We are so honored to have you speak at Polyglot.LA and help grow our community! To make sure everyone gets the most value out of this experience, we ask that you follow our guidelines. We want everyone to benefit, whether you’re an attendee, presenter, or sponsor.
Tips
Know your audience. Appeal to everyone without diluting your content. Our broad-based community includes those who are new to coding and industry veterans, people who work in software and hardware, and much more. The content of your talk may not be understood by everyone at all times, but aiming for clarity and providing context can go a long way. To get a sense of our community and audience expectations, attend some of our meetings before your talk or check out previous talks.
No hard sell. We are a community of people who come together every month for the love of software development, not as part of our jobs or career development. In other words, this is not an investor meeting for pitching startup ideas, nor is it a trade show for selling products (feel free to share if your company is hiring, but no active recruiting, please). Focus on making a good impression on a human level, rather than on a product level.
Make your presentation legible. For accessibility and general readability purposes, both IRL and for video recording, make your Keynote/PowerPoint slides high-contrast. Black letters on a white background will give you great visibility, but of course, you can experiment with other high-contrast colors. For displaying code, keep syntax highlighting intact as you copy code from your editor to your slides. Aim for 40px font size and don't be afraid to break up walls of text and lines of code over several slides.
Mind the time. If you’re asked to give a talk for 30 minutes, stick to the allotted time. Rehearse and time your talk. Some meetups can be more flexible than others, but if there are consecutive talks and activities during a single event, let's try to be mindful of everyone’s time.
Note photography and videography. Our audio/visual equipment setup will record your talk, which will be shared online, and there will be some photography for social media or marketing purposes. Let us know if you prefer to not be audio/video recorded or photographed.
Have backup presentation slides. Whether this is your first or fiftieth talk, it’s generally good practice to have multiple copies of your slides. We prefer that you send to us in advance of the meetup. We also recommend that you have multiple copies that can be accessed at the meetup (e.g. emailed to us, emailed to yourself, stored on a flash drive or on the cloud).