I asked Speakers what makes a good Tech Talk

I was at React Nexus, a tech conference, recently which took place at Bengaluru in the first week of this month.

It had an amazing line of speakers who delivered great talks. I got a chance to interact with them in the lobby during lunch and free hours. One question I managed to ask 2 speakers, Tejas and Matheus, was - "What makes a talk GOOD?"

Hero's Journey

Matheus told he likes to use Hero's Journey pattern while building the outline for his talk.

It's a classic story structure, often employed in literature and film, that follows the tale of a protagonist as they embark on a transformative journey.

Matheus' blog post

This helps him keep the listeners hooked in.

He mentioned he does a lot of dry runs, practices his complete talk, before delivering it.

One more thing I loved about his talk is - it was very interactive. He asked us a question in the beginning of the talk and show us a QR code which opened a webpage where we could enter our answers. At the end of the talk, he showed a word cloud of all the answers we, the audience, had.

That's equally cool and clever.

He pointed me to a blog post he recently wrote touching all these points.

Content + Delivery = Magic

Tejas likes to teach his audience things that can be put to use straight away. He codes live while giving the talk and explains concepts clearly.

That was the main crux of his advice.

He actually recorded a YouTube video during his dry run and thats a wonderful video if you want to look at a good talk being delivered.

YouTube - Write React Server Components from Scratch

These were the key takeaways with respect to giving talks. Had a lot of wholesome conversation with the people I met there, which is a memo for another time.