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My First Public Tech Talk: What I’m Learning in Preparation
A while back I wrote an article titled What Standup Comedy Has Taught Me About Public Speaking and Life. That article provides a pretty comprehensive coverage of everything I know about public speaking. But even with all of that experience and knowledge, I’ve been learning a lot more in the process of preparing for my first public technology talk. Or perhaps I’ve just been revisiting, deepening, and consolidating existing realizations.
Despite the fact that I’ve been immersed in the technology world since I was a child, and having now been a professional engineer for 23 years, I somehow managed to avoid giving a public talk about technology until now. Next Wednesday, I’ll be presenting at the 2019 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, an artificial intelligence (AI) conference that attracted over 8,400 attendees last year. This conference happens to be organized by my employer: NVIDIA. That makes the experience a little more familiar than it would otherwise be, but also raises the stakes because I’ll be representing my company on its own turf, and I expect that many of my colleagues will be watching.
I anticipate that my talk will be held in a room that can hold at least one-hundred people. I know which room it is, and it looks pretty big on the map, but I have not yet stood in it. I’ve performed five-minute…
