How I make annotated presentations

摘要

Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.

If you’re going to put that much work into something, I think it’s worth taking steps to maximize the value that work produces—both for you and for your audience.

One of my favourite ways of getting “paid” for a talk is when the event puts in the work to produce a really good video of that talk, and then shares that video online. North Bay Python is a fantastic example of an event that does this well: they team up with Next Day Video and White Coat Captioning and have talks professionally recorded, captioned and uploaded to YouTube within 24 hours of the talk being given.

Even with that quality of presentation, I don’t think a video on its own is enough. My most recent talk was 40 minutes long—I’d love people to watch it, but I myself watch very few 40m long YouTube videos each year.

So I like to publish my talks with a text and image version of the talk that can provide as much of the value as possible to people who don’t have the time or inclination to sit through a 40m talk (or 20m if you run it at 2x speed, which I do for many of the talks I watch myself).