I like this topic from the legendary Steve Hughes. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him, but he was always a thoroughly good guy. We both spoke at conferences back in the heyday of the SQL community, and although his journey has been tougher than most in recent years, he is still impacting the world in amazing ways.
Steve is hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, and asks about what we’ve learned from conference sessions, things which impacted us and how we work. It’s an interesting topic for two reasons – firstly, I enjoy giving conference presentations, and secondly, they’re really not my preferred way of learning.
Don’t get me wrong – conferences are a great way to learn things for a lot of people. I just find that my brain isn’t wired for learning during sessions. If I’m at a conference, I’m probably learning more from conversations, and from hearing what people are saying outside the sessions they’re giving. But this is part of why I enjoy giving presentations. Let me explain, by way of describing some sessions where I definitely did learn something.
I’m not sure which things I learned in conference sessions per se, rather than at conferences in general. I remember an incredibly insightful session at an MVP Summit in 2023 where a few things about Fabric really clicked in ways they hadn’t before. It was so insightful that I grabbed a few others who hadn’t been there (Alex Whittles comes to mind) to join the rest of Bogdan Crivat’s session. But I can’t say it impacted the way I work – just that it set a stronger foundation than what I’d had before. And also, it wasn’t a “traditional” session, with someone talking in front of hundreds of people. There were a dozen or so of us in a fairly small room, and Bogdan was writing on a whiteboard.
Whereas, a session from TechEd Australia 2005 impacted me a lot.
It was my second TechEd event (the first was 1999), but the first after I learned the significance of the technical community. And I’d become a regular presenter myself, just not large events yet. I couldn’t tell you about many of the sessions I attended (I learned a lot more in the expo hall that year), but one session certainly had an impact. It was about security, and the speaker was Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson. LinkedIn tells me he now works for Walmart. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesperjo
Of course there were things about security that I learned that day, although I couldn’t tell you much about that. The impact that he had on me was more than that. He held the audience’s attention like few technical presenters I’d seen before. I had done user group presentations and spoken in church plenty of times. I understood the need to connect with an audience, but Jesper validated the significance of that for technical sessions. I could remember university lecturers who connected with the room, but mostly that only applied if you were already interested in the subject matter. Jesper was attracting an audience who didn’t even care that much about security. He was leaving a mark. People were learning. Really learning.
Jesper’s session inspired me to aim for a style that would engage people. Technical sessions that would be interesting to people who didn’t necessarily have a background in the material. I wanted to be able to grab the attention of the people in the room (or at least most of them), and hold onto it. To teach their hearts and not just their minds, hopefully so they would leave changed. I try to do the same with my consulting, with the people I encounter in life in general. Of course I’m not always successful at that, but I do ask myself what people need from me whether I’m teaching a large room, a small room, or an individual. Sometimes it’s just a one-on-one conversation, but I’m there for the audience. I’m not trying to perform to be entertaining or interesting to them, I’m genuinely interested in the people who are there and I want to create that connection.
I know that my first TechEd Australia presentation didn’t achieve that. But I hope some of my presentations since then have. I try not to be bound by a slide deck or script (although I’ll have an idea about how the talk will go, and may have even used slides during the preparation), and instead reach into the room and be led by how the people are responding (definitely harder for online presentations, I know). I learn my material well, so that I have the freedom to explain it in ways that work that day, whether it’s through demos, whiteboards, flip-charts, or something else. It means I’m not a typical presenter, and while some audience members don’t like my presentation style, I hope that enough of them do. I’ve had a lot of good feedback from a lot of sessions, and even seen some other presenters adopt similar styles with great success.
I’m keen to see which sessions other people mention in response to Steve’s blog party this month, because I feel like there’s always something to learn about presenting. When I hear people saying that someone blew their mind, I want to know what it was that caused that. I would encourage every conference presenter to learn from the posts that respond to Steve’s question, and to inspire to blow people’s mind, to change their lives, and leave them different. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
@robfarley.com@bluesky (previously @rob_farley@twitter)
