Topic: How to Give a Tech Talk Presenters: Brian Gerard, Daniel Farrell, Jason Hibbets, Sandi Metz, Chris Collins When: Thursday, 14th May, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building 2 Room 1021, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: Youtube

Synopsis: Giving a tech talk can seem daunting. Come get some tips and tricks from folks who have done it before.

This presentation will be a panel discussion about how to give a technical presentation. Panelists Brian Gerard, Daniel Farrell, Jason Hibbets, Sandi Metz, and Chris Collins will join us to talk about how they prepare to give a presentation, what to do and avoid during a presentation, how they handle questions from the crowd, and other aspects of presenting.

Bios:

Brian Gerard has been working with various *nixes, and Linux specifically, since the mid-'90s, as a Systems Administrator, a Software Engineer, and an end user. After eight years developing abuse defenses for Yahoo! and training their engineers, he now uses his expertise doing deployment automation and security work for WebAssign.

Daniel Farrell is a Software Engineer on Red Hat’s SDN Team, where he contributes to upstream OpenDaylight and OPNFV. He has been involved in SDN’s development since it emerged from Stanford, including early OpenFlow and OpenStack work. He’s now an active committer on OpenDaylight’s Integration Team.

Jason Hibbets is a senior community evangelist in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat where he is a community manager for Opensource.com. He has been with Red Hat since 2003 and is the author of The foundation for an open source city. Prior roles include senior marketing specialist, project manager, Red Hat Knowledgebase maintainer, and support engineer.

Sandi Metz, author of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby", believes in simple code and straightforward explanations. She prefers working software, practical solutions and lengthy bicycle trips (not necessarily in that order) and consults and teaches and speaks on all things OOP.

Chris Collins began working for Duke in 2006, and became a systems administrator with the Duke Office of Information Technology's Linux team in 2008. As a technical lead and tech enthusiast, he teaches introductory and intermediate courses and workshops to a wide variety of audiences around campus, and regularly gives presentations highlighting new projects and technologies.