Ruby and VoIP

Jay Phillips (hope I have his name right) of Adhearsion gave the third talk this morning. You might imagine that there wouldn't be that many people interested in telephony, or at least, writing software for telephony (just like far fewer people design cars than drive cars), but the Ruby community seems diverse, and a good number of people had had some experience in telephony.

His talk was putting a Ruby layer on top of Asterisk, an API for telephony, that would make coding telephony applications easier than it is now.

My point isn't to summarize his talk, but to summarize the way he gave his talk. The most successful talks do several things right, and one thing that is amazingly overlooked is sound. Universally, getting audio right is horrible. No one can seem to do it. It requires engineers, you need to be close to the mike, and so forth.

Some guy named Dr. Nic gave a talk. Between his accent and the volume, it was hard to hear what sounded like quite an entertaining talk. If you do nothing right, make sure you can be heard. It is absolutely critical to a good talk. It can torpedo a great talk, which is why folks like Dave Thomas seem to know "get the sound right".

The second key is to have minimal slides. Play a bit with the fonts so it looks aesthetically pleasing, but don't cram much information. If you do, it's probably too technical for a crowd like this. Some of the most successful talks seem to be the least technical because it appeals to a wide crowd. Talks that make people think, even as it may not offer much in terms of improving skill, can be far better than those that attempt to teach something that requires a lot of time to figure out.

And so this talk went well because the sound went well, the slides were good, Jay spoke well. It meandered a bit at the end when he was just doing demo after demo, but other than that, it piqued interest, which is what most talks should aim to do.