Give a Great First Technical Talk: Share your experiences at user groups and meetups - Available now!

 

My third book is now available on Kindle. It's called: Give a Great First Technical Talk: Share your experiences at user groups and meetups

User groups and meetups are perfect places to gain public speaking experience. They also provide a great way to build professional and personal networks by sharing what you’ve been working on.

This book provides a simple way to give a short talk based on three questions. It’s been used successfully over many years, for many topics, by hundreds of people.

This short guide shows how to use these questions and explains why it works.

For group organizers, the outlined talk structure provides a simple and practical way to build community while encouraging and supporting new speakers.

It's a very short book (about 7000 words) and should take you less than an hour to read.

It's 24 chapters plus an appendix.

Yes, very short chapters. To give you a sample, here are the first two.

Why give a technical talk?

Across the world, people regularly meet to discuss and learn about the things that interest them. Learning directly from the experiences of others is the most fascinating and rewarding way to benefit from such meetings. 

For people to be able to learn from others’ experiences, some people must share what they’ve done and learned. This book will show you how you can be one of the people who share their experiences, and benefit you and the people listening.

You are not going to give a talk like you’ve seen many times before

So, you’d like to (or at least have agreed to) give a short technical talk. Great. You’ve come to the right place. In this short guide, I will show you what to do and explain why it works.

This guide is different from other resources because it’s for a different kind of talk.

You’ve probably seen many technical talks and presentations in the past. They likely all had a very similar structure that was condensed or expanded based on the allocated time.

This guide focuses explicitly on giving short talks (approximately 5 minutes in length) where you share your experiences with your peers at a meetup or user group.

Talks like these are popular with organizers and attendees of such groups, and they’re easy for you to prepare and give.

This may seem a bold statement, and you may have many questions. We’ll get to them in time, but there are other questions to address first