25 Tips for New Developers: Advice from a (Mostly) Self-Taught Software Engineer

The Day of your Talk

So, I'm not going to sugar coat this, you will almost definitely be nervous on the day of your talk, especially right before. It happens! I still get nervous and I do this all the time! My biggest tip here is to listen to peppy music that you really like right before you speak-- I listen to Britney Spears and Beyonce before every talk and love it. I wear clothes that I'm comfortable in, that usually make a statement -- that's just another thing that makes me feel more confident in front of a crowd.
Another tip is to pretend to be as confident and peppy as possible, even if you don't feel that way -- people usually can't tell the difference. Finally, I usually go over my slides a few times the day of the talk so that I really remember everything that I'm supposed to say.
Your talk is a performance -- you are in stage or in front of a room of people, so being engaging is important. I talk with my hands, sound super excited, and always talk about how much I love writing code. It makes my audience more excited as well, and they keep paying attention to my talk. In the same vein, you want to be understandable, so speak clearly, project, and don't rush.
I make my slides available to the audience before all of my talks so they can follow along. I will use BigTextBox on the projector to show the link to the slides, and I will put the link in the conference Slack group and with the conference hashtag on Twitter. I send them out ahead of time so that people can follow along on their own computers if they want -- they can read the text more easily, play with demos, and see my code samples. I also keep the links to my slides up after so people can come back to the resources I have linked.
Some piece of technology will almost definitely fail during the conference, so be prepared. You may barely have internet, your microphone may misfire, a demo may break, or your projector may be awful. It happens! Don't worry too much about it, it happens and people understand! Earlier this year, I ended up projecting some of my demos over my phone because the internet wasn't working at the conference center! I would also recommend bringing your own adapters just in case the conference staff doesn't have the one for your laptop on hand. I personally don't use clickers to move from slide to slide, I just use my keyboard, but a lot of people really like them!
If you want to watch one of my talks, I did my CSS art talk for dev.to a few weeks ago which was super fun!
Take advantage of the opportunity -- conferences are great places to meet new people and learn new things. Do your best, but don't worry about perfection!