Write to Learn and Learn to Present with Duncan Epping (1/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

What would you do if your co-presenter for a breakout session at a large technology conference had to back out a couple of weeks before the event? One option is deliver the presentation yourself. That’s exactly what Duncan Epping did in this situation despite his crippling fear of public speaking at the time.
Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist, a published author, a blogger, and someone who has given many presentations in different settings throughout his career. In episode 303, we have a focused conversation with Duncan on presentations and public speaking. You’ll hear the story of Duncan’s first public presentation at VMworld and why he decided to continue doing presentations. Duncan shares his learning process, how writing has helped him develop deep technical expertise, and how he’s been able to translate this into presentation slides. We talk through different settings for presentations like customer meetings, small groups, and very large groups and stress the importance of focusing on what the audience wants to know.
Original Recording Date: 10-29-2024
Topics – Meet Duncan Epping, A Focus on Presentations and Public Speaking, Lessons Learned Then and Later, Writing and Distilling Concepts to the Core, Think about the Audience, An Outline for Presentation Building, High and Low Stakes Presentations
2:37 – Meet Duncan Epping
* Duncan Epping is presently a Chief Technologist in the VCF Business Unit at Broadcom. In the past, Duncan worked for VMware and has been part of the storage and availability team, the vSAN team, technical marketing, and even professional services.
* Duncan lives in the south of The Netherlands in an area called Helmond. This is near the city of Eindhoven, which is known for its association with technology companies like Philips and ASML.
* In the early days of his exposure to virtualization, Duncan was mainly focused on implementations with vSphere. He later would learn about and focus on Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vCloud Director (VCD).
* Duncan is also a blogger and the sole maintainer of Yellow Bricks.
4:17 – A Focus on Presentations and Public Speaking
* Nick mentioned the diversity of Duncan’s experience comes out in his writing and especially in his presentations. Duncan has done a number of public presentations at conferences and user groups. He’s even been the keynote speaker a number of times. We wanted to have a focused conversation with Duncan on presentations through the lens of career progression.
* Nick feels like he heard a story on an older episode of The Geek Whisperers about Duncan’s first public presentation being at a large technology conference with hundreds of people in attendance.
* This is something Duncan would not recommend others do or repeat. Looking back, it was pretty scary and daunting.
* Duncan had been blogging about vSphere High Availability (or vSphere HA) and developed a deep expertise in this area. In parallel, he got to know and built relationships with the product management and engineering teams for vSphere HA.
* A member of the HA team at one point asked Duncan if he would help them create slides or possibly help deliver a presentation on the topic. Duncan agreed to help create slides but refused to do any public speaking.
* “It’s an interesting thing because when they asked me, I had presented before, but it was probably for a group of like 5 or 6 people, more like a group discussion than a presentation. And it usually was with peers as well. Now, just to paint the picture, even when I needed to do that, I would always get extremely terrified. I had a pretty big fear of public speaking in general….” – Duncan Epping