Simon Willison's Weblog: lightning-talks

Datasette Public Office Hours Application

2025-01-16T18:38:31+00:00

Datasette Public Office Hours Application

We are running another Datasette Public Office Hours event on Discord tomorrow (Friday 17th January 2025) at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 10pm GMT / more timezones here.

The theme this time around is lightning talks - we're looking for 5-8 minute long talks from community members about projects they are working on or things they have built using the Datasette family of tools (which includes LLM and sqlite-utils as well).

If you have a demo you'd like to share, please let us know via this form.

I'm going to be demonstrating my recent work on the next generation of Datasette Enrichments.

Tags: lightning-talks, datasette, discord, enrichments, datasette-public-office-hours

What are some tips for giving a lightning talk at a conference?

2012-09-10T15:31:00+00:00

My answer to What are some tips for giving a lightning talk at a conference? on Quora

Tips for general public speaking still hold for lightning talks. Here are some tips that might help:

Five minutes is not a long time. The lightning talk format forces you to get straight to the point and stay there, so you need to edit, edit and edit. This means dropping anything superfluous (who you are, your background etc) and making absolutely sure to rehearse your presentation out loud as early in the process as possible, to give you time to trim material out.
Practice out loud, a whole bunch of times, to make sure you'll be within the time limit. You have to do this out loud, or you'll mess up the pacing. Speak slower than you would normally.
Don't have too many slides. A reasonable rule of thumb is one slide per minute, so for a lightning talk you probably have a maximum of 5 slides. And don't ever put more than three bullet points on a slide (ideally don't have any bullet points at all).

One thing that might help is to watch a bunch of lightning talk videos online (easily done since they are only five minutes long) and try to figure out what makes the good ones really good. We have a bunch of videos on Lanyrd which you could take a look at: http://lanyrd.com/video/?q=light...

Tags: conferences, lightning-talks, speaking, quora

Quoting Ian Mansfield

2010-03-19T11:07:38+00:00

Each speaker gets five minutes to explain their research, with a human metronome banging a waste bin with a big stick after every minute. After five minutes, an eight-year old girl (last night, actually two twins) walks across the stage and says "Please Stop, I'm Bored" and repeats it until the speaker does indeed stop.

— Ian Mansfield

Tags: conferences, ian-mansfield, ignobels, lightning-talks

lightningtimer.net

2008-11-12T16:43:22+00:00

lightningtimer.net

I'm fed up of having to dig out or knock up a timer script every time I manage lightning talks, so I've given one a domain name. You can use lightningtimer.net/#90 to set a different start time for the counter.

Update March 25th 2025: I rescued an old copy of this from the Internet Archive and re-published it to tools.simonwillison.net/lightning-timer.

Tags: javascript, lightning-talks, lightningtimer, projects, tools

Zeppelin 101 in 5 mins

2008-10-30T17:05:16+00:00

Zeppelin 101 in 5 mins

Ribot videoed my five minute lightning talk on Zeppelins at last night’s Skillswap Brighton.

Via SkillSwap Brighton

Tags: brighton, lightning-talks, ribot, skillswap, speaking, my-talks, video, vimeo, zeppelins

I love Zeppelins, and you should too

2008-09-13T18:38:49+00:00

I love Zeppelins, and you should too

Slides from my PyCon UK lightning talk on Zeppelins. I’ve annotated them using SlideShare comments.

Via My talks page

Tags: airships, lightning-talks, pyconuk, pyconuk2008, slides, speaking, my-talks, zeppelins