Speaker Kit Lightning Talk

"Intro to Sandstorm" lightning talk speaker kit

Talk Resources

• Here is an Intro to Sandstorm slide deck. It should take about 5 minutes to go through slides 1-11, a shrunk-down version of a talk that Kenton Varda gave once. The later slides are bonus material that you can use as-needed to answer questions.

• It is based on this full talk by Kenton. Kenton gave the talk at a Sourcegraph Meetup in San Francisco, and you can read a blog post about the event and see a video of him delivering it.

• Cool blank Sandstorm-themed slides can be found here or here.

• You are very encouraged to modify the talk and the slides to fit you or your audience, if you'd like.

  • For example, here's a Traditional Chinese translation.

Why give a talk about Sandstorm?

• People will like Sandstorm once they know about it. You're a person who is excited about Sandstorm. The great thing about giving a talk about Sandstorm is that other people who haven't even heard of it will realize how it has a lot of potential to make their lives better.

• People are always excited to meet people who are part of the community for a thing they use (or can use). You might meet other people who already have a Sandstorm install, or who have used it, or who really want to install an app you made that runs on Sandstorm. It's easy to accidentally turn into a mini-celebrity this way, and simultaneously gratifying and surprising.

Where should I give my talk?

This intro presentation is great for Linux users groups or other open source-oriented meetups. It's also a good fit for hackerspaces that have lightning talk slots. If there's a meetup group about self-hosting, that would be perfect!

If you're active in a language-specific meetup, attendees would love to hear about apps written in that language. For example, the Python meetup would love to hear about a one-click install for IPython Notebook. A Meteor meetup would love to hear about meteor-spk and to know that the Sandstorm shell is made with Meteor.

Your own company might be interested in hearing about Sandstorm, since it would make it easier for them to maintain web apps for internal use.

You can also use this talk as the first talk in a Sandstorm user group!

Preparation Tips

• Rehearse the talk by setting the slides to full-screen and saying out loud what you would say to the audience.

• Since five minutes are pretty short, practice with a timer. One way is to use pdf-presenter-console if you export the slides to PDF; another way is to use Google's built-in timer feature.

• Make the most of the demo. Rehearse this too, so that you know what you're going to show off, and go slow enough that people get the gist of it. Plan to demo an app that you think is cool. Plan to demo two apps if you want. Plan to demo your app if you have one!

• Remember that people care about how you use Sandstorm in addition to what Sandstorm is. Otherwise, they'd just read the Sandstorm website. Given that, see if you can mention apps that you use, and if you have Sandstorm installed on your server, then say so!

• Skim through slides 12 and beyond so that you can use those slides to answer people's questions.

• Make a copy of the presentation, and change the first slide and last slide to show your name!

• Email community@sandstorm.io so we can send you stickers to give out, at the event!

At the presentation

• Get someone to take a photo! Then share the photo with us.

• Make sure that the Internet connectivity works well. If not, then you'll need to skip the demo. It's best to know this in advance.

• Something unexpected could happen during the demo. That can be OK!

• In Q&A, be authentic. You don't have to pretend to be an expert; it's always OK to say that you don't know how something works because that's an opportunity to tell people how you would find out the answer. If people learn about other people in the community as a result, that's a massive win! It's always OK to say, "I'm still learning myself."

Tell us about your talk!

If you give a talk, send an email to community@sandstorm.io. Getting in touch can help improve the slides or connect attendees with community members that should get to know each other.

Credits

This page is inspired by the Intro to Meteor speaker kit page by Alice Yu, Cesar Chen, Miroslav Hibler, Robert Dickert, and others.