Helen wrote these notes on the slack group on 13/05/21 so we added incase they may help:

• Attendees just want to learn stuff. You just have to reach them with one or two points for them to go away and think about. You don’t need to ensure they consume the whole 50 minute talk - that would be information overload (I personally like to think about this as lighting the fuse)
• When comparing giving a talk at a user group versus a conference, it’s really on the environment that matters. The nerves will be the same if it’s 10 heads or 1000 heads in the audience.
• Use your colleagues and friends as sounding boards and checkers for abstracts. Would they go to the talk? Do they understand what you want to speak about?
• When you submit an abstract, have some videos of prior talks you have given, and if you don’t have that, record yourself giving a five minute pitch of your own talk, it will massively help the conference organisers to determine if you’re a good fit and increase your chances of being accepted
• Get on a CFP / programme committee and learn how how talks and abstracts are reviewed from the other side. Learn what gets rejected and why and what gets accepted and why
• Check your title and abstract for spelling and grammar. Keep it polished - put the time in.
• Submit your talk to the right track, otherwise it will have the wrong eyes and get rejected. Keep it brief, to the point, use bullet points.
• The value in talks is experience, especially where people have struggled. Sometimes your USP IS that you are new, you’re unique and you’re different.
• You do not have to an expert in something to be able to give a presentation on that topic. Knowing something well and being able to explain it to others are two different skill sets. What you know is not self-limiting.
• Conference organisers want new speakers. Otherwise they’re all identical events and that would be dull. Your experience is what matters.
• Folks in the Java sphere are looking for talks that can help them in their day to day work and there’s a huge range of them and thus a huge range of talks that can appeal from new to experienced developers.
• Attendees read the title, they do not read abstracts! Keep your title short and snappy and remember it might get cut off on printed stuff. The abstract is for the program committee.
• Remember that giving a talk is about owning your opinion, and sharing it - this is your opportunity to do that.
• A member of the audience can either look at a picture, read some text or listen to you, don’t ask them to do any more than one of those things - they can’t.
• Practise a lot, and then some. Don’t make it even more stressful for yourself and the conference organiser
• Watch yourself presenting, you will hate it to start with, but stick with it, your confidence will grow - focus on the stuff you are good at, that in itself builds confidence, forget the stuff you don’t like, focus on and build on the good stuff.
• You are your biggest critique but remember that everyone (especially the audience) wants you to succeed. You always have something to share and it will be new to some people, or refresh their memories. Never feel like what you have to offer is not going to be useful to them.
• Don’t put too many words in your slides (or too many of anything), don’t have noisy slides.
• Your slide deck is not the presentation, you are the presentation. With that in mind, don’t spend a lot of time on your slides, just dump bullets in them and then move all those to the speaker notes as you get your talk polished.