Bleeding Edge Web
A meetup for the discerning web app developer
Speaker Guide
So you've decided to give a talk for our meetup — thank you! Here are a few things we'll need from you and some tips to get you started.
What We Need From You
We need the following information up front in order to get your talk scheduled:
- The title of your talk
- Brief overview of the talk. Generally a paragraph or two highlighting the main things people can expect to learn about (not required for lightning talks).
- A one or two sentence bio including any contact info you'd like shared (e.g. Twitter handle)
Take a look at any of our recent meetup announcements for examples of how others have done this.
If your slides will be hosted online (strongly preferred) please provide the link to us prior to the start of the meetup so that we can make them available to anyone watching the livestream during your talk.
Slide Tips
You will be presenting in a large room, and slides will be on monitors that may be hard to see for people sitting in the back. Also, while we record the slides on video, the camera is not close to the screen. Plan your talk with these parameters in mind.
- Slides should be light text on dark background. Very light backgrounds wash out completely on video and negatively affect the overall video quality. This one is very important!
- Font size should be large. Basically the bigger the text, the better. Favor more slides with less text per slide over fewer densely-populated slides when possible.
- Favor high contrast between text and background colors.
Preparing | Talk Duration
We typically have the room from 6:30-9pm. We always start off with our standing "News from the Bleeding Edge" talk, which takes the first 20 minutes or so. The perfect duration for the main talk is about 30 minutes. In fact, erring on the shorter side is usually better (TED talks are 18 minutes!), and leaves more time afterward for questions and networking.
You should plan on arriving 15 minutes prior to the meetup start time to get set up and oriented with the room. We present and record via Zoom, so you'll want time to connect to wifi and make sure you can get into Zoom.
Check out some of our prior meetups on YouTube to get a good feel for how the events usually go.