93 items tagged “speaking”
2023
No Moat: Closed AI gets its Open Source wakeup call — ft. Simon Willison (via) I joined the Latent Space podcast yesterday (on short notice, so I was out and about on my phone) to talk about the leaked Google memo about open source LLMs. This was a Twitter Space, but swyx did an excellent job of cleaning up the audio and turning it into a podcast. # 5th May 2023, 6:17 pm
Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums
I’ve had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, “Big Opportunities in Small Data”. I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, “Data analysis with SQLite and Python”.
[... 225 words]Data analysis with SQLite and Python for PyCon 2023
I’m at PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake City this week.
[... 334 words]The Changelog podcast: LLMs break the internet
I’m the guest on the latest episode of The Changelog podcast: LLMs break the internet. It’s a follow-up to the episode we recorded six months ago about Stable Diffusion.
[... 416 words]Working in public
I participated in a panel discussion this week for path to Citus Con, a series of Discord audio events that are happening in the run up to the Citus Con 2023 later this month.
[... 546 words]I talked about Bing and tried to explain language models on live TV!
Yesterday evening I was interviewed by Natasha Zouves on NewsNation, on live TV (over Zoom).
[... 1697 words]2022
Don’t Read Off The Screen (via) Stuart Langridge provides a fantastic set of public speaking tips in a five minute lightning talk remix of Sunscreen. Watch with sound. # 4th November 2022, 4:02 pm
Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI
My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.
[... 1434 words]2020
Weeknotes: datasette-indieauth, datasette-graphql, PyCon Argentina
Last week’s weeknotes took the form of my Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data talk write-up, which represented most of what I got done that week. This week I mainly worked on datasette-indieauth, but I also gave a keynote at PyCon Argentina and released a version of datasette-graphql with a small security fix.
[... 724 words]Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and I’m presenting that here along with an annotated summary of the talk, including links to demos and further information.
[... 5166 words]OCTO Speaker Series: Simon Willison—Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data. I’m giving a talk in the GitHub OCTO (Office of the CTO) speaker series about Datasette and my Dogsheep personal analytics project. You can register for free here—the stream will be on Thursday November 12, 2020 at 8:30am PST (4:30pm GMT). # 23rd October 2020, 3 am
Weeknotes: datasette-dump, sqlite-backup, talks
I spent some time this week digging into Python’s sqlite3 internals. I also gave two talks and recorded a third, due to air at PyGotham in October.
[... 928 words]2019
Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments
Last week I completed GSBGEN 315: Strategic Communication at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
[... 643 words]Weeknotes: first week of Stanford classes
One of the benefits of the JSK fellowship is that I can take classes and lectures at Stanford, on a somewhat ad-hoc basis (I don’t take exams or earn credits).
[... 544 words]If you’re a little shy at conferences, speaking is The Best way to break the ice. Nobody talks to you before the talk. Everybody want’s to talk to you afterwards, largely because they have a way in. As such, public speaking is bizarrely good for introverts.
— Andy Budd # 26th September 2019, 3:15 pm
2018
How I moderated the State of Django panel at DjangoCon US.
On Wednesday last week I moderated the State of Django panel as the closing session for DjangoCon US 2018.
[... 1210 words]Notes from my appearance on the Changelog podcast
After I spoke at Zeit Day SF last weekend I sat down with Adam Stacoviak to record a 25 minute segment for episode 296 of the Changelog podcast, talking about Datasette. We covered a lot of ground!
[... 536 words]mendoza-trees-workshop (via) Eventbrite Argentina has an academy program to train new Python/Django developers. I presented a workshop there this morning showing how Django and Jupyter can be used together to iterate on a project. Since the session was primarily about demonstrating Jupyter it was mostly live-coding, but the joy of Jupyter is that at the end of a workshop you can go back and add inline commentary to the notebooks that you used. In putting together the workshop I learned about the django_extensions “/manage.py shell_plus --notebook” command—it’s brilliant! It launches Jupyter in a way that lets you directly import your Django models without having to mess around with DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. # 8th May 2018, 5:22 pm
2014
What are some tips for improving public speaking skills quickly?
Practice your talk, out loud, in private, as many times as possible before you deliver it. There’s no better way of ensuring you know your material and that you can deliver it at a sensible pace without freezing up.
[... 127 words]What are the most important things to keep in mind when doing a presentation?
Know your material, and don’t speak too fast.
[... 28 words]Presentations: What tools does Patrick Van Stee use to make his slides?
That looks very much like Apple Keynote (used extremely effectively) to me.
[... 30 words]First: I am a first time speaker at a convention (to happen in 2 days time) and I have no experience at all but I believe I can do so can anyone give me tips on how to look confident, engage the audience, inspire them and NOT SUCK...?
Practice your talk, out loud, at the speed you will be delivering it (which should be slower than you normally speak) as many times as possible. After the first few runthroughs, think about ways in which you can improve the talk—things you could communicate more clearly, slides that could be better presented, changes to the order that might help. Then make sure you practice the final version, out loud, at least three times in the exact form you intend to deliver it.
[... 138 words]2013
Why does TED refer to its speeches as “talks”?
I think this reflects a more general trend in the tech conference world which TED emerged from.
[... 115 words]How do I overcome my fear of public speaking (of people just “switching off”, or simply getting up and leaving the room)?
Look for opportunities to give “lightning talks”—5 minute talks given as part of a series of talks. These are excellent for beginner speakers as they help force you to get to the point as quickly as possible, and you only have to survive for five minutes! They are good for the audience too as if they don’t enjoy our talk they only have to sit politely for a couple of minutes before the next talk comes along.
[... 107 words]What’s your opinion on sharing your presentation slides (online for anyone to access) after speaking at an event where eventgoers paid to hear you (and others) speak?
I think sharing slides is almost always the best thing for everyone:
[... 277 words]How long does it usually take you to prepare a presentation?
Damian Conway (one of the best technical presenters I’ve ever seen, who also runs amazing tutorials on giving great talks) says “to produce really top-class presentations, budget at least ten to twenty hours per hour of speaking”.
[... 71 words]What are some tips for a successful Ignite talk?
Practice. All public speaking can be improved by repetitive practice, but this is especially important for ignite talks. The one-slide-every-15-seconds format is extremely unforgiving—if you haven’t nailed it, in private, speaking out loud at a sensible pace there’s no chance you’ll be able to keep up with the slides when you are on stage.
[... 92 words]What are some creative ways to pitch a new initiative to my team without slides?
Use a whiteboard.
[... 24 words]What are those most annoying problems you experience while working on presentations?
Keynote crashing and losing all of my work.
[... 43 words]I have embedded videos in a PowerPoint presentation (using a fix), but now they do not play when I save the file as a .pdf. Any idea how to make this work?
It isn’t possible to embed a video in a PDF file. If you want the embedded video to play you will need to distribute the presentation in the original PowerPoint format.
[... 69 words]