roughly twenty (20) pages of mostly rapid back and forth dialog. Neither Todd nor I have ever done any acting at all, we had zero experience memorizing lines. And let me tell you memorizing lines is incredibly hard. I am a huge live theatre fan, especially Shakespeare, and have always had a lot of respect for actors. In the weeks leading up to the conference my respect doubled, tripled, then doubled again. My hats go off to the actors that can memorize their roles in iambic pentameter.

So we came to the realization that we were not going to be able to memorize our parts. Instead, we were going to have to read from the script as we walked through the slides. So we had to cut and paste each section of text from the script into the slide. Also, because of the rapid pace of our dialog we would need at least a few lines from the next slide showing on the current slide. This, it turned out, was a fair amount of work; and as we kept refining the slides going further we also had to refine the notes for the slide, and the text from the prior slide, and the text from the next slide. It was a constant battle of keeping everything aligned.

About five days before the conference we had our first “live” reading together using ScreenHero and Google Hangouts. We set some time aside on Tuesday night at 9:30 after our respective wives/partners had gone off to bed. I remember telling my partner Jennifer that I would be up “in about an hour.” I went to bed at 1:30am that night. We managed to read the script completely through exactly twice.

This is where I feel the real work began. We moved some slides around, changed some images, changed a bunch of dialog placement, and all that. Every single slide and line of dialog was tweaked and reviewed. It was constantly a work in progress and as I said above, changing slides around meant a lot of rework to get all the alignments correct. Uggh.

I think prior to our first reading that I figured we’d rehearse a couple of times, do the Google Hangout things, then maybe a few reads the day before our talk. Except it became pretty clear right from the first reading that the timing of our dialog was going to be everything. The opening bit with the masks was especially hard for me to get down because of the constant interruption nature of those first 20 lines.

After working into the wee hours on Tuesday, we decided we needed to do it again the next night.

Wednesday night at 9:30 I told my partner Jennifer once again, “This should be much shorter, we just need to read it.” I went to bed Wednesday night at 2:30am.

THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY BEFORE

On Thursday I flew down to Jacksonville. It’s a two hour flight from Baltimore, plus a few hours sitting around in the airport. I re-read the slides a dozen times. I had one particularly long speech that I just couldn’t seem to get down so I keep going over it over and over again. I’m pretty sure the couple sitting next to me on the plane thought I was some sort of crazed lunatic because I just kept staring at my iPad and mumbling to myself under my breath; and then every time the “Points for Glen” slide would come up I would throw my arms up in the air. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a sky marshal on the flight or I would have been detained.

The preceding Monday Jan Lehnardt had contacted me about sharing a shuttle van from the airport, since he, I, and Patricia Garcia were all arriving at the airport at the same time. I had already booked a rental car, so I just invited them to join me in the drive. Best thing I ever did. Jan is a seasoned pro at talks and Patricia had just given her first one at JSConf EU. I quizzed them both mercilessly for tips and tricks and perspectives. They were both very open and sharing, despite having been awake far more hours then they should have and that it was like 2am in their local time. I appreciate their company and helpfulness.

Additionally, Jan pointed me at a blog post he did on the subject of speaking at conferences which he emailed me later. It’s a great quick read and you should totally read it. It also gave me the idea to write this up as well and share my own experiences. So much thanks to Jan and Patricia.

THE DAY BEFORE

Todd (and another friend of ours Chris) arrived the next morning. Let the dress rehearsal begin.

Remember when I said I had constantly been tinkering… It’s true. The first thing I did before we even rehearsed was drop a slide and 2 lines of dialog. We also realized (remembered actually) how shitty the hotel WiFi is. This is important because we had used Google Slides to write our presentation. The first time we ran through the Google Slides on site we realized waiting for each slide image to load wasn’t going to cut it. We ended up exporting the slides to Keynote. For the most part this was fine as most everything moved over except for one crucial part: We had done some color coding of our speaker notes to indicate text said on a prior slide, or text coming up on the next slide, or even whose line was whose. That didn’t transfer over. Todd was a trooper and reformatted all those things Friday night instead of sleeping.

We rehearsed probably eight times that day. Chris (our other friend) came in and pretended to be our audience despite the fact he had heard our talk five times already at this point. Him being there was so critical because it acclimated me to the idea of an audience. Let me focus on them instead of always looking down at the slide notes.

A large part of our practice on Friday was just getting comfortable with each other and learning the timing and the delivery of each line. We had never given a talk together, so just learning each other’s cues was really important. Creating a rapport between us was really one of the biggest success we had in our talk and that rapport was entirely due to spending a day practicing. By learning each other’s cues we also learned how to respond to each other conversationally. This turned out to be critical because I don’t think we ever said the same line the same way twice. There was a fair amount of “scripted improv”. That is to say, while we would be saying the line, we each would modify the line or the intonation or the pace when we actually said it. It made for a much more comfortable dialog.

Practice also proved out that our method of reading the slide notes would work amazingly well without the need to total memorization. Yea, I did end up memorizing a lot of my lines, but what I had a big problem was was knowing when the line was supposed to come. However, because we had a dialog between both of us, whenever Todd was speaking I could glance at the script and read my next line.

Another thing that we changed during practice was who was running the slides. Initially I ran the slides during our remote practices, but it seemed to get in the way when we were rehearsing together. We tried splitting who was in charge of what slide, but it didn’t work. So Todd just took it over and did a far better job than I had. I think he’s more used to using the clicker and was less worried about timing the slides with the dialog. I also think he really wanted to take over running from the very beginning, but I was unable to hear his desire. Sorry Todd. You did an awesome job running the slides.

GIVING THE SPEECH

Honestly, I have very little recollection of what happened during the speech.

I couldn’t tell you how Tracy introduced us, but I’m sure she did a great job. Everyone knows she’s awesome.

I know a lot of people laughed, which was so amazing. I knew we had a few jokes in there, but never expected our audience to laugh as much as they did. And the laughter started the minute we stepped on stage. I’m told we looked utterly ridiculous. I remember telling myself prior to the talk that “if we got some laughs, just wait a second or two for them to die down before continuing.” Problem was, in the intro, the laughter didn’t stop. People genuinely thought what we were doing was funny. That made the speech for me right there.

After that point, everything was coasting.

I know I made two mistakes, but they weren’t huge and I was okay with that. I remember toward the end of the talk, Todd read one of the lines I was supposed to read. So I read his. And we kept going reading the other person’s line. Nobody seemed to notice, so we went with it. I think the practice really allowed us to do that. Well, that and it was pretty close to the end.

I do remember Zahra‘s game of twenty questions, but having missed all the prior talks due to rehearsals, I had no idea why she was asking us these questions. It seemed odd, but I rolled with it. Turned out to be a lot of fun… I improv fairly well. I think Todd doesn’t do as well and was less comfortable.

AFTERSHOCKS

Let me tell you what it’s like after giving a speech…

First, everything about your talk, all that memorization that you did? all of it gone. My brain literally emptied of everything regarding the talk within a second of exiting the stage. Well, that’s not true… I know all the themes and points we hit during the talk, but the lines we memorized? Can’t think of a single one. A few have surfaced back to memory over the days since, but by and large all the memorized text is gone.

Second, I was full of energy. My body was positively charged and I just wanted to bounce around. We had given the talk, everyone laughed, it was great. I was humming.

People came up to use and said good things. Chris Williams came over and complemented the hell out of the talk. That meant so much to us that he enjoyed it. Todd and I had said that if just one person came up to us after and complimented the talk, then it was a success. That the first person to do so was Chris made it all that much better.

We shook hands and said “Thank You” a lot. We met new people, we grew our community, it was amazing.

And then the crash… I think your body is running so high building up to your talk, that when it’s all over the adrenaline goes away and all you want to do is sleep. I almost fell asleep in one of the talks after ours. Todd was in the exact same state. Power nap time. Its amazing how much your body can recover in a 30 minute nap. Try it some time. 30 minutes is the perfect nap length.

WHAT DID I LEARN?

Don’t agonize over submitting your talk, just do it. You are completely capable to give a talk and people genuinely want to hear what you have to say. Stop thinking about it and go submit a talk. Do it now, I’ll wait.

Don’t give a talk with another person unless it’s absolutely critical to do so. It’s really, really hard to do. We were very lucky in that Todd and I work amazingly well together. YMMV.

Outline before you write, or make slides, or whatever. The outline is they key to organizing your thoughts.

You don’t need a script like we had, but have solid notes that are easy to refer back to.

Don’t make your audience read your slides.  Use images to enhance what you are saying.  But, be careful of the funny image as that can cause people to not pay attention to what you are saying as well.

If your slides depend on timing, make sure your notes have the text that is immediately following your slide change so you don’t lose your place.

You can never practice too much. I think overall, Todd and I rehearsed together somewhere between fifteen and twenty times. When we were not rehearsing I was reading the slides over and over again.

Delivery is everything. The timing, the intonation, the mannerisms, they all play into the performance.

It’s a performance. I learned this from Jan’s blog post (see above) and its absolutely true. Even more so for us where we actually had a script.

If you do slides in Google Slides, export them to PowerPoint or Keynote for the actual presentation. Never ever rely on conference WiFi.

You are absolutely going to make mistakes during the talk; just roll with it. Take a second, move on. Repeat your line if you have to. Like I mentioned above, Todd said one of my lines near the end of our talk, so I said his next line, and for the last 10 or so lines of the talk, we were inverted. We never rehearsed that, so it was completely unprepared for, but we were pros at reading the script by then, so nobody noticed.

As Chris Williams told all the speakers in a conference call prior to the conference, everyone in the audience wants you succeed. They’re your peers, co-workers, friends, and family.

Thanks.