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Good advice for presenting a TEDx talk. Bad advice for a technical talk.


If you don't care about the material, why on earth would anybody sit around for 15 minutes/30 minutes/an hour listening to you talk about the material. The sole reason for a presentation over a technical reference buried somewhere is because the presenter wants the audience to care about the thing they're presenting. If that isn't reflected in the presentation, it's not a worthwhile presentation.


But this was a technical presentation at a conference dedicated to the technology in question. A person stumbling across this on HN does not magically make them part of the target audience.


A technical presentation is a still a presentation, as opposed to a reference document. If you want to give someone a block of technical information, you do so in a reference document. You talk in front of a room full of people in order to convince them that this matters enough to bother.


Sure, but I don’t think this is relevant to the comment thread we’re in, which started off by sharing generic advice that mostly applies to TED-style motivational talks or “keynotes” at large conferences etc.


I definitely thought we were downstream of pinkmuffinere's critiques about not establishing a reason to be excited about the material. oops.




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