{"id":298,"date":"2010-02-22T13:38:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T19:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/?p=298"},"modified":"2010-02-22T13:38:53","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T19:38:53","slug":"rebuilding-my-gdc-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/22\/rebuilding-my-gdc-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebuilding my GDC talk &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 244px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/02\/phil-infiltrates-the-colorado-gop\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Me speaking two sentences at some political thingie.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/phil-closeup-234x300.jpg\" alt=\"Me speaking two sentences at some political thingie.\" width=\"234\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Me making a 15 second speech at some crazy political thing.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>So, wow .. I&#8217;m going to be speaking during the iPhone summit at GDC in two weeks.  The last few months have been a whirlwind of activity for me as I&#8217;ve been churning out Galcon Fusion.  So now it&#8217;s time to get to business getting my talk ready.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the GDC talk process is sending them a title and a draft version of your talk a month or so in advance.  I did this with my talk, which was titled, &#8220;Nuts &amp; Bolts of Internet Multiplayer iPhone Game Testing&#8221; .. The feedback I got from the iPhone summit advisors was (to summarize): &#8220;This talk looks short, and maybe a bit boring.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>After a week of soul searching and considering my options, I had to agree.  I wouldn&#8217;t want to go to my talk, it didn&#8217;t sound that great.  Having nowhere else to turn to, I turned to PyCon.  I knew that at PyCon people gave talks about how to give talks almost every year.  I&#8217;ve missed the last two PyCons, so thankfully they&#8217;ve been posting them online!<\/p>\n<p>I watched Andrew Kuchling&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/us.pycon.org\/2009\/conference\/schedule\/event\/6\/\">How to Give a Python Talk<\/a> which gave me some insight.  The three points he made that really struck me were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Think About Your Audience\n<p>This means I need to give my audience a reason to be at my talk. \u00a0What are they interested in? \u00a0What do they want to accomplish? \u00a0What can I give them so they are empowered to accomplish this goal?<\/li>\n<li>Too Short &gt; Too Long\n<p>Andrew related that it&#8217;s better to cover too much material in too little time, then to cover too little material in too much time. \u00a0If I can cover a blazing amount of information, but at least hit some key points with a strong note, the audience will come away with something. \u00a0If I drone away about nothing for 30 minutes, they&#8217;ll come away bored.<\/li>\n<li> Rehearse your talk!\n<p>I knew this one. \u00a0But, it&#8217;s good to be reminded. \u00a0To those who are coming to GDC and plan on seeing my talk, fear not. \u00a0I&#8217;ve got this week and next week with NOTHING planned, so I&#8217;ll be rehearsing my talk MANY times. \u00a0I plan on delivering this one with a bit more style than last time. \u00a0Last time was at 360iDev, my first &#8220;long&#8221; talk at a conference. \u00a0I \u00a0rehearsed my talk about 1.5 times, and I think it showed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think for me the first two points answer my question really quickly. \u00a0Why does a dev want to hear me talk? \u00a0They want to learn how to make a multi-player game. \u00a0As for length, I can cover a bunch of keys to creating a multi-player game and maybe people will latch onto a few key points. \u00a0If I only cover testing (as was my original plan) the people at my talk would walk away completely unable to use that information if they don&#8217;t have any idea where to start. \u00a0Instead, if I give the whole picture, and include testing as part of it, they&#8217;ll have enough to go on to get started creating iPhone multi-player games.<\/p>\n<p>-Phil<\/p>\n<p>P.S. Yeah, if anyone wants to give me tips on talking, feel free. \u00a0Oh, and I think my talk is going to be re-titled to: &#8220;How GALCON Conquered the Universe of\u00a0Online Multiplayer Games&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, wow .. I&#8217;m going to be speaking during the iPhone summit at GDC in two weeks. The last few months have been a whirlwind of activity for me as I&#8217;ve been churning out Galcon Fusion. So now it&#8217;s time to get to business getting my talk ready. Part of the GDC talk process is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-python"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philhassey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}