Cameron Purdy: Entertaining Speaker
Cameron Purdy has what many technical speakers lack: a certain charm, an ease with public speaking and humor that make any topic entertaining. I’d gotten that impression from audio-and-slide presentations I’d watched before, but it’s definitely true in person.
I’d probably rather hear Cameron Purdy tak about something I’m mildly interested in than many of the other speakers today talk about something I’m very interested in. It’s just a lot easier to engage when the speaker is able to entertain.
He has a style much like several music teachers I’ve had in my life - a little heavy on bad jokes, but entertaining nonetheless, and manages to get the point across through the humor.
For example, “Multithreaded programming is hard … to do well. It’s not hard to do multithreaded programming, you can just synchronize everything and turn your multi-threaded program into a single-threaded program.”
If you’ve got an opportunity to see him speak, and you’re at all interested in what he has to say, I’d definitely give it a whirl.
