Comment by thetrumanshow

One of the best topics for new speakers is "here's what I learned when I built project X".

Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.

It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.

Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.

No, it means you have something unique to say.

The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.

And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.

I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.

I don't think the author meant that you have to be the world leading expert at any topic. You can be pretty average, but you need to give it your personal twist. He is warning against very generic abstract talks that can be replaced by reading a man page.

That's how I read it as well. I think it's wrong because I've learned the most from people one step ahead of me. Experts who are ten steps ahead have the curse of knowledge: it's extra hard to figure out what things make sense to a conference audience. Many presentations go too fast and then too slow two minutes later

Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful

Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see

No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!

Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:

Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.

But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.

They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.

Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.

Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.

That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.

I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.

It's doable if you pick a very focused topic. In my first year of using Julia, I gave a talk on gradually adding Julia to a large Python codebase. Very few people could give a similar talk because (1) Julia is a fairly niche language, (2) most of the people who understood Julia <> Python interop knew it too well, and had forgotten all the common beginner challenges.

It is an extremely high bar if you aim for super popular topics.

You might want to spend time on some niche topic and there might be people who don’t have time to dabble in that topic but would be happy if someone did it for them.

Yes, it's bullshit.

I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?

Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?

There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.

If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".

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