This year I was once again able to attend Zendcon in Santa Clara, CA. While I really enjoy just the general chance to listen to great people give awesome talks as well as catch up with the people that I already know, this year I was actually a speaker. I gave two talks, 'A Tale of Two Apps' and 'Your Inner Sysadmin'. The former was a talk I've distilled down from a post-mortem of two apps I built, and the second was one that I worked on specifically for Zendcon about server-related tools for developers.
Now, I've spoken to groups of unknown people before. At my previous job we did this thing called a Roadshow, where we went around the state and talked to our agents about what we were doing. I had to demo some of the stuff we were working on. I've also given many talks out our local user group. The big difference with Zendcon was that people paid good money to come, and someone believe enough in me to fly me across the country to speak.
That's an enormous amount of pressure. During my first talk, about 5 people walked out. As I saw them leave, I got a bit worried. Was I doing that bad of a job? Or was the talk just not what they were looking for? I hoped it was the second option as the talk was billed as an IBM i talk, and overall I touched on just some of the things we did on the iSeries. Overall though I got some good questions and tried to engage my audience.
After the talk, someone came up to me and thanked me for the talk, and told me how they really enjoyed it, especially with the story-telling spin I put on it. Considering people walked out, I cannot describe how good that made me feel. If nothing else, I helped at least one person. Later that night at the Pingdom party someone else said they enjoyed my talk, and then followed me on Twitter. I drank and was merry for the night.
The next morning during breakfast I decided to fix some slides, and ended up rewriting most of 'Your Inner Sysadmin.' Part of this was because I had combined two talks and some of the slides didn't fit correctly, and also because of a conversation I had with Shawn Stratton (@mfacenet) as he was giving a sysadmin-based talk as well. I was incredibly worried about the talk, truth be told, but in the end I think I came out with a better talk.
One thing I learned with all of this is that it is incredibly satisfying, if incredibly terrifying, to give a talk at a conference. That doesn't mean I'll stop though. I've been submitting to conferences for a few years now and will continue to try. Like Kevin Bruce says in a recent post, "I'm developing a small addiction to talking at conferences."
If anyone is ever on the fence about submitting a talk to a conference, just do it. The worst that can happen is no one will show up to your talk, but you still might be the one talk that really helps a person.
And if you are reading this and haven't rated my talks on Joind.in, do so now!
Joind.in page for 'Your Inner Sysadmin'
Joind.in page for 'A Tale of Two Apps'