About that walk bojanz, Damz and I had in London

Another Drupalcon is getting closer, and the sessions are open for votes. Let’s clear the technical stuff first - please vote for my OG7 session.

Now after all the required link clicking has been done we can talk about that walk Bojan Živanović (bojanz), Damien Tournoud (Damz) and I had in London. It was the night commerce module was officially released. I somehow found myself in a restaurant with the rest of the commerce guys celebrating the event. After some good paeia and a french amount of wine we headed back to the hotel. We were talking about the day we had in Drupalcon London, the sessions we attended and so on.

“Oh yeah, you had your core conversation”, I said to Damien. “You were talking about Document oriented storage, right. What is it exactly?” I asked. Damien, being Damien, gave me a Damien answer. Bojan, being Bojan, explained it to me. You should have heard what he was talking about. Seriously, I imagined people literally banging their heads in the table, and I think I even imagined someone bursting into flames. I think it’s called self combustion - it happens to geeks when they hear such ideas.

After that, there was a minute of silence before I asked Damien how did the people react, and did he think they liked it. Damien, well, you know. He just said - but this time with a little smile - “I don’t know if they liked it, but it sure was disruptive”.

The next day I had my own presentation. It’s no secret some parts of it were completely non-linear. If I may, I would use Damien’s answer to describe my own presentation.

Random list of guidelines that I think can help in achieving a good presentation

• While there’s a slight odor of corporate in Drupalcons, we are still Drupal, and I’d like to encourage presenters to act like it
• I’m always nervous before presenting, I doubt there are many who are calm. Fortunately, most of the people in the audience are extremely positive
• Don’t imitate, unless you want to. It’s good to learn from others, but presenting is something very personal. Think what you want to tell the audience and how it is right for you
• Prepare your presentation in advance. Seriously, people come from all over the world, and pay good money for it. Some crappy slides with occasional Lol cats images isn’t what they dreamed of
• The slides are there to enhance what you say, and are not the most important thing, so you can lose the long bulleted list slides
• It’s not about being funny or entertaining. If you are not funny in your day to day, don’t try it in front of a big audience. There are lots of other skills you can use to engage the audience

Lets try to make Drupalcon sessions truly inspiring. Or at least not completely boring.