Where are James' Slides?

I give a lot—well, I give some—talks, but I never give the slides out.

And, as far as I can remember, no one has ever asked for them.

I know people, people who speak a lot more than me, who put all their slide decks up. Why wouldn’t I do that? What makes me think I’m so special?

It’s about my style of speaking, the kind of impression I want to make, and the types of slide decks I build. If I do it all correctly, the slides themselves will be completely useless to you. At best, they might jog your memory about something, but there are much better ways to do that.

The slides aren’t the story, not by themselves. The slides are half the story. I’m telling you the other half.

That’s not to say there isn’t going to be information in my talk. There will be. And it’ll be valuable and important, or they wouldn’t have let me give the talk, and you wouldn’t have come. And I want you to get back at that information later, after the talk, too.

But I want you to get the whole story. And the slides are only half the story. (Sometimes, the slides and the words combine to make a joke. I’d really hate for you to only get half of that.)

Most of my technical talks have one URL in them, it’s the last or second to last slide, and it’s where to get the story, in some other form. That one URL has all the links you need, all the projects I mentioned. And if I’ve had time, it has the whole story, just in text form.

Edit: There’s some good conversation happening over on Hacker News, you might want to check that out, since people disagree with me.