talk

Conference Talk Builder

Structured for technical developer conferences (25-30 min single track). Produces three deliverables: CFP abstract, talk outline with timing, key slides list.

What Makes a Talk Work

The talk structure that gets accepted and remembered:

1. Visceral opening — a failure story, a question the audience can't answer, a stat that reframes what they thought they knew. Not "today I'm going to tell you about X."

2. The painful thing everyone does — establish shared experience. The audience needs to recognize themselves. If they're nodding, you have them.

3. The journey with failed attempts — how you discovered the solution, including what didn't work. This is what separates a talk from a blog post. The failed attempts are credibility — they show you lived this, not just read about it.

4. The insight with a demo — the thing they came for. Keep demos minimal. Have a backup screenshot. Live demos fail publicly; plan for it.

5. Monday morning takeaways — 3 concrete things they can do when they're back at their desk. Not "think differently about X" — actual actions.

Workflow

1. Clarify the Submission

Before writing, establish:

• Target conference / audience level (introductory, intermediate, advanced)
• Talk length (default: 25-30 min)
• The single core insight — if it takes more than one sentence, the scope is too broad
• Speaker's direct experience with the topic (required for credibility in the abstract)

2. Draft CFP Abstract

Format (400-500 words total):

TITLE
[Direct and specific. "How we reduced deploy time from 40 min to 90 sec" 
beats "Optimizing CI/CD Pipelines". Concrete beats clever.]

ABSTRACT (250-300 words)
Paragraph 1: The problem — what's painful about this right now, why it matters today
Paragraph 2: The journey — what you tried, what failed, what you discovered
Paragraph 3: What attendees will leave with (specific, not vague)

WHAT ATTENDEES WILL LEARN
- [Specific skill or decision they'll be able to make]
- [Specific tool, pattern, or technique they'll use]
- [Mental model that changes how they approach this problem]

SPEAKER BIO HOOK (50 words)
Not a resume. One sentence about why you specifically are the right person 
to give this talk — the thing that establishes credibility on this topic.

3. Talk Outline with Timing

[0:00-2:00]  Opening hook — the failure/question/stat
[2:00-7:00]  Problem setup — the painful thing everyone does, why it's wrong
[7:00-15:00] Journey — what you tried, what failed, the turning point
[15:00-22:00] Resolution — the insight, live demo or concrete example
[22:00-25:00] Takeaways + Q&A setup

Adjust for actual length. Keep demo segments to 5-7 min max — they always run long.

4. Key Slides List

Not the slides themselves — the logical flow. One line per slide/beat:

1. Opening image/question (no title slide to start)
2. "Here's the mistake" — the thing everyone does
3. Code showing the wrong way
4. The moment of discovery
5. Architecture diagram / key concept
6. Code showing the right way
7. Benchmark / result / proof
8. Demo (or screenshot if demo risky)
9. Three takeaways
10. One slide people will photograph

5. iA Presenter Slides (if requested)

When the user asks for slide markdown (not just the outline), generate iA Presenter format:

# Slide Title

	Content visible on slide (indented with tab)

Speaker notes without tab (invisible to audience)

// reminder comment

---

iA Presenter rules:

• Separate slides with ---
• Visible slide content must be indented with a tab
• Speaker notes are left-margin (no indent)
• Code blocks on slides: break across multiple slides if >8 lines — code must be readable on a bad projector
• Use // comment for author reminders

Structure: Title slide → speaker intro → one or more slides per Story Circle step → closing with contact/resources.

Output

Deliverables in this order:

1. CFP abstract (ready to paste into submission form)
2. Talk outline with timing
3. Key slides list
4. iA Presenter markdown (if requested)

Present 1–3 together — they inform each other and the reviewer needs to see the full shape.

References

Priority	Stage	Load when	Reference
1	Outline	Building the narrative arc or structuring the talk story	references/story-circle.md
2	Slides	Generating iA Presenter slide markdown	references/ia-presenter-syntax.md