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
    • Many times in high school if Duncan had to deliver a presentation on a specific day, he would call in sick that morning. Duncan would get so nervous about the presentation it would make him physically sick.
  • Duncan worked together with one of the lead engineers for HA at the time and contributed slides highlighting best practices. They split the work roughly 50/50.
    • Once the slides were created, the two of them went through and highlighted the talking points. Duncan shared the things he would highlight if he were discussing the topic with a customer.
    • The engineer told Duncan it made more sense for him to deliver the slides he had created on stage during the presentation because he knew them so well. The two of them could be co-presenters.
    • Duncan agreed to think about it but wanted to know how many people would be coming to the session. The engineer estimated about 100 people.
    • “I’ve never done more than 5 people. I wouldn’t even get in front of a classroom with people that I know extremely well, so 100 people for me is insane.” – Duncan Epping, thinking through the chance to present at a conference
  • Somehow Duncan was able to convince himself to co-present with the HA engineer at the VMworld conference in San Francisco.
  • A few weeks before the presentation was scheduled to take place, Duncan’s co-presenter had to back out of coming to the conference. No one else from the HA team could attend the conference, so the only option would be for Duncan to deliver the presentation on his own.
    • At this point, conference attendees had already registered to attend the session. Duncan agreed to go forward as the sole presenter.
  • “I logged in, and I expected to see 100 people, 120 people. But it wasn’t 100 or 120. It ended up being 600+ people that had already signed up. And it got worse because on the day itself the room was actually completely packed. So it was like 750 or 760 people or something like that. You can imagine that if you’re terrified of public speaking and your very first session is at VMworld…and you’re actually in one of the bigger rooms and the room is completely packed that it’s going to be a crazy, crazy experience. So that’s why I said it’s something that I probably would never recommend anyone to do. This is not the order in which you should be doing public speaking in any shape or form, so don’t repeat what I did.” – Duncan Epping
  • Thinking back, Duncan feels like the session was probably below average. Attendees rated it ok. They may have come because they read a blog by Duncan or a book he had written.
  • Duncan says walking off that stage after the presentation felt horrible, but it taught him something.
  • “It was horrible, and I also knew then that if I wanted to do this again, I needed to have first of all a completely different approach. And then secondly, I also knew I would probably need to do this extremely often to get more comfortable at presenting…. It’s not a skill you acquire overnight. That’s for sure.” – Duncan Epping, reflecting on his first public presentation at a conference
• How did Duncan prepare for the presentation once he agreed to do it?
  • One thing that stands out for Duncan is not wanting to make any mistakes during the presentation. When people do this, they tend to over-rehearse.
    • “I literally knew every single dot, comma, period on every single slide. I was so overprepared. It’s not like I learned a full script, but it could have been a full script that I learned. So every single slide I knew what to say, when to say every single sentence, when to pause, when to go to the next part, etc.” – Duncan Epping
    • Duncan’s level of preparedness made him even more terrified while presenting. He was afraid he might start forgetting things.
  • “Of course you need to rehearse things, but you don’t need to do it 26 times. I would encourage you to rehearse it because if you don’t rehearse it, that first session is going to be a rehearsal for sure, and it’s going to come across as a rehearsal. But don’t do it 26 or 27 times because you’re going to drive yourself completely nuts, and you’re going to get extremely scared that you’ll send up forgetting things. And in the end, people don’t know what you’re going to say anyway, so if you forget something, you can always come back to that point if you want to get that point across. And if it doesn’t really matter for the story, you just skip it.” – Duncan Epping, giving advice on preparing for a presentation
  • Duncan put a lot of pressure on himself for this presentation too, feeling it could impact his career positively or negatively based on how it turned out, which only increased the level of anxiety he felt.
    • Many of us might treat presenting at a big conference as a possible career inflection point even while we prepare for it.
    • Duncan shared that around the time of his presentation (12-13 years ago), there were close to 20,000 attendees at the VMworld conference. Being a presenter was a huge deal, and he was invited to present as a subject matter expert.
    • Duncan had been writing a lot of content about HA leading up the event. Material from Duncan’s first book on vSphere HA and some of his blogs on the topic were used to create whitepapers on best practice.
    • “But for me, yeah, it very much felt like if I nail this, if I kill this…and they’re already using my content, for sure they will hire me…. So for me…it felt like that…could be a giant moment for my career. If I nail this and everyone talks about it, I for sure will easily move up the ranks.” – Duncan Epping, on the career impact of delivering a presentation

15:45 – Lessons Learned Then and Later

• How many of the lessons learned were immediately incorporated after the conference, and how many came years later reflecting back on it for Duncan?
  • Duncan likes to reflect back pretty quickly after things happen. He gives the example of running and waiting a couple days after the run to think through what happened.
  • After the conference presentation, Duncan tried to determine what he did (what worked), what he did not do (what did not work), and how he could improve (why did something work / not work). Much of the advice Duncan will give others is a number of things he learned after his first few presentations.
  • When looking back on an event like a presentation, Duncan likes to create something like a best practices guide for refining certain skills moving forward.
  • “For me it was fairly straightforward. I knew I wasn’t good at public speaking. I didn’t like public speaking. I didn’t even like speaking in public, and with speaking in public I don’t mean in front of a group of 700 people. Even during a meeting when you’re in a room with 10 or 12 or 15 people, I normally would not be the person raising my hand and then saying something in front of a group. Even if someone would ask a question, and in the group no one would have the answer, I typically wouldn’t even raise my hand and provide the answer if I knew the answer to that particular question. So I was never really comfortable in terms of doing that. And that was also one of the main reasons I forced myself to get comfortable with it.” – Duncan Epping
  • Working for a larger company often times affords you the chance to answer a question in front of one or more of your leaders. Being able to answer in those moments (when you know the answer) can raise your profile across the organization.
    • Duncan highlights the importance for each of us in being ready to do this to grow both personally and professionally.
    • Duncan says forcing himself to speak up in meetings and also speaking in public helped him tremendously over time.
• John highlights Duncan’s linkage of fear of speaking to large groups to the fear of speaking up in a group setting / business meeting. Facing one of those fears is closely linked to facing the other fear.
  • Duncan had to get used to sharing his ideas in front of a group or audience he didn’t completely know.
  • Duncan mentions he would usually be ok speaking up in a small group of other professional services consultants during his time in that role. He knew the people in the group were all at mostly the same level.
  • “If you’re in front of a group, you have no idea who is in the audience. So you don’t know what they know, and you also don’t know what they don’t know. Those are two different things. And the same applies in a meeting.” – Duncan Epping
    • Duncan gives an example of being in a meeting with an engineer with deep technical knowledge as well as a CTO or CEO. These kinds of settings made it more challenging for him to speak up.
  • The fear in the smaller group was not the same as the fear of public speaking in front of a large group. The latter was about 10 times worse and caused a lot more anxiety according to Duncan.
    • “I just had to force myself to get over the fact that there could be someone in the audience that knows more than you do. And that’s fine. You need to be ok with that. And the other thing that you have to be comfortable with is sometimes saying ‘I don’t know. I’ll get back to you…. I don’t have the answer in this particular scenario, so I’ll get back to you.’” – Duncan Epping
    • This was hard for Duncan to do at the start of his career, but he has no problem with it now. When Duncan does not know, he will be the first one to admit it and is willing to go find the answer to the question someone asked.
  • Nick mentions we often feel like it makes us somehow lesser to admit we don’t know something. But admitting it and going to find the answer helps us learn and also helps the person who asked the question learn.
    • Duncan says admitting we don’t know is much better than trying to make something up in the moment that is not correct.
    • Having served on a number of VCDX panels for prospective candidates, Duncan has seen people try to cover up for not knowing the reasons behind their design decisions. It actually made the situation worse. In these moments it is far better to admit you do not know or forgot to document the reason rather than making up a story that is incorrect.
    • “You may as well say that you don’t know, and that’s fine. And most people are ok with that. I’ve never had a situation when someone said, ‘I don’t accept that answer.’ If you don’t know, you don’t know.” – Duncan Epping

22:49 – Writing and Distilling Concepts to the Core

• John says maybe we skipped a step. The first step is to become a subject matter expert. Once you become a subject matter expert, you have to determine how to present that information effectively. Duncan has been a blogger, podcaster, written books, and given a number of presentations. What process does Duncan use to learn content, write about it, and then write about it authoritatively?
  • The way Duncan learns is by writing things out. He learns how something really works in depth by taking a really long article and trying to condense it into a couple of paragraphs.
  • Duncan says this can be the complete opposite of how other people might learn. Frank Denneman might write 60+ pages about NUMA, for example. Duncan likes to distill things down to the core, while Frank likes to get deep into the weeds because it helps with an understanding of the way things work end to end. Duncan’s learning process is the opposite.
  • Duncan has written books that take technical topics into a very deep level of detail. But for blog articles, he will try to condense things as much as possible.
  • When learning about a new topic, Duncan will try to break things down into smaller parts. A storage system or hypervisor will have multiple components. Duncan would then write down each component and what it does, continuing to break down each component into subcomponents where applicable from there. Once he has all the components, Duncan then tries to put them all together again to describe how the larger system works.
  • Duncan says for a long time he assumed this process was the same in other people’s brains but learned that is not the case. His daughter, for example, needed help through the process of breaking down a big concept into smaller components to make an outline for a school assignment.
  • Duncan likes to follow the same process in his presentations – starting with an introduction, breaking that into smaller chunks, and at the end bring everything back together.
  • “I always feel that especially for a presentation (but the same applies to an article or to a book), you typically have to repeat yourself at least 3 or 4 times before you get the point across. And it has nothing to do with the way you communicate. It’s just the way people process information. That’s what I tend to do in my head anyway, so I may as well use the same outline for a blog post, for a book, or for a presentation.” – Duncan Epping
  • John says this matches the pattern we’ve seen of turning information into knowledge.
    • First, writing is thinking. Information we consume is ephemeral unless we process it by writing it down.
    • John mentions this pattern of learning Duncan has shared seems to match the Zettelkasten method of note taking discussed in How to Take Smart Notes.
    • We originally discussed this concept of “writing is thinking” with Josh Duffney in Episode 156 if you want to learn more.

28:42 – Think about the Audience

• Nick feels like the process of going deep and working to condense a very long article as Duncan does almost writes the presentation for him. Once Duncan has written the couple of paragraphs for a finished article, the content is down to the key points that could be part of a presentation. Did this process naturally happen as a byproduct of the way Duncan writes?
  • Duncan feels it happened naturally, and he had done a lot of writing before he started presenting. The writing helped Duncan craft presentations and to convey a particular story.
  • In fact, Duncan started writing even before he began his blog, Yellow Bricks. He had a community forum / website all revolving around hard core punk music that contained album reviews, interviews with bands, etc.
  • “That writing has always been something that was part of me, and that definitely helps processing information in some shape or form…or think about things in a particular way…and also think about ‘what do people actually want to know about this particular thing?’ Whether that’s a CD / an album or whether that’s a product or a feature doesn’t really matter. You really need to understand what people would like to know….” – Duncan Epping, on writing
  • Duncan approaches content creation by putting himself in the shoes of his audience.
  • “If I would read this myself, what are the 5 things I would like to get out of it? What should I learn at the end of this conversation? And that applies to both writing a blog article but also when you do a presentation.” – Duncan Epping
  • When Duncan is asked to present at an event, the first thing he asks is about the audience for the presentation. It is challenging to present something useful if you do not know the audience.
    • Duncan consistently wants to bring value to an audience if he is presenting, and it’s similar when he is writing.
    • We need to know who our audience is and what we think the audience would be interested in learning.
  • “When you write blogs…and it doesn’t matter what the subject is…you’ll quickly find out if it’s interesting or not because people will be reading it or they will not be reading it. And the same applies to a presentation. You can quickly see if people are interested or not. You see it in their faces. You will notice it after the session as well. People will thank you for the content that you delivered, or if it goes completely silent and no one says anything, it probably wasn’t as good as you thought it would be. So you have that fairly quick feedback loop regardless, I think. I think those things are really important. Try to figure out what customers, readers, or listeners would want to consume.” – Duncan Epping

32:34 – An Outline for Presentation Building

• Does Duncan document and then translate into a presentation or start with slides and filling them out?
  • The first thing Duncan likes to do and would recommend others do is figure out a topic or focus area for the presentation.
  • Then, within the focus area Duncan will try to come up with 5-7 things to discuss the presentation (i.e. subtopics). The exact number of things matters less than having a list of things to cover within your focus area.
  • There will be an overarching theme to the discussion. Duncan gives the example of focusing on vSAN stretched cluster configurations as the broad topic. Within that topic, what would customers be interested in? Some examples might be…
    • The configuration of a stretched cluster
    • Best practices
    • Failure scenarios and how they are handled
  • Once Duncan has done the above (selected a topic and some subtopics), he will create an empty slide deck, give it a title, and create sections that align to the items / subtopics he wrote down.
    • For each item (or subtopic), Duncan will create slides to see if it actually makes sense.
  • Duncan usually does 4-5 rehearsals once he has finished building a new set of slides. During that first rehearsal, one would notice how well some slides or sections of work or don’t work. This is the chance to rearrange and change the flow if needed.
    • When you work for a technology company like VMware / Broadcom, there are many slides made by product team members to chose from when building a presentation. Duncan will use some slides that others have made but also has to create his own slides.
  • Duncan gets asked to do presentations on various topics. It can range from things he’s written about to those he hasn’t.
    • As a Chief Technologist, Duncan is responsible for understanding and shaping the product strategy and roadmap (set of features and functionality)p. Sometimes he needs to create slides for things that don’t yet exist.
    • Duncan mentions creating a slide for a product manager last week based on a feature he requested. In addition to this, Duncan will write the user story for the product teams to better understand how they might implement this feature.
  • “Of course it’s 10 times easier to create a slide deck when you’ve already written an article about it because you exactly know what you want to talk about. If you don’t know what you’re going to talk about it’s slightly more complex. But, when you do this on almost a daily basis, it gets a bit easier…. When it’s a presentation in front of a large audience, you need to make sure that slide deck works end to end. Every single bullet point needs to be spot on. But when it’s a meeting with a customer, then I can grab 20 slides, talk through the slides, and then you get to certain areas where you may not have any content but you still get that discussion going. And as a result, it still works.” – Duncan Epping
    • Duncan has learned to be very flexible in what and how he presents in customer meetings. But what enables this flexibility is having a well-prepared deck and focusing on covering the content he is supposed to be covering during the meeting.

37:42 – High and Low Stakes Presentations

• What if Duncan needs to deliver a presentation to people in different roles or at different technical levels? Does he change the content on the slides, change the way he discusses things and the level of depth, or both?
  • Duncan says it depends on how deep the slide deck is. Sometimes the material is really best suited for an administrator, consultant, or architect. Advanced settings, log files, and deep configuration details are near impossible to discuss at an extremely high level.
  • Some of the content these days is built so one could use it to speak to administrators, consultants, architects but also to people at a manager level or slightly higher.
    • “In that particular case I may remove one or two slides that are too geeky, but I’ll just keep the higher-level slides which then allow me to talk through the story….” – Duncan Epping, on adjusting the content for the audience
• Duncan mentioned customer meetings as a form of presentation. These atmospheres could be very conversational with the audience. Does Duncan feel more comfortable when a presentation has more interaction with the audience / is more conversational?
  • If Duncan is in front of a group of customers and not on a stage, it is much easier. You can sit down, have some coffee, go through a set of slides, and have a conversation. Questions throughout allow you to talk about different areas.
  • “But it’s also because of the setting. It’s much more relaxed, right? It’s much different when you’re up on stage and you’ve got 500 people or 2000 people staring at you…. When you do a keynote, and there’s 500 people sitting there, well, you still need to make sure you know your story end to end. And if you mess up, there’s 500 people stating at you. When you’re in a group of 20 people you can always say, ‘let’s take 5 steps back,’ and then it’s not an issue.” – Duncan Epping
  • Duncan tells us public speaking is not scary any longer, but he still gets nervous from time to time.
  • In having so many discussions over the past 10 years, Duncan is confident he could have a discussion with a customer and feel fully comfortable. This is different than presenting in front of a group.
  • John says this is about the stakes of different situations and how bad figuratively or literally falling on your face would be.

Mentioned in the Outro

• The way Duncan learns by taking a high level concept, breaking it down, and putting it back together isn’t so different than people who decided to take a computer apart to learn how it works as a system.
• Condensing a long article into just a couple of paragraphs can be challenging. It requires summarization and brevity, and it’s really a skill to be able to do this. It is a skill we can use to communicate with people at higher levels within an organization (i.e. our managers and above).
  • We can practice this summarization and brevity in our writing, and it will help us in our verbal communication.
  • If you are someone who does not feel comfortable speaking up in meetings when leadership is present, try changing the way you communicate by using summarization and brevity.
• If writing is thinking, that is a 100% transferrable skill across different areas.
  • You don’t have to write about technology. You can write about anything you are learning. But we can make our writing publicly accessible for recruiters and hiring managers and thus show them how we think.
• If you want to hear more stories about public speaking, check out:
  • Episode 73 – Journey to Presenting at Conventions with Al Rasheed
  • Episode 74 – Feedback and Career Impacts of Convention Presentations with Al Rasheed
  • Consider presenting at a user group or join Toastmasters
    • Check out Episode 230 – A Steward of the Community with Chris Williams (2/3) to get a perspective from a user group leader who encourages people to present.
    • Toastmasters is also an option to become better at public speaking. Check out Episode 254 – Train and Teach: A Mixture of Techniques and Concepts with Larry Roberts (1/3).
    • If you’re a STEM professional looking for help with public speaking, be sure to check out Neil Thompson’s Teach the Geek program.

Contact the Hosts

• The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte.
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  • Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman
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