Rails Conf 2013 How to Talk to Developers by Ben Orenstein

yeah I figured we try something crazy and start on time
sound good so those of you would have seemed to give talks before can probably
guess what's about to happen
my name is Ben or NC now we're gonna stop that and i would love it if you
would all stand up please
oh man it's hard to see
check the set I'll take the stage
would you please all do a set of 12 air squats with me get the blood pumping a
little bit you know their squad is you just squat down and stand back up
will do 12 together ready
come on feel the burn
that's 10 well
awesome now would you please put your hands up in the air like you don't even
care and good stretch on the stretch them a little taller now you keep your
abs tight and would you blend this way to get a nice stretch that way that
sounds type
now give me ten percent more oh yeah
abs tight let's come back to the middle and now we go that way
same thing here we go feel that stretch
don't make the pain face don't go in there . dave is there's no power animal
in there one more ten percent don't make the pain face and up
actually I would you please turn your neighbor and thank you for coming to a
neighbor how's it going
shake their hands
awesome go ahead and take your seats
so this talk is how to talk to developers again if you know me you
would know that I there's no way i could just get a pure metal talk of a very
practical guy i like to focus on examples in real world things
there's no way i could just sit here and talk to you for 40 minutes
purely about giving talks so what I'm gonna do instead is i'm going to give
you several lightning talks that will work with your short attention spans
towards the end of the week so I'm gonna give you these little talks and then i
will talk about the techniques I use in the lightning talk and mix in a little
meta talk as we go
so worst case scenario if you learn nothing about speaking you'll hopefully
at least learned something from the lightning talks
best case scenario you might learn a little bit more than that
so the first thing we'll talk about his law of Demeter
so can I have sad pie tell joe Ferris kayla thompson John york and george back
hurts to the stage please would you stand over here gentlemen these are all
fathers these are my colleagues my colleagues and I was sent to you
actually but thanks for your participation
ok so i can I have you in that order we have a chat and then Joe and then Kaleb
and then John and George you come over here please don't hold you in reserve
you're my special guy
ok so loud to me the most important thing to know about love the meter is
that everyone will argue about how to pronounce it
some people say to me to some people saved ammeter i'm gonna switch between
the two patrol you maximally
ok I'm stable for the second see your pretty face is highlighted in my nice
white projector screen a little further
there we go ok so these gentlemen he's good-looking gentlemen are objects in my
system I had built the system chad is an object jose an object
caleb is an object and John's the object that John is the master of the time John
knows what time it is no time - 10:30 perfect John knows what time it is ok so
i have built the system and these components are wired together these
components yes
and the best thing about having the mic to be able to troll your colleagues so
chad has now wants to know what time it is
however because i'm not aware or what I was not aware of what the law of Demeter
is or diameter as it's often known i have encoded the information of how to
look up what time it is
and so what chad knows is that he should ask Joe to ask Caleb to ask john what
time it is
chad knows that exact chain of how to get that information
so now channel to find what time it is such as hey Joe
please ask Caleb to a strong what time it is hey you know that John and then
Joe knows what to do he asked a lot to ask john and then Kaleb
it's asks John and John what time is it and that this information
1030 ish this information that i didn't coach John very well
I monkey patch time . now to be time . now ish not as good
so this information of the ish flows back to chat and Chad find out what time
it is and that is great however i'm about to break Chad
so what I'm going to do is say thank you very much guilt for your help you make
us sit down George come in
Caleb I'm sorry but you've been refactored
this is George George is my new replacement for Kayla peace
he functions better than Caleb didn't sorry Caleb so but the problem is I've
broken Chad go Chad now asked Joe to ask Caleb to ask john what time it is and
joe says no problem i'm going to appt 0 and then we have an exception and chad
has an exception inside him and it makes him sad
chad is broken and the problem is the reason is broken is because of the
structural duplication in the system
that's a lot of the meter is all about it's about avoiding structural
duplication it says don't encode in your objects knowledge about how the whole
system is wired together
so what we need to do to fix this since we have to refactor anyway because we
broke chat and have to bus chat open and rip apart is internal sorry Chad we're
going to change him while we're here and we're going to do instead is have Joe
turn towards Chad and block his vision and now you're here we go
now when shadow would like to ask what time it is he may ask show what show is
gonna let him know what he's doing right
so chances hey what time is it and chad has no idea what Joe's going to do he's
gonna block him off he's going to turn around and be like hey George
what time is it and then George has also blocked jo Jo doesn't know what's going
on behind George George whispers and John's here
it's still 10 30 years apparently
terrible programmers that's me and the information flows back but now later if
I want to swap out George again or even John again it doesn't bother chad chad
is not broken just have one big clap off the same time for these guys
hello one big clap all the same time for these guys
much better thank you guess they just get one class
so that's love 2 meter don't encode structural knowledge about your system
in your objects because then you have coupling
Chad knew exactly how to get the time all I want Chad to know is who we should
ask to get the time and that person should block off how that person is
getting the time and that way you can swap out components
it reduces coupling that's what a lot of 2 meters all about ok so that's it
that's the first lightning talk let me talk over five minutes in
let's talk about a little bit of stuff so what you probably noticed is that
right off the bat i did two things that you probably have not seen this
conference we started off with some light calisthenics
that's just to get your blood flowing to get you excited to get you paying
attention and also we did some sort of live demonstration with people and
pushing and talking and all that
now that's very intentional talks have to reach out and grab people you've got
to do it right away because your first 30 seconds or so your first 60 seconds
or so you are setting the tone
also notice how my introduction when my introduction is one sentence that says
my name is Ben orenstein i work at thoughtbot and i would like you all to
stand up
so before the end of my first introductory sentence something weird
has already happened and that is completely intentional but I want from
the start for you to be like what
what is this guy doing that's how you keep people's attention throw something
weird and then make something odd happen
most people they give talks you like to come up and they have a slide and slide
is about themselves and they have a second slide this lies about their
company and they think they should know that the company for sending them and
tell you what their company does and then they try to tell you they summarize
the talk and they try to sell you on why this is important problem and then you
some background information about this problem and then they give you your
first example and what happens is you find that about minute 10
the most important thing has been our one important thing has been taught to
you before that I was almost all
noise and so I try to get people to my thesis right away and here's the thesis
for this stock this talk
it is more important to be entertaining and informative bored people do not
learn anything
it doesn't matter how good your information is if it's not interesting
to watch
if you can't hold people's attention they don't learn a thing
that's not to say that you should only be entertaining and have no substance to
talk that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying there's a hierarchy
you have to start with the interesting part you have to hold people that's hard
to do because you're fighting the whole internet people have laptops you have to
be more interesting than the internet
i recommend air squats
ok so i have a quick story which was I was at a conference and this is a
conference you put on for college students in boston and we're teaching
the very basic stuff about software engineering and there was a talk done by
Nick caranto dick
good timing that's Nick over there and so Nick you have a talk about the basics
of TD
now at that point i have been doing TDD professionally for about a year and a
half and this was intentionally it was an eight-minute introductory talk very
simple very straightforward
I literally learned nothing during the talk I knew everything that nyx said
during the talk but I was completely engrossed for the whole thing because of
his delivery
the way he presented the information made me enjoy the talk
even though I didn't learn anything sandy mess has a saying that she passed
down to her which is people enjoy the story they don't know where to start
people love the story they know even if you know the story even if you know the
information if you can present it well in a compelling way people to pay
attention
ok one more thought of how you build a talk when it reporter create some peace
for a newspaper they write in a very specific way and you'll notice this out
check this out when you go like New York Times from now on the very first
sentence is extremely high level summary of what happened the next paragraph is
more detail still high level about what happened
each paragraph build on the previous one the dependencies the paragraph all .
upward will never have a paragraph here that refers to something that's going to
be just explain down here all the dependencies . this way and that's so
that their editor can cut the piece at any point and still have a complete
article because sometimes you only want this much and sometimes you have a lot
of column inches and so you want this much
write your talks that way I've already told you my most important thesis
we're not even 10 minutes in if you guys went to sleep right now you would know
the most important thing I think i have to tell you which is it's more important
to be interesting and informative and so if you all tuned out
that's ok i got my best . at you I think there's more good stuff in here so let's
see what else we can come up with
so a lot of people have probably heard of tell don't ask with object-oriented
programming
raise your hand if you've heard of that if you haven't heard of you should
google it later
it's an interesting idea
something I follow for talks is show don't tell
so let's see what that looks like so I want to show you three interesting
things that have improved my vin productivity recently
anybody here a fan of anybody heard of it yeah come on then
there we go okay Wow okay
this is them in inverted colors they're lovely
that's ok so first thing that I have learned I picked up the phone mr. Joe
Ferris you can visit me while we were pairing is something called a relative
number
so notice the line numbers on the left side of the screen and what happens is i
move my cursor everything is relative to my cursor my cursor is always on line 0
why is that good you asked what an excellent question what an attractive
audience
so that's good because you don't have to eyeball things anymore
so let's say I want to go to the start of the method find by off hash which is
four lines up
I can say for k and jump right there
I don't have to hold k our whole day by the way holding characters and them is a
nice anti-pattern to be aware of
so I can do quick vertical motion let's say I want to delete this whole method
because you know what this method just kind of garbage e so I want to delete
the whole method plus the line below it I can say for DD
I don't have to estimate how long that method is because I can see how it goes
from 0 to 3 or 3 is on the white space and I want to get rid of the white space
as well that's four lines
BAM I can't believe that whole thing at once as opposed to visual mode right
visual mode start selecting come down here go down here blah blah who has time
for that
I'm a consultant i get paid by the hour if anybody saw me do that client saw me
using visual mode to be so embarrassed
also used for things like indenting so let's come down here this right here i
think i just know this morning this doesn't need to be a begin
we have like an implicit the thing wrapped around this part right here to
rescue this
let's get rid of this begin so now i need to run in dense this whole thing
all the way down to the line that is nine lines below so i can say nine less
than less than the dent all that stuff
actually let's decide we don't want to rescue this anymore so 9j hot down there
and then I want to eat all the way to the end
so i'll say 70d just fast
Joe has an awesome analogy that he used with it is he says it's like you're
driving a car and fifty feet up ahead of you you see a turn that you want to take
you would take a left and with relative number you just take the left and you're
there
I love because that's how it feels it's just so fast that's right to know that
the first thing I own is another cool thing i learned last night
say I want to move down i'm gonna change a thing last name which is currently six
lines or seven lines below me
I want to change that variable name if I just say 7j that's a 6 j
I moved down to last name what I want to do instead is moved to the l you can
actually use plus plus says move down to the next line to the first non-white
space character which is pretty badass just plus alone
see how hops down there here's here's - of course it does the opposite
so i can say good on the last name i'll say six plus it's over John 5 plus you
get the gist
30 basic arithmetic is difficult for me
all right Ruby by the way you can still have absolute numbers
so one of the one of the downsides of this is it's a little annoying when
you're pairing was like oh just things i think line for 23 there
that's a little annoying it's easy to flip between these two things but you
can look at your numbers if you notice in the bottom right
I have a line number in my status line you can see it counting up and down
you can also still jump to specific numbers of your test says oh you got you
got a problem on line 32 x 32 capital g and you pop right there
so it's not too big a deal this workaround for that two more things that
I learned that were very handy
the first is a new leader command a lot of leader commands i have so many leader
commands their leader commands
some of them by the way i think this is one of the best ways to improve your
speed with vin is divine at on the leader commands
whenever you're repeating stuff so this one I want to look at is right here
I was watching a play by play with Aaron Patterson and corey haynes and they get
something done the test pass and here it goes
oh my god please commit and i understand that metallic sometimes like it works
please just get in there make it let's let's write this down
so this just add the current directory committed with a message of work in
progress WIP and pushes it up because you know when i push it sounds great
I think a good mentality to get into is trying to leave the editor don't make
committing code
I'll leave the editor activity don't make running tests will be the editor
activity stay in them that number two or number three is this is something i want
you to do on the plane ride home so you can be sitting there and you have no
internet and that's a bummer
you have no Wi-Fi most likely so type : h and go to the help and then scroll way
down here
don't hold gel like I'm doing and check out this section editing effectively
maybe you could read some of these docs and not learn anything but i'd be pretty
surprised there's a lot of good stuff in here it actually has a really good
documentation especially for an open source tool
so go ahead and check that out on your plane ride learn to pick up a couple
things don't try to cram 10 things your brain to pick up one or two
ok so zoom back up the metal modem for a second so i did some show don't tell
I'm a huge fan of live coding live demos showing things for real in a real editor
or a real browser
I think it's so powerful because of I guess because of power . because of
history because of precedent people think i have to give a talk
therefore i will write some slides I think slides can be awesome in certain
instances
sometimes the right visual aid and slide is tremendous but I think as our default
means for conveying information it kind of stinks slides are dead their object
under glass
so slides to me are like photos live demos are like videos showing a sequence
of what happens live there's more information being conveyed in it
so now you're trying to teach someone how to throw a frisbee and so you show
them with a series of five different things of you throwing the frisbee vs
this is how you throw a frisbee there's so much more information conveyed in the
live-action of doing it so I tried to reach her slides almost ever i think
it's i think it tends to create more compelling talks and that gets back to
the being interesting thing again live coding i think is more interesting than
code on a slide it takes more work
it's pretty tough people say i don't know how you do it it's not that bad
it's not that hard
it's just kind of hard but giving talks is kind of hard and your challenge is to
be interesting
so try to do that I think like coding is an awesome way to be more interesting
ok that's my rant on live stuff so let's do a quick sidebar on body language
this is something that a lot of new speakers struggle with so quick body
language check what's good body language well kinda tall
nice tall posture looking comfortable confident the thing that most people
struggle with is your hands
so there's a lot of temptation extremely natural reaction to the intensity of
having this many people look at you is to do this
it's not so good even worse is this
this one's you this one happens a lot it's kind of hard to see
come up here even worse is this
for this this is pretty bad too
whoa for various reasons don't stand on chairs
this is the worst of all the way like look how it looks you guys right now
think about how your perception of the changes vs this this is the best default
posture for talking hands
our arms bent right about here very neutral very fine you can get in trouble
with this
I think one hand in the pocket is all right casual kind of talk we're just
talking
we're talking code hanging out
well switch sides whatever
that's cool two hands this is starting to look a little bit like this
I think two hands is a little to cash a little too much little too close off
so when in doubt go with this arms bent at 90 degrees
maybe drop one maybe one pocket if you're feeling pretty saucy
okay uh just where did we go there we go
ok so let's make a change of pace new lighting talk this is a story
so this is a story about my very first programming job ever so I had no
experience so i took an entry level position at a company that would hire me
and trained me i had written some code on my own but I had never done
professionally so they hired me and I was so excited and then after not very
long i discovered this company had the worst case of not invented here syndrome
that you have ever experienced in your whole life
so this is a 30 year old medical software company and when they got
started in the game
mainframes were being used in hospitals so what you have to do is you have to
write your own operating system and then you have to write your own programming
language and then you ran that on the mainframe and that was how you deliver
software and so the DNA of this company encoded that information in a law of
Demeter violation and today and you when i got there in two thousand six or so
they were still writing their own mail client to do list application text
editor and programming languages and the and also operating system that ran
emulated on windows
awesome so in the early nineties HP approach this company and said we want
to do
bedside ordering for doctors we want to give them a hand held device which
probably like this big at the time I want to be able to do like order things
for their patients without going to a computer only we have about 500 k of ram
to work with
so this company that was working for said well not a problem what we can do
is we can design a language that's extremely small and by small i mean
literally it has a very low number of characters per program
I swear I'm not making this up
so let me hear that hear the details of the programming language locals in this
programming language or capital letters
so if you want a local variable you cannot name it patient or doctor or
order or account username MP 40 or diore you have a through z within a method
those are all you can use for local variables you cannot give a more
descriptive name
sorry next you have Global's which are a letter plus a number lower case a
through z plus numbers
that's where you store your data if you want some global data which of course
you want lots of global data next built-in functions for the programming
language artoo are pairs of letters lowercase Z capital t means print this
on the screen
obviously
capital v lowercase R means i don't know
kill the patient there was a thing you would use as you were programming this
you flip up and look through and find the code for the function you wanted to
call because they weren't even demonic they were just you had to memorize what
they were so that's your functions built in to define your own functions which
you could do which is frankly very generous of them you could use single
numbers so within a file you would say call function six on the piece of data
f and then when that comes back store it in our and pass it to function
ZM yeah you get a picture there a 1 data structure which was a list
they had one condition which is if that one looping constructs which is due and
very strict rules about line breaks so it's very hard to actually break a line
the rules for when you could break a line we're pretty draconian and so
sometimes you have to really stretch a long line of statement that before you
could break it now
fortunately I had the good sense to quit this company eventually and I had the
good sense to take a screenshot before I left because I knew no one would believe
me
so i'm going to show you some proprietary information that hopefully
won't get me sued
this is the four real programming language
so first I just want to get a sense of it
this is better right ok so i just don't know you can't read it but this is check
out the shape of it
so everybody talks about the line breaks not being easy to do well and so by the
way this is gonna be hard to see but do you see the scrollbar edge right here
all the way it's like three times this wide so let's zoom in this is the macro
view I think you have an entity let's zoom in and check this out a little bit
closer
let's check it out up here and you're going to see I was not lying to you
why are you applauding
this is because I survived good answer
mmm so let's talk about what's happening on line one here
I mean I i know it's obvious
so this says if you access the global data that's in lower case V 1 within
this is a bad sign and how you access things that means like you know it's
like double / ends in JavaScript
so if you access something from the data structure be one and then you feed it
into the function capital C capital V which does obviously know what it does
and that equals 1
then let's start building a data structure will build a list of whatever
was in v1 but grab the zero with piece of it
feed-in whatever is in our local 0 which is you know whatever it is
Oh probably stands for order would be my guess in this one and then the literal
for
obviously and then take that structure feed it to the HC built-in and store the
result back in 20
we are now one line into the file because you're with me right you totally
you're following me
you start to get a picture let's scroll down to the main body of this program
this do loop right here so i don't remember what almost any this does
however i do remember that
lklk reads from the keyboard so I believe this is this is like the main
like input loop and so we have like a doll k equals 13 like that's that enter
an ascii remember yeah
so if if the user hit enter you know do this condition which is like build a
data structure of oj and are obviously and feed it into appt at five right
there
that's one of my local methods for my local functions so the data structure of
oj and our and run it through number code set five and then a sign that too
co je r and grab the zero with peace and if that's true then
well just kind of kill yourself
so in conclusion if you're ever wondering why my ruby code looks so bad
is because this is my first language so so sorry about that
if it ok so back to the metal and people like stories people especially like
stories
if they're about you and they're embarrassing and programmers especially
like stories
if they're about code that you wrote that's worse than their code so feel
free to use that this is why the daily WTF is so popular people love this stuff
is a little bit like crack
you did that gives me PTSD to show to you and exposing you to lawsuits
I'm gonna take a quick second so at that point we recently rolled out a new thing
that I want to tell you about is called learn prime so we have all these
workshops we have all the screencast we have all these ebooks and they're all
pretty awesome but they're all the workshops particular like a thousand
bucks not approachable to everybody so we do is we packed everything up
we put in this new thing called during prime as a monthly subscription for it
it's kind of awesome i think it's a pretty good deal the site its looks like
that
it's learned off opcom and we have a discount code for you it's railsconf all
capital get you twenty five twenty percent off your first month so keep
that in mind
ok so jump up the metaphor a couple seconds want to talk about dealing with
nerves dealing with nervousness huge issue for speaker is very common
so the first thing to do is to accept its inevitability I still get nervous
before every talk
I've done a bunch of them now it still is just agitating it's hard it's scary
it's really tough so you're just going to get nerves and so the first thing is
to realize it's going to happen and to take it as an expected and normal result
of what you're about to do which is about to stand in front of a bunch of
your peers and tell them things
so what I do is I start my talks with calisthenics and partly that's like
eighty percent to get you guys going to wake you up and see what's going on but
it's also partly for me because when I walk out on here and start talking
my heart like pum pum pum pum pum pum pum so I'm like well let's take this
adrenaline this use it and I burn off a little bit energy that way and so that
works in in two directions i think it's it helps me a lot
if you get massive physical reactions to nervousness which happens to some people
they get really bad
sweaty palms they've got really bad dry mouth they breathe really fast you can
go to your doctor and say I have super bad stage fright and it will give you
something called beta blockers and beta-blockers work with the receptors in
your brain and they adopt a dull slightly your response to fight or
flight
they don't sedate you it doesn't make you slower or dumber
it just lowers your physical response to anxiety
I'm not taking them now I don't intend for conference box it's not too bad
I get a little bit agitated but not not so much to do this but it's a godsend
for some people
so consider that if you really need it however if you're not into drugs there's
a natural solution or if you are in a dress
no judgment is portland school
so that's an amazing
ted talk recently by a woman named Amy Cuddy and it was about this idea that
she calls power posing so she ran an experiment where she had subjects take
one of two different kinds of poses one was high power pose and high power pose
looks like this right or this or sitting down arms behind the head feet up on the
table
you know that kind of thing and she had had another half of her subjects take
low power poses
they look kind of like this and they were all sort of like you at the table
with their their head down arms cross things like that and then she took those
groups of people and sent them to mock interviews and then afterwards ask the
mock interviewers
who would you rather hire and the people that had done power poses were hired at
a much higher rate than the people that had done low power poses and basically
she found the brain activity is that when you act like you are confident and
you feel good and you're on top of the world
your brain adjusts and believes it
if you fake it makes it true it's weird it's like the same thing where if you
force yourself to smile for a while you start to feel happy
your brain really does work in that direction it can take inputs in what
feel like outputs to consider power posing if you had looked back by the
sound booth when you guys are walking in
you would have seen you standing there like this
yeah
true story
you can ask cassie is that right true story she says yes
so consider that it works so I I told Chad Fowler about this on our podcast
and by the way we have a podcast and he
I was supposed to go to rails very much like I can't let couldn't make it so I
my behalf
he asked the rails very people to power pose this is it from the front this is
it from the back
power posing takes two minutes to get the effect on your brain is going to try
next time you have a talk
go in the bathroom going back to the room take some strong poses
fake it till you make it you'll feel much better
by the way so at one other way of dealing with talk nerves
almost every talk has an otter which is someone that almost no matter what you
say they're like
I haven't spotted this talks not yet actually
but I try to and so if you're feeling really nervous scan for your not err i
look around and assess their use
and then when you're feeling that's not good you look at him
you like and that's a great idea right and he's like and if all else fails
plant an otter
if
true story so seriously if you're really nervous get your best friend and set him
right here right where Chris haunted city
yeah and then say I need you to not at everything I say I get it I get it I
understand you're right
this talk is awesome and learning so much that's what you gotta shoot for
that will help so much
and then if you if you're really panicking you just give you talk to
chris and everybody else is gone but you're feeling good and you understand
we're together he's not nodding like now I'm not you're not everybody gets your
own daughter
so this is it this is a true story so one time
MIT students decided to prank the professor which MIT students like to do
and what they did was whenever the professor walked in this direction and
was lecturing they would not like totally
yeah we we get it they're all like smiling and nodding and whenever you try
to turn around and walk this little like
and so by the end of the talk
this poor guy is literally into the wall
education is lecture from here because every time you feel like going to the
old old before I did this a lot
don't start doing this to me and not allowed to use my own tactics against me
that would be unfair
okay um a little more metal stuff that I have one more lightning talk and we're
gonna put this thing to bed first thing I will tell you about a couple
anti-patterns in talks
these are things i see and the audience I'm just like dude don't do that
the first is not being crazy excited there's no substitute for being really
excited to talk to people
that's the best thing you can do to be interesting really care don't give talks
about things you don't care about don't give talk about things you're not really
passionate about you're just going to bomb
it's gonna come off in your delivery it's not going to be great talk
people's can spot that stuff you probably saw a couple talks this week
has suffered from that good information in passionate delivery its death
next anti-pattern you guys see this in the back
I hate that or even worse
I know you guys can't see this you know I can't see it
I know you can't eat this cake
but it's super good I spent a lot of time on this
I guess my talks about a half an hour or an hour early and I open up the slide
that's the hardest to read and go to the back of the room and I make sure people
can read it and I never say can you read this or I'm sorry you can't read this
I've seen people should know better mess this up designers people whose job it is
to figure out good ways to convey information will can make beautiful
slides with tiny load contrast type and I'm like what
how do you not get this huge any pattern drives me crazy the other thing is this
one is so tempting this is so hard to put to avoid is pre apologizing
this happens a lot this is my first talk and I'm sort of nervous so I'm sorry if
this comes off as blah blah
it's so natural you want to do it it's so hard to avoid this is the first time
I've given this talk I was just changing things last night I didn't get a lot of
sleep I have a little bit of a cold
people love to pre apologize before they start their talk starts just don't do it
don't set expectations low because you're setting expectations low
don't set them low so you can you know sort of step over that little bar
just go for it don't pre-apologize hard to do but don't do it next is how to ask
four questions worse when asked questions
uh you guys I'll get this right cool
all right
see that all the time and the thing is that the problem is most speakers think
they have to fill every bit of space if there's any dead sound you screwed up
it's a little terrifying to leave open space the way you ask four questions in
the talk is
let's have some questions and then you wait and as a speaker
it feels like forever it's only five seconds but there are people in the
audience to thinking oh do I have a question
Oh is anybody else gonna ask one so i kind of do have one but I don't want to
be impolite ok I guess
okay yeah i guess it's five seconds but you're like oh my god oh my god oh my
god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god please ask me some questions so
oh there's a bottle in this thing by the way when I ask four questions and listen
to them I put my hands behind my back
this is a listening post you lean forward slightly and you have your hands
behind your back
that's how you solicit information from people it's like i'm gonna go ahead and
put these things away now because i want to give you my full attention i'm just
gonna put those to rest and I'm opening myself up to you it's not closed off
it's still open and it's sort of a slightly like let's do it and that and I
think that solicits more questions because if you if you watch videos and
other top you'll see me do that
let's have some questions and I wait and sometimes not all kind of move forward
to them whether that's a good way to deal with questions
so say you get a question that you like you're listening to the question you say
oh that's it that's a great question
you move towards the questioner and that's like oh yes I want to connect
with you a little bit more could you ask me a great question
let's say you're in a meeting you get a question you don't like and you go hmmm
ok
oh well I think you can kind of back away from the question and it still
seems professional doesn't seem like you're dissing them
exactly
but it gives that impression the room can feel what you're thinking when you
say when someone asks you a question
okay well I mean that's a good question and you're sort of throwing yourself and
what you're saying is that was a dumb question or not are you know that's a
bad question you're a jerk and the room can tell how you feel about it
body language ok and so that's how you answer questions let's have some
questions it shows the expectation that you're going to have questions I have
and now I at one time after in my most recent talk ancient city Ruby
I said let's have some questions and I waited a really long time and it didn't
happen and so I did this
body language this tells you i'm not going on so I got some questions
you don't have to ask me what I had for breakfast or something but I wait and it
worked
ok so here are two for two two last things at the middle level than we had
our talk last night to talk we're done two things that I think you should do
that I messed up
I didn't take my advice the first thing is don't ever talk the last day
people are tired they're a little conference doubt
attendance is going to be a little sparse they probably drank the night
before because that's the party night
don't talk first on the last day conference organizers
don't put your new speakers in those slots put people that you think can
handle it
it's hard as an uphill battle it's not possible it's just harder so i didn't i
did not i saw where my spot was in the schedule and I didn't try to correct it
almost every organizer if when you get your acceptance you say thanks so much i
can't wait to speak
can you please put me early on in the friend of in the program go it makes
what makes makes a huge difference does it make the conference a little more fun
I think we don't have to talk hanging over you little bit of a bummer
the other thing is don't ever give talks and giant rooms
what I wish I had done and what I often do as I say can you please give me your
smallest room because if you have 500 people at your talk in a room that holds
450
it's going to feel amazing the energy level is going to be so high
we're like wow they're packed around the back edges and you can take your little
picture from the stage you look awesome
if you have 500 people in a room that seats a thousand ever looks around as oh
wow it's gonna suck
nobody's here do you want to go check out the other thing because it's like
the night club thing you know a half full night club
no one wants that so ask for small rooms if you're being a speaker beginning of
the program small rooms a low-pressure this one filled up nicely but you'll
notice when you walked in i had a sign that said please come sit as close as
possible
it was not an accident I didn't want to spread out over this whole room I want
to fill up the front first and then slowly fell back and that makes it feel
more exciting
look at setting is having the guys stand over there do you feel that energy
coming off them they're like we can't even sit down and we want to hear what
this guy has to say a huge difference
okay we're about to try something a little crazy or you want to work with me
you want to trust me all right here we go
is it isn't anybody's birthday today I see a hand
what's your name Jason ok everybody is Jason's birthday today
Jason have you ever had 400 people sing you happy birthday
what you prefer not to
well you're in the wrong talk my friend every would you please sing Jason happy
birthday ready
Jason
excellent job
ok I'm about to tell you my deep dark secret which is when I'm not ready Ruby
my side job is that I'm the course director
I direct this helped to write a 16-man course just outside Boston and what I'm
going to do now is draft you all into the railsconf course you've all passed
your audition with that lovely rendition of happy birthday
welcome to the course would you please turn your neighbor site welcome the
chorus nice job passing additional
thank you so here's a here's what I'm gonna teach you
I'm going to teach you how to improve happy birthday by a thousand percent
over we were just saying
the first and most important thing we're going to do to move is a stand-up the
next most important thing to do is to realize that if you have an attitude
that says I'm not a good singer
you are wrong you have gotten that programming in your head it is not true
the problem that is it is true is that no one has ever taught you how to sync
correctly and about to do it right now
it's very easy anybody can do it so here are here's how we can improve happy
birthday a thousand percent
first we have to pick a starting pitch so what happened was everyone sort of
started in their own area where ever you want to the low basically men said be
birthday -
and the bearitones at happy birthday to you and said happy birthday to you
and what we got in the music is what we call the music industry a cluster cord
which is very similar to a not so nice word for how it sounds
so what we need to do is pick a starting pitch so when we started as an
extradition with our 1000% improve happy birthday i will start the pitch and
we'll all sing in the same key and it will sound beautiful
the next thing we're going to do is I'm tell you how to stand so here's how you
stand normally the way you stand when you sing is tall is buoyant it's not
military style but your chest is lifted and you feel proud and you feel proud
because you're in the real kind of course i'm a director Ben and i'll be
making a sound amazing tonight
now that's how you stand here is how you breathe take one hand and put it up on
your chest and one to put it right on the belly button level
now watch my watch my hands and see what you want to move when I breathe
there are no six packs and singing the bottom hand moves take a couple breaths
and move your bottom hand but not your top hand and see what that feels like
that's a diaphragmatic breath
that's a singers breath that's how you breathe when you sing think you can
think of it as a low accordion happening down here
you put your hands down because i'll take a breath together and send it nice
and low already reached in and out breathe in and out and this time when
you read that a little vocals they should go
oh and see how good that feels ready
breathe in and out good one more time and let some relaxation coming to your
body when you do that it's not amazing
we never do that we never do it feels so good
so that's how to stand tall that's how to breathe nice and low and i want to
talk about improving residence
so here's how it sounds if I sing with my way up
first of all a little anatomy lesson take your tongue touches the roof your
mouth and feel that hard thing
now slide it back until it gets soft I think you just hit in the back that soft
is called your soft palate
now at the end of a trumpet you have a bell and the reason you have a bell is
because it makes the trumpet louder so we have our bell and it's our soft
palate is the area around the soft palate so we want to do with singers is
open that area up as much as possible
so here's how it sounds like if i sing when my soft palate is down
I think something like we write lots of code and if I instead open it up with my
soft palate lifted it sounds like we wrote lots of code and I think you
probably heard a difference right there and the way to get to that difference
that way to access that soft palate lift is by thinking of yourself as a radio
announcer that's the difference between this voice and my normal speaking voice
is amount of soft palate lift i'm adding myself a resonator at the top of that
so would you sing with lows clap soft palate we write lots of code right there
a couple grand upgrade your house of stylez forget we are
oh my goodness this thing just that that got like two thousand percent more manly
if nothing else and ladylike ladies very nice job
ok so try um who needs client-side JavaScript stripe rails is all Marc
awesome
yeah
excellent so we're gonna sing happy birthday to you and that key and the
most important musical things are going to stand right we're going to breathe
right we're going to use our radio announcer for the whole song and we're
going to important musical thing which is the last phrase has to be super loud
happy birthday to you about apana her that you're chasin
happy birthday that's when you let the horse out of the barn
imagine you have a beer stein and you're just that's that last phrase it's it's
everything you got
has to happen in that phrase you ready happy birthday let's go real golf course
right
thank you so muc