The qualities of a good talk

Rabea Gransberger: It means that the speaker is very knowledgeable and that he or she has a well-prepared talk, and they don't skip some of the answers that I would actually expect to have given to me.

A great talk should also match the abstract. Plenty of speakers give talks that don't match their abstract at all because they don't read it again. They submit something for a conference, half a year before the conference, and when they prepare the talk, they have a different idea for the talk in their mind because it developed over that half year.

If a talk doesn't match the abstract anymore, then it's not good for the audience. The audience is at the talk because they expect something that they read in the abstract. Sometimes, some of the points that were raised in the abstract are not addressed in the talk.

What I had to work on, after giving my first talk, was that I was very nervous at the beginning. When I'm very nervous, I tend to talk too fast. When I talk too fast, I can't breathe anymore. So, at some points, I had to struggle between talking and actually breathing.

I think that now I'm more relaxed. For example, last autumn I had five talks in six weeks and it was always the same talk. At the end of that period, I wasn't nervous anymore because I had been giving the talk all the time and it was very easy for me. It's a nice experience to be very fluent in giving one of your talks.

It feels great to not be nervous anymore, walk freely on the stage, and describe some of the aspects of the talk.

I'm trying to improve. I know that I will never be like Venkat Subramaniam, for example, but that also comes with experience. I will never, ever, give as many talks as Venkat! If you give a talk every couple of days, then you have a very different experience level compared to other people.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is it purely a question of speaking frequently, would you say?

Rabea Gransberger: No, it's also that you have to be willing to improve yourself. What I still can't do is actually watch my own talks. I just can't do that. It's still embarrassing to see myself giving a talk. But I try to learn from the feedback that I get from other people.

Another reason that I give talks is that they have helped in growing my self-confidence. I used to be a very shy person, so before I started going to conferences, I could never have imagined myself traveling the world alone and going to different places.

I used to travel with my parents as a kid, so traveling was nothing new for me. I knew how to get around and I knew airports, and how everything works, so that was a big advantage for me. But I could never have imagined actually going out myself, into a city that I didn't know before, and getting some dinner alone.

That was a big barrier in the beginning, but now I think my confidence has improved a lot. I'm not that shy anymore. I think just going on stage is a good thing for shy people.

Now it's normal for me at conferences, when I see nobody that I know for lunch, for example, to ask people if I can share the table with them, and just talk to them. It's a very big step forward from a personal perspective!

Sometimes, during my talks, I also refer to personal mistakes as well. I don't have a problem with sharing my personal mistakes on stage because I think people have to learn from that. Many people still see conference speakers as better developers who are at a level that they will probably never reach. I try to give them a different view about that. I just say that I have made my own mistakes as well and that I'm not perfect.

Geertjan Wielenga: Have you been in situations where you've known that the people in the room, or you suspect that the people in the room, know more than you do about the topic that you're talking about? How do you deal with that?