Tag: conference speaking
-
Lady Conference Speaker: Presenter roulette
You deserve to feel like wherever you’re speaking supports you and your talk. Hopefully they tell you up front what they expect, or send you videos, or give you practice time. But if they don’t, I promise it’s reasonable to want to know ahead of time what will happen.
-
Write the Docs: No Pitch Hot
I love impromptu speaking when I get to do it, and Write the Docs had open signups for lightning talks. I wanted to explain the thing I keep teaching founders and all the awesome people I keep coaching: No one cares. No one cares about the thing you want to tell them about as much…
-
Conferences, Inclusion, and Money
Last night, I was reading a tweet stream from Nicole Archambault about having to pay to speak at conferences. https://twitter.com/wiredferret/status/1129932920368574464 I self-funded a lot of conferences when I started speaking. I was more-or-less ok with it because I was using them as advertising and connections for my tech writing consultancy, so I treated them as…
-
Speaker’s Hierarchy of Needs
I’ve been thinking about what I need to be a happy speaker, and what I expect, and what I hope for, and it seems to me like it’s a a hierarchy of needs, like Maslow. This is absolutely not intended to “call out” any organizer or make anyone feel bad. The vast majority of my…
-
My first year, a professional review
A bit over a year ago, I applied to a startup. I’d never been a developer advocate before, and I wasn’t sure what the job actually entailed, but the person who recommended me (thanks, Rach!) and the hiring manager said that probably my experience doing talks about technical writing was enough to make me a…
-
Construct, Capable, Confident
I can’t make it parallel. I tried. We just have to live with an imperfect world of non-parallel headline items. I was talking to another speaker the other day, and she asked me how I knew I was ready to give a talk. As with so many other things in my life, I have a…
-
Live-Tweeting for Fame and Fortune
That’s a joke. I have made $65 off 4 years of live-tweeting, and it’s more than I ever expected. As far as fame, the point is not for me to get famous, but to promote some amazing speakers as they do their thing. I don’t know about you, but I have about 20 tabs open…
-
Using Airtable to Manage Conference Submissions
I know, it’s not a very catchy title, but it is descriptive. A large part of my current job is speaking at conferences and talking about feature flags, systems resiliency, and whatever else I can talk people into. And part of speaking at conferences is applying to lots and lots of conferences. But how do…
-
Nothing gold can stay
This month marks the end of two organizations that were really important to me, and I want to tell you about them. Alterconf Alterconf was a conference series that happened all over the world. The organizing spirit was Ashe Dryden. She took all her experience with the tech industry, gaming, and conferences, and used it…
-
Why I Speak at Developer Conferences
I don’t write code for a living, and I never have. Developer has never been part of my job titles, and my Github history won’t impress anyone. I think that’s why people are surprised that I speak at developer conferences — next month I’m going to RubyConf, PyconCA, and Nodevember. When I started speaking at…