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Anil's experience prompts one of my own that merits a retelling... 1/ https://twitter.com/avsm/status/1384941770975371271
Years ago, there was a large Sun-internal conference that was trying to address the biggest complaint of attendees: there were too many good talks to go to! 2/
It should be said that this is in that bygone era before talks were recorded. So if you missed a talk, you just... missed it. 3/
The conference had a very, um, creative idea to solve this: they had each presenter give the SAME PRESENTATION three times in a row. 4/
Yes: back-to-back-to-back. Same presentation. Same room. It should not need to be said that presenters universally hated this idea -- and this horrific experiment would thankfully not be repeated. 5/
But that speaker revolt was still in the future when I had signed up to give a talk -- which, it must be said, was highly technical and esoteric. 6/
My talk -- an hour-long talk about the implementation-level detail of the real-time aspects of the operating system kernel -- would barely fill a room when given ONCE, let alone divided over three sessions! 7/
Another germane detail: I was living in California, but giving this talk in Denver, where I grew up. My mom never seen me speak (pre-recordings!); she wanted to come to the conference. Good news, three time slots to pick from! She decides to come to the second slot. 8/
I give my talk for the first hour. The room has maybe 15 people in it, which is honestly more than I would have expected. Talk goes well. 9/
Time for the second hour. My mom is there and... one other person comes. One. We wait for a few minutes. No one else shows up. 10/
I say: "hey, you're the only one here, and they're having every presentation given in triplicate; why don't you go to the talk that you were going to go to next during this slot, and come back here for the third slot?" 11/
He says: "I don't really feel like doing that." 12/
Like, okay: single solitary person (and MY MOM), here goes! OBVIOUSLY STOP ME IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS BECAUSE YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE HERE 13/
Now, during that era, you didn't have a phone or a laptop or whatever; if you were at a talk and stopped paying attention, you would just kinda... space out. 14/
And this dude is totally spacing out -- just like counting the number of lights on the ceiling or whatever. Like: buddy, you're the only one here -- we are in new territory with respect to the presenter/attendee social contract; you need to maintain eye contact! 15/
Fortunately, there actually IS one other person there, and she's paying rapt attention: my mom. 16/
So I just more or less ignore Mr. Spacey and just give the talk to my mom. 17/
At the end of the talk, the dude just gets up and... leaves. No "wow thank you for just presenting to only me" or anything -- he just like drifts off. I felt like screaming "YOU'RE WELCOME!" after him... 18/
And I'm thinking to myself: not only have I just bombed, I have bombed in FRONT OF MY MOTHER. 19/
I apologize to her: "really sorry you had to see that!" But my mom -- God bless her -- could not have been more encouraging: "I really enjoyed it! I didn't understand a lot of it, but I learned that a millisecond is a really long period of time!" 20/
To this day, my mom recalls that talk (still the only one of mine she's watched in person), but does not recall that there was only one other person there. 21/
This speaks both highly of my mom (thank you, Mom!), but also serves to make Anil's point: no matter how small your audience, always treat them like they want to be there! (Bonus second moral to the story: a millisecond really IS a long period of time!) 22/22
