Week 8: Good public speaking

Slide from Greig Roulston's Kiwi Pycon talk: Find All The Books
Credit: Greig Roulston

Last year I attended a Kiwi PyCon in Wellington. A PyCon is a conference where people get together to discuss what they're doing with the Python programming language. As Python is used for such a broad range of applications, this can make for some really interesting talks on some diverse topics over the two days of the conference.

Some of the talks are better than others. As you can imagine, when you talk about your own niche corner of programming for up to an hour you run the risk of boring your audience to sleep. Interestingly though, the talks which were most engaging at the time are also the talks where I can still remember many of the technical details.

Credit: Greig Roulston

So what makes some of these talks so much more interesting and memorable than others? In many cases the speakers were just great, and obviously get invited to many conferences, but one thing the best talks all had in common was the effective use of humour.

One of the best talks last year was by Greig Roulston from the digitisation team at National Library of New Zealand. On the face of it his topic was rather dry: How, as a programming newcomer he gradually acquired the skills and technology to analyse an arcane metadata format, and cross reference his data sets to blah blah blah zzzzzz. However, thanks to his clever use of humour, and a speaker deck which was a work of art, this was widely considered one of the top talks of the conference.

Credit: Greig Rouston

The problem is that I'm not sure how easy it is to replicate this success in a formulaic way. I think you would either need to be a naturally funny and sociable person, or have built up your confidence through doing a lot of public speaking. I can see the potential for attempts at humour to backfire if you were under-confident or if it seemed forced.

Greig's entire talk can be viewed below: