I’ve been working over the last couple of weeks diverting my attention from writing or working on any projects to focusing on some personal life things, but also working on designing a presentation for a technical conference. I’d like to talk about my motivations, how I’ve developed and worked on it, and where I am. I will add a caveat: I have only submitted my talk, and I cannot speak to if I have not been accepted or even gone through any review with the first conference.
My Motivations
Back when I first became a developer, within the first year, I could go to a local tech conference called Stir Trek. At this conference, I was able to meet and talk with lots of other developers with varied levels of experience. I was mesmerized by the speakers and their knowledge of the specific topics and was able to feel immersed and even motivated to learn new tools or new concepts. After the conference and I could apply and experiment with the new items, my young developer mind was blown.
After this first conference, I have continued to go to conferences. After my second year of attending Stir Trek and after attending Code Mash, I decided to set a personal goal. This goal was in 5 years, I wanted to build up my skills and refine my abilities so that I would be able to competently cover a topic at a technical conference. My biggest motivation is that conferences have provided and shaped my skills so much already, and I am a firm believer that I should also contribute to this community so that it can continue to thrive.
The Planning Process
The premise of the first talk I wanted to give was hard to think about because I know a lot of different principles, I know different tools, and I was starting to think, what is the thing that makes me an expert in something. I landed on one topic or idea, in software engineering, and no matter where I was in work or user groups, there seemed to be a language dogma that existed. The dominant language was always the catch-all-best solution for every problem, with no exceptions. If there was a pain point or difficulty, it was a problem with the problem, not the solution in the framework. As I have gone through so many spaces, I’ve realized that there is a lie that is being used in our industry, and if we let it continue, it will eventually destroy us, most likely from the inside. The lie is that languages and frameworks will move in and move out, there is no perfect framework that solves all the problems and is perfect for any problem or use case.
This lie, is the crux of many issues I think we are experiencing, and we as an industry have become too focused on using the framework or language we know and are comfortable with. It is a lie that injects itself in multiple levels, from focusing on sales pitches and dependency creation to selling the “best of all time” solutions. This led me to want to do a talk that highlighted this problem but also provided some real solutions to the problems. After I decided on the premise, I did research, thought of the solutions, and then started writing. I’ve spent the last couple of months actually thinking about this subject and talking it over with a variety of people at different levels of experience in the field.
The hardest part of all of this was determining that I knew enough to be the expert in the room. After several drafts of outlines, I decided to start writing an abstract. This abstract was definitely longer than it needed to be in the end, because when the first talk I decided to target opened up, they simplified the review process for speakers, and just required the sales pitch and description, my bio, and then any notes. I had to switch gears, because honestly, writing a long abstract for a presentation that would last an hour, was easy, I could add details where I wanted. Shifting to two paragraphs was hard. I used my network, reviewed it, pitched it, and probably went through several iterations over the last week and a half. What has been great though, as every checkpoint passed, the feedback got less critical of some of the details, which meant I reached the point where I was ready.
Where I Am At
Since I have gotten so many inputs, I did reach a point of comfort with my topic and talk plan. I’ve drafted a version of this talk, and have done the action to actually submit the application for the call to speakers for Code Mash. I am hoping that they will look at my submission and hear me out. I’d love the opportunity to talk at Code Mash, but also am going to be realistic. It is a real possibility that won’t be the right conference at the right time. I might need to revise the pitch, revise some details, or it was going against too many other great ideas, and that’s fine. In the end, I have a plan to bring this talk, and practice it in other forums, because I think the message needs to be shared and I can get insights into how I am doing and progressing here.