Shouting at the DevOps With Corey Quinn

Matty and Corey Quinn trade hosting duties in a crossover with Corey's Screaming in the Cloud and talk about how to build a good conference talk, a craft both do often. Corey says the two have had several conversations about where talk ideas come from and thought they would help more than the two of them. Matty, now a DevOps advocate at PagerDuty, says Matty has given about ten times as many talks this year as in an entire prior career. The cold open is Matty's running joke that the show doesn't name drop "except when we do."

Get the Bad Talks Out

Corey's rule: "The secret to giving a good conference talk is always to give a bunch of crappy ones first," then iterating until you learn a joke will never work and cut it. Matty cites Robert Rodriguez in Rebel Without a Crew saying everyone has 10 bad films in them, and Matty hopes the ten bad talks are behind now, and notes they can be versions of the same material. Matty also takes a tip from Jez Humble to iterate on roughly one talk a year. Corey's joke is to give the ten bad ones in a row and get fired.

Stories, Especially Failures

Corey's pet peeve is talks where the speaker is the hero with the solution for everyone's problem, where a coworker in the audience doesn't recall the project. Corey wants more failure stories, which are "fantastic, and no one wants to give them," including how the decision was made, since "we're all in the process of making terrible decisions." If you lack a story, start there: "People want stories. They don't want you to read a man page to them." Matty adds that stories can be fiction as a narrative device, like a made-up Acme Corp with characters, and recalls Adam Jacob telling a talk through a personal story. Matty also describes a speaker at a large enterprise whose PR department asked to remove everything that said the company did it wrong, which was the point of the talk.

Nobody Wants You to Fail

Corey says "no one in the audience is hoping a presenter screws up," and everyone is panicking the night before and nervous on stage. Matty adds "Remember always that nobody knows what you meant to do but you," as in the story of Hitchcock never watching finished films because they never matched what was in Hitchcock's head. Corey notes that the talks they hold up as examples have their speakers cringing too, and that the talks people love most are often ones the speaker would rather not show.

Preparation and Practice

Matty admits to writing slides on the plane and a history of last-minute success, and now wants to reframe it: how much better could it be with preparation? Corey does it from poor time management, not pride. Giving a talk more than once means the first time isn't practice on an audience, though Corey warns not to show another conference's title slide. Matty's advice on practice: record yourself every time and watch it, and focus on one improvement per talk, like bowling one frame at a time, so "I am focusing on one improvement." Corey jokes that a list of 18 things to fix doesn't stick.

Finding Ideas and Submitting

Corey keeps a running note on a phone, jotting ideas from conversations, and gets themes from other people's talks and consulting. Matty does best when a shower or cutting grass turns off the thinking, and does expense reports at the desk for the same effect. Giving a talk is a good way to learn: Corey's Terrible Ideas in Git came from using a tool without understanding it well, and Matty's Keeping Calm with Azure DevOps came from wanting to learn it. Both recommend a fun title and a suitably vague abstract, and waiting until it's accepted to build it out. Corey says "Submit early, submit often," about six proposals per conference, expecting one accepted. Matty adds to submit appropriately, not a shotgun, since organizers get to know you, and use the notes field to explain. Anyone who says "don't you know who I am?" has lost the fight.

Ignites, Slides and Openings

Corey says new speakers choose a five-minute auto-advancing Ignite to get it over with, which is almost always a bad idea, since "it takes me somewhere between 3 to 5 times longer to build the Ignite talk than it does the 45-minute session," with no chance to back up. Matty's friend prefers Ignites because every beat can be rehearsed. Both say reading from notes is deadening, with caveats from Corey's first Ignite.

Matty says an audience can either read or listen, so a slide should be mostly empty while talking. A plain black slide makes a technical audience think "something broke," so Matty mentions Emily Freeman's approach of using a calm photo. Corey recalls Emily opening a keynote at devopsdays Indianapolis with "the dumpster is on fire" as a fire alarm went off. Both recommend a cold open with a story, because "you have about 45 seconds to grab people's interest before they get back into their phone," and the resume slide can wait a few slides, a snap from Decker Communications training. Corey says the urge for a resume slide comes from the voice saying you're a fraud, and Matty answers that "You don't need to prove that you have the validity to be there because the talk selection committee already did that by giving you the stage." Corey: "If you're holding the microphone, you deserve to be there."