Conference Speaking 101

⚠️ Wordsmithing in progress! ⚠️
This article is still a draft. I've put it up so that I can share it with people for gathering feedback. Come back soon to see the final version!

Public speaking is a superpower that unlocks a whole new world of opportunities. The best thing about public speaking is that no matter what you work on, or what your field is, you can train yourself and get better at speaking in front of an audience. This will make people trust you and your skills much more.

Public speaking will let you meet new interesting people and through these people you'll find yourself with more opportunities and more opportunities to talk more. It is also a great way to travel a lot if you're into that.

This blog post is a gist of everything I've learnt about giving talks after working on different talks from the time I was in college.

Why do you want to talk?

I hope the introduction has given you enough reason to want to give talks about what you're working on or what you're interested in. If not, think about why you would be interested to talk, if at all you are. It's totally okay if this is not for you as well, so give good thought on if and why you'd want to pursue speaking.

What do you want to talk about?

Now that you're convinced that you want to get into public speaking, you need to figure out what you want to talk about. This is not a question you're supposed to get an answer for right away. You should be learning something new or teaching something new to the audience. Make sure you do justice to the attendees and make your talk worth their time.

I usually shape talks out of the work I'm doing or find projects to work on with the intent of making a talk out of it. Both are fine as long as you have an experience to share.

A good talk tells a story. A great talk tells your story.

Where to talk?

Start small. Many tech conferences have something called lightning talks. These are 5 minute talks which are sometimes decided on the day of the conference. Check if the conference you want to attend is accepting proposals for lightning talks. If yes apply early. It'll be easier to convince conference organizers to select your 5 minute talk rather than a regular session.

Sometimes (for smaller conferences) the organizers put up a whiteboard in the conference venue and let people write down talk proposals on the day of the event. The folks who write down ideas would be able to present their talks in a first come first serve manner.

What not to do when selecting a topic to talk about

Do not select a "popular" topic just for the sake of getting your talk selected if you're not interested in the topic to do the due diligence. Certainly take inspiration from talks and talk abstracts of other fellow speakers, but know where to draw the line so that you don't loose your creative control over the talk.

Even if you're taking inspiration, you'd still want the talk to be your original creation. Think of public speaking as an art. The real pleasure is in coming up with something new on your own. The creative process is arguably as much if not more rewarding than presenting the talk in front of an audience. Make your talks so ambitious that presenting in front of an audience would only be the reward for all the research and preparation you'd get to do for the talk.

Who do you want to talk with?

It is fairly common that talks at tech conferences are given by two or more people. Now that you've given a lightning talk and have been to a few conferences, you'd know fellow conference attendees who you might be interested to talk with, or vice versa. Think carefully before reaching out to someone asking them to submit a talk with you. Think carefully when someone asks you the same.

If you want to give a certain talk with someone else you know, reach out to them with your ideas. If you're reaching out to someone online, always start by sharing some of your ideas. This shows that you're ready to roll your sleeves up and do the work and let's the other person trust you. A sample outreach message could look like this:

Hi Priyanka!

I was wondering if you were interested in submitting a talk together for
KubeCon NA. Here are some ideas that I have so far. Let me know if any of
these interests you!

- a talk about CEL internals, with a walkthrough of the code
  (It'd be fun to learn about programming language internals, ASTs etc.)

- a talk about the benchmark tests we wrote for KEP 4595, exploring what
  benchmark tests are in Go and how we can use them to stress test code.

How to prepare your talk?

Once your talk has been selected, make sure to plan your talk with your co-speaker as early as possible. You can split parts of the talk amongst yourself and prepare your parts of the talk diligently.