McKenney: Speaking at Kernel Recipes [LWN.net]

Paul McKenney has put together a series of articles on how to improve one's ability to give a good talk at a technical conference.

On the other hand, (1) presentation skills stay with you through life, and (2) small improvements in presentation skills over months or years can provide you with great advantages longer term. An old saying credited to Thomas Edison claims a breakdown of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. However, my own experience with RCU has instead been 0.1% inspiration, 9.9% perspiration, and 90% communication. Had I been unable to communicate effectively, others would have extreme difficulty using RCU, as in even more difficulty than they do now.

There is a lot of speaking experience distilled into this set of posts.

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Engaging the audience

Posted Feb 28, 2025 4:34 UTC (Fri) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (2 responses)

Paul has an amazing ability to engage attendees in his talks to transmit a message. He's definitely one of the few people who can present first in the afternoon just after lunch and keep attendees awake. There's first a bit of mystery about where he's going and suddenly he pops something from behind the curtains to distribute to attendees and make them participate to an experiment such as measuring the length of toilet paper or counting sweets. And two years later every attendee remembers that a memory access takes as many cycles as there are foils on a toilet paper roll, and that distributed counting is extremely hard :-)

After all, that's the whole point of a presentation, spreading a message. Originally slides were made to help the speaker stay on track, and as they became graphical and colored they participated to turn a presentation into a show and somewhat tried to share info that attendees quickly forget (except numbers and graphs that are often photographed and shared as-is online). But normally it's the presenter who should spread the message, that's also why a presenter can rarely be replaced for a given talk. And I think a given presentation should only focus on spreading a single message, otherwise the risk of losing the audience or splitting the attendees in two populations having understood something different is high.

Engaging the audience

Posted Mar 1, 2025 13:31 UTC (Sat) by dmv (subscriber, #168800) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, agree, even as a complete outsider. He’s able to hold you through the introductory material, which makes it more likely, for me at least, to remain for the remainder.

But I also think that part of that effectiveness comes down to personality. Well, or maybe just a lot of practice. I don’t know him personally. But in his talks, he comes across very much as somebody exploring a space, someone curious and certainly expertly knowledgeable, but not imperious or arrogant. I am a high school teacher. I can tell you from my experience of standing in front of literally thousands and thousands of students, that there is a very vast difference between these two styles: (1) “Hmm. So this is weird. See? A, B, C. How are we gonna solve this? What do you think? Well, let’s think about it together.” and (2) “This is a problem for reasons A, B, C. Here’s the solution. Goodbye.” If you want people to engage with your material, (1) is virtually always superior to (2).

Engaging the audience

Posted Mar 3, 2025 7:58 UTC (Mon) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

I totally agree with your differences between the two styles. I've had a few of the second one at the uni, that I really didn't like. It might be what left me with this willingness in presentations or training to make problems appear and try to solve them as a group :-)

Spock's brain

Posted Mar 3, 2025 4:04 UTC (Mon) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link]

I LOVE Paul's talks. Every time I emerge from one I feel like I understand everything about RCU and/or parallel programming. However, just like in the Star Trek episode "Spock's brain", the feeling too quickly fades.