coach

Your slot

• An open floor gives each speaker 3 minutes. The timer starts at your first words, and at 3:00 the screen switches to the timer, mid-demo or not.
• A talk in an evening's lineup has the length we agree with you, often about 20 minutes. It ends on time too.
• Plan to finish early: by 2:40 of 3:00, and by 90% of a longer slot.

What good looks like

• Finish with room to spare: by 2:40 of a 3-minute slot, by 90% of a longer one. The timer starts at your first words, and the slot ends on time. At allthings/aie the screen switched to the timer at exactly 3:00, and a live demo ended there.
• Show the work, not a sale: no prices, discounts, demos to book or sign-ups. Saying where you work, open source and free packages are all welcome. We have never sold a stage. The code of conduct says it: no shilling, sales pitches, or pressure to buy, invest, or hand over contact details. At allthings/aie the one talk that turned into a pitch was flagged on the room's screen.
• Open with who you are and what you built, in your first 20 seconds. allthings is about who's on stage and what they built: "Show what you built and how." Saying it first tells the room why to listen.
• Have a live demo recorded as a fallback, playable offline, and know the moment you'll stop. Venue Wi-Fi can keep devices from reaching each other, as it did at allthings/aie, and the timer doesn't wait for a demo to finish.
• End by saying where to find it: the repo, the slides, a link. Then send them to us for your talk's page on allthings.dev. People look you up after, and every talk's page on allthings.dev carries its recording and what the speaker shares.
• Speak at a pace the room can follow: between 100 and 175 words a minute. The room hears it once. Racing to fit a hard timer loses them; cutting words keeps them.
• Fewer than 3 fillers a minute ("um", "you know", "basically"). A pause sounds sure of itself; a filler sounds unsure. Many transcribers drop fillers, so a count here is a floor.
• About 2 slides a minute at most: one idea each, long enough to land. A slide the room can't read before it changes is a slide they missed.
• Keep each slide under 40 words: say it, and show the code or the thing. When a slide is full of words, the room reads it instead of listening to you.
• A plain title of 12 words or fewer that says what the room will take home. Every talk is listed by its title on its evening's page and at allthings.dev/talks.
• For a talk in the lineup, an abstract of 150 words or fewer: what you built, and what the room will learn from it. People choose an evening from its page and Luma, where each talk's abstract is shown.
• A title and abstract in plain words: what you built and what the room will learn, without hype. People pick a talk by what it says it shows. Plain words say it; hype hides it. This is only a suggestion: your title is yours.

For what you want from it

It's my first talk

• Rehearse out loud, with a timer, and record it: a transcript of one run checks your length, pace and opening. Everyone on our stage gave a first talk somewhere. The run-through is where it gets good.

Teach a technique

• Show the steps or the code in order, and end with the one thing to try tomorrow. A talk earns its place by what the room takes home.

Find contributors

• Put the repository's link on screen. Someone who wants to help tonight needs to know where.
• Name a good first issue, by number or label. A named issue turns interest into a first pull request.

Show a launch

• Show the launch working, then how you built it. A launch is welcome on our stage; a sales pitch isn't. Showing it working is what tells them apart.

Get hired

• Say what you did yourself, and how you did it. People remember the person who explains how it works, and find them after.

Check yours

From your terminal, with your slides or outline in Markdown and a rehearsal's transcript:

bunx allthings coach slides.md rehearsal.vtt

Or send your slot, your title, an outline or your slides, and a rehearsal's transcript (plain text, WebVTT or SRT) to coach_talk, a tool on our MCP server at https://allthings.dev/mcp. Any agent can call it: bunx allthings mcp prints the line to add it. You get back what to change first, with what was measured.

The checks are the ones on this page, and the same talk always gets the same answer. Nothing you send is kept or logged.

After your talk

Send the organizers your slides and the repo: your talk's page on allthings.dev carries its recording and what you share.

pitch a talk on discord →