Speaking Up: The Developer’s Guide to Conference Talks & Career Growth - JSJ 682 - JavaScript Jabber

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the JavaScript
Jobber podcast. Today, I'm flying solo as a host, Dan Shapiro,
coming to you from Tel Aviv. But I've got plenty
of guests with me, Ariel Schulmann, Lead Josef and de
Viota Alush, and together we're going to have this really
interesting discussion. I think about public speaking, speaking at conferences,

(00:30):
speaking at any venue where you can talk about tech,
what we think about it, how you should go about it,
the upsides, the downsides, tips and suggestions and whatnot. I
think it's going to be a great conversation. But first
let me I'll let you introduce yourself. So ladies first,

(00:51):
Darrielle please go.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Liad please go.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
And I'm Ariel.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Sorry, here's my friend. I'm Al and I'm Mary.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
I'm a full stack developer at elmex I've.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Been I think I did my first conference.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Three years ago and very passionate about it and have
a few upcoming conferences also this week this year, sorry
not this week, and I think that's it also coming
live from.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Theelvi Yeah, Tel Avi is the place to be today.
We are all Israeli on this podcast, so I hope
it works. Well, anyway, Leads, how about you yourself. You've
You've given some of the best talks I've heard. I
have to say I've listened to you, for example at

(01:46):
the Reversing conference. You always give these amazing talks. So
please describe yourself as in general and as a public speaker.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
Yeah, so, first of all, yeah, thank you. I'm lead.
I'm currently a principal engineering Shopify. I've been in companies
like Douda. I've been a consultant to too many companies,
and one of my patients is public speaking and specifically
tech public speaking. I think I gave my I gave

(02:16):
my first talk at the conference about six years ago,
and it started. I gave talks and meetups before that
and ever since. I'm trying to give really entertaining talsic conferences.
So we'll probably dive into that later. And yeah, added
than that, I am also coming like from Tel Aviv
right now, and again, public sticking is one of my hobbies.

(02:39):
So I'm looking forward.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
To any any upcoming talk conferences that you scheduled to
speak at.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
There are there are a few, actually this year. I'm
in the content committee of a lot of conferences, and
there are also a few meetups and private company lectures
that I'm giving in the in the coming months.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Oh we don't count tails. Yeah, okay, cool and a viata.
How about you.

Speaker 5 (03:09):
I'm Avatar. I'm a software engineer at Meta for the
past five years or so a little bit more, and
also a public speaker. Been speaking in conferences on and
off for the past six years, almost six years. First
conference was in twenty nineteen. You mentioned Reversing conference, so
that was the first one I spoke. I spoke at

(03:31):
Reversing twenty nineteen, so yeah, that's pretty cool. And I
also have a few upcoming this year as well.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
That's nice. So also I'll introduce myself as a speaker.
I'm older than all of you, so I've been speaking
for longer together. Yeah, not quite, not quite that old,
I don't think. I think I spoke at a conference
for the first time approximately twenty years ago, probably before

(03:57):
Yell was born.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Um, I was starting elementary school.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
I've I'm currently principal engineer at some Sense. I also
really enjoy public speaking. This year, I've got three upcoming talks.
I'll be speaking at JS Heroes in Romania in about
a month, and I'm also speaking at React next and

(04:25):
at no TLV two conferences here in Tel Aviv, and
I've got some submitted cfps, so you know, keeping my
finger crossed for some additional talks. We will see anyway.
So now that we've all introduced ourselves and we can
start talking about, you know, conference speaking specifically, I think

(04:46):
the first question that I want to post to you
and feel free to answer in whatever order is why
why is it that you want to speak at conferences
that you know you submit to? The conference goes through
the whole challenge of coming up with the talk, what's
the upside? Why do you actually do it?

Speaker 5 (05:06):
It goes first, I can go. I can go because
it's pretty simple. So before even becoming a public speaker,
I mean, I wanted to be a public speaker for
a long time. But one of the things that I
enjoy doing is working on open source projects. I have
a bunch of open source projects, and I always come

(05:28):
up with more, and it's usually I even spoke about
one of those here on the podcast last year, I think.
And every time we'll working on libraries and tools for
other developed developers, I come up with the challenges that
are non trivial things that the everyday developers don't always
face because they're lower level or they come from a

(05:48):
different paradigm from a product developer, because I build tools
and not products, and sometimes I need to find special
solutions in genius solutions and sometimes even break the rules.
And what I like doing is take the audience with
me on a journey of like a detective story, solving

(06:08):
the same problem that I did, and seeing them experience
the same development and learning journey that I went through.
Is some of the most empowerant things that I enjoy
doing is as a public speaker.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
So I'm going to take AJ's role a little bit
in the sense that I'm going to push back a
little bit on what you just said, because what you
described to an extent you kind of corrected at the end,
But to an extent, you described the value that your
audience gets from your talk. But I'm actually asking a

(06:45):
different question. I'm asking about the value that you derive
from giving the talk. What is it about public speaking?
You know, you do it at the end of the day,
We do it for us. I mean, you know, we
obviously like to share. We want to see the industry
move forward. If we can help people that's great, but
you know, we let's be honest, we do it for us.

(07:08):
So what is it about giving public talks that is
enjoyable to you?

Speaker 5 (07:16):
Of course I do it for the traveling accommodation, no more. Seriously,
it is something that of course I do talk about
my open source projects, mostly to gain attraction to those projects,
to gain visibility to projects, but I also like to

(07:37):
educate the audience about new ways of solving issues. It's
not just for them, it's for me. It's to get
some sort of validation that the things that I do
and the things that I come up with actually work
and are interesting and are valuable to other people other
than just me. So it is kind of both cool.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
So in a sense, it's like the value that you
derive from doing those open source projects in a sense
that you like to share. Basically, yes, cool, how about you, earliad?
What's in it for you?

Speaker 4 (08:15):
So? I actually really like that this is the first question,
because that's, like, I think, the hardest one. But I
I used to I really like giving talks, not just
on tech, even since I was in high school. Like
I'm standing in front of an audience and speaking about

(08:36):
something that's also something that I did in the in
the military a little bit. And I think that I
noticed that I really enjoy seeing this aha moment in
the eyes of the audience when I try to tell
them about things that that are new to them or
things that I did that all of a sudden they

(08:57):
look at it in a different way, and that that
that doesn't the exact moments that I'm looking for, whether
I'm speaking in a room of fifty people or two
thousand people. So I think that's like the high that
I'm getting from standing standing.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
And yeah, it is a rush, I agree.

Speaker 4 (09:16):
And so so that's that's one thing that's what's in
it for me. And I think I used to refrain
from even submitting to conferences for a long time. And
then I heard this kind of someone like saying that
someone told me because I thought I had nothing interesting
to say because everybody knows everything. But then someone told me,

(09:36):
I can bet that you did in the past year,
you did at least five things that no one else did,
like no one that you can you can talk about
no one else did.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
You're jumping the gun on a future question of mine.
So let's put that aside for a minute. I mostly
want to, So I want to concentrate less on what
it is that you decide to talk about or the
topics you bring to the table. I'm again more focusing
in this question on the value that we derive from

(10:07):
public speaking.

Speaker 4 (10:09):
Yeah, so I'll just I'll end up by saying that
obviously there's the value of putting myself out there and
making myself a little bit of content. It's not content expert,
but someone who speaks about react to speaks about those
kinds of things, And like Kevital said, when you build,
when you build a talk, you have to really dive

(10:31):
into things, right to explain to explain it to someone
in thirty minutes, you have to know it very deeply.
So that's part of the value that I derive from it,
of understanding the topic really well and also being being
the person that understands the topic really well so they
can talk about it.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Oh, I totally agree with you. I can get the
same value from talks also from this podcast. By the way,
that when you need to speak intelligently about the topic,
it requires you to learn it, to understand it, to
actually be able to articulate it means that you have
to internalize at first, so it's a great way of

(11:14):
learning new topics. But you also brought up a certain
point in the past. We actually had this great episode
on the show with the Moad Stone from Wicks about
building your personal technological brand, and you mentioned that. But
I do have to ask about this. Do you feel
that your public speaking has actually promoted your brand in

(11:39):
a sense which furthered your career?

Speaker 4 (11:41):
Let's say, yeah, I can answer for myself. Definitely. Definitely.
I feel like my career. You can slit the career
into two. Before I started public speaking and after. You
can't compete with this kind of freach. You can't compete
with an audience of people who sit and listen to you,
and you have you have the chance, You have the
opportunity two to present yourself as as an an expert,

(12:06):
as a domain experts, as someone who can speak intelligently
like you say so, Definitely, it has a huge impact
on the brand I think. I think it's the highest
value for effort that you can you can get.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
You're a very senior role principal engineer the very well
known company Shopify. Do you think that your public speaking
was had a significant impact on your ability to get
this position.

Speaker 4 (12:38):
Yeah, definitely. I can't count the number of messages that
I got. Hey, I saw your video in this conference,
so I saw you in this conference, or someone from
my company told me about this talk that you gave
and when you like, a lot of messages come with
links to my to YouTube of my top So so

(13:01):
I think I wouldn't say that I wouldn't get to
this point otherwise. But but definitely it helps a lot.
It helps a lot put you out there to get
your name to be known. That's something that yeah, you
can't really do in any other way.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
How about your real.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
I think they saw all of my arguments like that first,
and it was both of you. That's still it.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
It's it's absolutely likely I said it's a and also
what Avitel said it for me, the value, like the
crowds benefit and my benefit are strictly equal. Like when
I see people's a harm moment like that that fills me.
So I am dependent on like their experience is my experience.

(13:51):
And and also the rush of seeing like you know,
a thousand people focused completely like only.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
On every word that you say.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
It's an incredible feeling that's very hard to describe. And
also the amount of opportunities that came out of.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
This is unbelievable.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
And I will say that I also had I was
interviewed recently about like public speaking and branding, and I
think that specifically when you talk about branding, when people
do public speaking not in the purpose of creating a brand,

(14:32):
but in the purpose of delivering and giving other people value,
the brand kind of builds itself. And it's really easy
to differentiate between speakers that the best speakers are not
in it for the branding. The branding built itself because
they're passionate. And I can see a lot of like

(14:55):
people pushing themselves towards public speaking for the sake of branding,
and it just doesn't create the same content because it's
quite obvious right when you're building. When you're creating content,
are you thinking about your brand or are you thinking
about how does my crowd benefit from this to the maximum?

Speaker 2 (15:15):
And it really creates a completely different experience if you
ask me.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
I do want to add one point. If you tell
you kind of joked about the travel and accommodation, but
for me, it's actually not so much of a joke.
Almost every time I go to a conference overseas, I
try to turn it into a trip, a vacation, a tour.
So for example, about two years ago, I spoke at

(15:43):
the Web Directions in Sydney, Australia, and I brought my
wife along and we toured four months in Australia after
this conference. Now, obviously we don't need the conference in
order to do that, but it's really nice when somebody
pays for half your plane tickets. Uh And and that's

(16:04):
a fairly significant factor for me of basically just visiting
places that I might not have gone to otherwise. If
not for that, for those conferences.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
You if you weren't that passionate about JavaScript, I don't
know if you would have made it.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
Oh yeah, for sure. But you know it's like you
know they say about real programmers that you know, we're
always surprised at how much we earned doing something we
would have done for free. And I guess it's kind
of the same about the conferences, the conference scene. I
I probably would have done it otherwise, but it's a

(16:44):
great benefit. I will say, just and I'll give you
the the I'll let you speak in a second yad.
I will say that if a conference does not cover
my expenses and it's not a conference that my job
decides to send me to, then I'm highly unlikely to
go there.

Speaker 4 (17:07):
Yeah, so you spoke about the accommodation and the flight,
and that's actually that raises another point. Another benefit of
speaking conferences, especially high profile conferences, is the other speakers.
So you have a lot of opportunities to connect with
people that are legends in the field, and you sit
with them to speakers dinner, and you talk to them

(17:28):
and you create connections, and that's something that it's a
personal benefit. It's not why you do the conferences, but
that's something that helps build your brand and build your connections,
and coming as a speaker obviously put you in a
different category than just coming to the conference.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
I'm actually a host here on this podcast because of that,
because I was speaking at O'Reilly Fluent when that process,
when that conference still existed a few years ago, and
the state it's like six years ago, it's not so
few anymore, six or seven. And I met Amy Knight,
who was one of the hosts at JavaScript Jabber back then,

(18:10):
and she basically kind of invited me on the show
and things got rolling and eventually I became a host.
So for sure. I met ken C. Dodds, I met
Kyle Simpson, I made the tagus. The list goes on
and on, you know, some just some people off the
top of my head. But the speakers dinners tend to

(18:35):
be awesome. And also I like to say that probably
that in many conferences the most interesting place in the
conference is the speaker's room.

Speaker 4 (18:44):
Speakers room. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, if even if you're not speaking, I recommend sneaking
into the speaker's room. Yeah. There usually isn't a guard
at the door. You can basically just get in if
you've got the.

Speaker 5 (18:59):
Don't tell the secret.

Speaker 4 (19:00):
So yeah, but by the way, about personal branda that
you ask, I remember that. I think only after my
third or fourth talk ever, I think it was Guilty
Hear that came to me and say, hey, maybe you
do want to put your details, like your contact details
at the end of the of the talk, just so
people will know you know who you who you are.

(19:21):
And I was so focused on giving the value that
didn't think about it. But that's something that if you
want to use conferences to increase your person brand, you
have to do that, right.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah. So Gil I actually met at Wix, but he's
one of the great people you can meet at conferences.
Another one was Rich Harris. I met him at the conference.
A lot of amazing people, Ryan Carniato. The list goes
on and on and on. I even remember a funny story,
like way back when I was at Google ioe and

(19:55):
I wasn't even speaking there. I was just, you know,
visiting and walking around, and I met Jason Miller, the
creator of pre Act, and I met I forget his name,
the guy who created Webpack Socra I forget anyway, so
we were sitting together, and then we were walking around together,

(20:17):
just talking about stuff. And then I see this guy
walking towards us, and there's this look of recognition in
his eyes, and he walks up to us, all excited,
and I'm wondering who will he speak to, the creator
of pre Act to my right or the creator of
web back to my left. And he goes to me
and he says, Dan, I saw your talk at this

(20:38):
and that conference. It was so good, and I was like, yes,
So it does create a certain brand recognition and it's
a great feeling when that happens. Anyway, moving on to
the next question that I prepared. So we talked about
our background to speakers about why we got into public speaking.

(21:00):
But after talking about the why, let's talk about the how.
How did you actually get into public speaking? What was
the process for you? Wants to go first? This time,
meet this time, go for it.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
And as a matter of fact, I was really outside
of the whole.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
I wouldn't say the industry.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
But like I wasn't really in this world of conferences,
and I was barely going to twenty meetimes, so I
had no idea how what of a brand it could
create and which opportunities is it going to give me?

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Like I just went I changed jobs after I worked
in Licensed.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
And in my new job, I suddenly I wasn't in
a team full of senior developers, and I suddenly saw
that I have value to give other developers. You were
the senior, yes, And suddenly I saw that I that
I have a lot of things I can teach others,

(22:07):
and and I wanted more. I wanted more than just
the five developers I was working with. And I was
looking for for a connection to speak in a in
a meetup, and I went to reverse in conference and
I started the mingling and caught some guy that that
connected Gilad you guys know him, and he connected me

(22:31):
with some community to speak in a meetup. It was
I gave a talk about GIT actually how how it works,
and and it just blew up. It was really quite insane,
Like after that talk, I had so many, so many
different industries approaching me. I was, I gave that talk

(22:53):
like probably everywhere in the military, and then the conference
approach to me to come to file to file a SFP,
and and it really just got so crazy so fast.
Without any intention of I had no idea what I'm
going to what's in it for me, Like.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
What we talked about earlier.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
I just wanted to to teach people stuff.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
And I was like, like I can talk about this.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
I like, like, I think it's beautiful, and and one
thing led to another, and now I'm flying for four
convinces in the year.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Each each one have has their own concept of beauty.
You don't think it is I think. I think KITS
is beautiful on the inside. I think the command line
interface leaves a lot to be desired if.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
You would listen to my talk. I don't recommend that
much using the command line.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
I just recommend understanding how it works, and then you
can use the beautiful doing interfaces.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
Point taken. Have you told how about you? How did
you get into actually public speaking?

Speaker 5 (24:04):
Funny story, No, so first one, like I initially wanted
to become a public speaker, like years before. I remember
going to a conference in twenty fifteen, and I think
it was the first you got a left front at
in twenty fifteen, and I saw I think it was

(24:25):
Douglas Crawford and on the stage and and and I
was odd because for the first time that I go
to a conference, I see it wasn't about him, but
it was about him being actually being valued enough to
be flown all the way to another country and actually
delivering value to an audience. And already at that point,

(24:46):
I was like, I want to be there. I want
to be on that stage, be able to deliver value
and valued enough so that I can be sent or
invited to such conferences. And I had no idea what
that that means being invited to a conference. And in
twenty nineteen came my first option, or my first opportunity,

(25:06):
where my company pretty much promoted and advocated for engineers
to apply for the Reversing conference, which was a local conference,
so it was pretty easy. The process was pretty easy
to follow up, and there was a voting process, and
I got in and gave a lightning talk, a fifteen
minute lightning talk about one of my open source projects.

(25:31):
But then a year after COVID hit and I was like,
how do I go to conferences? And now how do
I join conferences?

Speaker 3 (25:38):
Now?

Speaker 5 (25:38):
How do I apply? I didn't even work at the
same place, nobody advocated for it, and I didn't really
still know any any speakers or anybody. And I didn't
know which door should I knock? What is the secret
code for actually applying to conferences? How do I get invited?
And it was like a very weird process of trial

(25:59):
and error and actually understanding there's no secret code, there
is no speakeasy bar. It's just a simple cfp kofa
papers form that you need to file and come up
with an interesting enough idea. And I filed enough of
those that I started getting accepted to back. It was
twenty twenty, so online conferences because everything was online in

(26:20):
twenty twenty, and suddenly that opened the door to real
life conferences, first in Poland and then in Germany, and
another one in Germany, and like a bunch of those
worldwide years after.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Yeah, it's the COVID period was tough. Oh yeah, sure.
Why wasn't it tough for you?

Speaker 2 (26:44):
I was surfing in Australia.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Oh well, okay, that's that's yeah. I can dig it. Yeah,
I can dig it. I can envy you. That's fine. Yeah,
it's It's interesting because my reaction to COVID was actually
a bit of the opposite of yours. I've been speaking
for a while before COVID, and when COVID hit, initially,

(27:07):
I also registered for a couple of online conferences just
to keep the ball rolling. The assumption was, you know,
we'll probably get out of this mess in about six
months or so. So I did a couple of those,
and my overall experience with them was terrible, felt like
I was talking to a wall, and I basically just

(27:28):
gave up on those. So for the most of the
duration of COVID, I did not speak at conferences at all,
and only got back to it after COVID hit. After
COVID ended, and then the war happened, and you know,
the last couple of years have not been easy anyway, I.

Speaker 5 (27:46):
Completely agree, But I saw that as a ladder for
me because that was the beginning of my career as
a speaker today. I completely agree with your with your
perception of online conferences. Many people like them, maybe as
an audience. As a speaker, you don't get audience engagement
and you don't even know if you come through to

(28:07):
the audience.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, that's true. How about Julia, how did you get
into the game.

Speaker 4 (28:14):
Yeah, So I have been giving internal talks in DUDA
because I was leading the front, and so I did
a lot of small talks like Ariel in Duda, and
there was I think it was early twenty nineteen, like
January twenty nineteen, where they came to me and say
do they come to me and say, hey, we're going
to host a meetup of a group called the React

(28:34):
as well. Do you want to give a talk there
about like the React migration that we did. And I
said okay, and I took I think a whole week.
I built this talk like a whole week, full time,
went into tuning because it was my first talk in
the meetup, and I gave it and it got really
good results. And actually my experience was the opposite of

(28:56):
guitars By. I didn't submit anything, but right after the
meetup Adam Klein, from one of the organizers of React Next.
It took me aside and say, hey, do you want
to speak at the React next. I mean, do you
want to give some sort of a talkic React Next? Yeah,
of course, And then I gave a talk at at
React Next. It was in whole By, which is a
smaller one, and I prepared for it a lot, so

(29:18):
I was a little bit disappointed, but it was crowded,
it was full, full, full room, and it also got
I think it got like the best talk in the
conference or something like that, and that really opened the
door for conference in Israel and as for the conferences abroad.
So actually the COVID times were really helpful for me,

(29:40):
like if you tas said, because it was online conferences,
and because it was online, there were a lot of tracks,
so a lot of talks could be accepted, so it
was really easy to start building your name and reputation
in those online conferences. I gave I think six or
seven different during the half year of the COVID day.

(30:02):
I recorded one of them from Greece. So we were
in a house in Greece and I sat with the
laptop and I recorded them because I had to submit
them and afterwards afterwards it opened the door to like
international conferences. I spoke in REACT Summit and GEST Nation,
all the all the big conferences, which yeah, and the

(30:24):
rest is history. By the way, I have to say
that before before I started speaking conferences, I went to
a lot of conferences like Avatar. I went to YGLF
You Got a Left Front in twenty fifteen. I think
it was like the infliction for a lot of us.
And the talk that that affected me the most, there
were two of them. The first one was Gilt I
hours so I looked at Guilt Talk and it was

(30:44):
so out of this world and as I want to be.
I don't know how, but I want to be there
on the stage one day. And the second, the second
one was the closing talk from I don't remember his name,
some from Smashing magazine who gave a talk that was
thirty minutes something like nine hundred slides like and it

(31:04):
was such a such a rush running through the stock.
I really enjoyed it, even though I didn't understand like
half of the things. So I said, okay, I want
to be the kind of people, this kind of person
that stands on and.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
You mean Vitally Itally.

Speaker 4 (31:19):
Friedman, Yeah, I think I think it was Itally.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, he's another guy I met at a couple of conferences.
He is a great guy. We should probably have him
on the show some.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
Yeah, he's a great entertainer. I mean that Gill and
Vitally was the like my epitom of how how a
good speaker should be. It should be informative and entertained.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
So yeah, So just to give my own background story,
I was working at this small company, a startup, and
we were playing in the field with a lot of
larger companies. We were trying to get the message out
and I actually leveraged conferences initially basically is a means
to promote our company and our technology. So it was

(31:57):
not a sponsored I was. I was not. I was
really careful not to do it like to marketing. So
I was talking about technologies and stuff like that, but
I was still getting just the fact that I could say,
and we're using this technology, or I could use our
products as examples for useful stuff, and enabled me to

(32:20):
get the word out. And then I got and I
and then I started working at WIS. And one of
the great things about WIS is that WIS really pushes
its employees to speak at conferences and even covers expenses
and stuff like that. And I also got into a
web performance relatively early, and that became a really hot topic.

(32:43):
So for a while there it was fairly straightforward to
get into conferences speaking about web performance. Anyway, moving on
to the next question, how do you find and select
speaking opportunities? What are your selection criteria for deciding which

(33:04):
conferences to try to speak at? Oh?

Speaker 5 (33:06):
Yeah, go first again. Yeah, I'm thinking do I want
to get more competition or not?

Speaker 1 (33:12):
You don't want you know, you don't need to name
the conferences if no, no, no, it's fine.

Speaker 5 (33:19):
It's fine. I was just kidding. There are enough conferences
in enough areas that it's okay, and and we always
in all conferences, I think, welcoming speakers as well, so
it's completely fine. So first of all, there are many
online repositories for for conferences, so like a bunch of websites,

(33:40):
there is a trailer board and airtable board. I just
found a new one recently that just have the list
of all upcoming, all upcoming conferences, and they usually also
say if the conferences cover travel and accommodation.

Speaker 4 (33:57):
What it is about? What is the date?

Speaker 5 (34:00):
So these are very good utilities and tools and websites.
Usually you should just look up on Google CFP and
maybe we can later on on the show notes just
a bunch of them. So yeah, yeah, so that we
can so that the audience can find them. But also

(34:22):
there is think.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
By the way, before you go on, what do you
think of sessionized sessionize?

Speaker 5 (34:28):
It's it's a good tool for actually applying, but I
don't think it's a good discovery tool from conferences. I
I do not enjoy it for discoverability.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
MM. Probably need to get you to share some of
your links with me.

Speaker 5 (34:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be on the show notes, I think,
but before that they'll get to you. And also there
is a really cool initiative in the Israeli community. That's
What's up group for. I don't know how many we
are there already, but at least do at least dozens
of speakers from Israel that we actually share cfps that

(35:06):
are about to close soon. And there's even a website
for that community where we voluntarily upload a list of
cfps that we find. So that's pretty cool for sure.
Members of it yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, that's how I recruited you for this conversation. Yeah,
how about you. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:30):
So, in addition to those resucess that Evita mentioned, I
think at some point in your career and your speaking career,
where you have conferences that you either gave more than
one talking or you gave a really good talking, you
start to get inbound requests for full speaking. For example
that get nation conferences sometimes approached me and say, hey,

(35:53):
we have reactions on it next year, do you want
to speak? Or the Giggle, which is like a network
of a lot of online conferences. They usually they have
a lot of inbound requests. And so so in addition
to those kind of conferences, I know people in the
community that share with me, Hey we're going to speak,

(36:14):
or we're applying to decent this conference, or there's this
really interesting conference that that's happening. So I think like
building a network of speakers, that's also something that's really
really important.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
In order to building networks is always a good thing. Yeah,
are you? And anything to add.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
Take a viotar's links, I think I think I got
like maybe four conferences since I asked the votar for
his resources.

Speaker 5 (36:46):
Oh I got the best links.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Links for us. But that's what you guys described is
how you find conferences. But how do you choose conferences?
I mean, I assume you don't submit to each and
every conference. How do you choose which conferences to submit too?

Speaker 2 (37:07):
Why not submit and then refuse like you can?

Speaker 3 (37:11):
You can submit as many as you like, you can
refuse like, oh, yeah, honestly, I don't. I would submit
to anything that has travel and accommodations covered and it's
not a place that I wouldn't like to be at.
And I it happened to me to decline to conferences, Like,

(37:33):
it's fine, it happens. I think it's better to have
the opportunity to decline than.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Not to have it at all.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Well, obviously you occasionally need to decline, you know, sometimes
strictly for personal reasons. Sometimes because you submit for three
conferences and they all happen at more or less the
same date, so you can't physically be three and you
get in into all three and you don't know that
in advance. So that I did go to you you

(38:03):
spoke at three conferences at the same time.

Speaker 5 (38:06):
Yeah, I went to two conferences, like there were one
day apart in two different countries in Europe.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
So yeah, even overlapped the overlap today and you got
late to the other conference.

Speaker 5 (38:22):
I would even though I do know a speaker who
flew from It was Hilla Fish who flew from Dublin
to who spoke at a conference in Dublin, flew to
Germany to give her talk, and flew back to Dublin again,
both conferences at the same day.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (38:42):
I would also add a rule of thumb for me
that it should be a conference that I can see
myself coming as a guest. I mean that that's I
think like that the top tiers of conferences that I
would apply to a conferences that I would want to
be in, even not as a speaker.

Speaker 1 (38:59):
I forget, by the way, who it was. He's a
well known C plus plus speaker whose name escapes me
right now, and he spoke at the conference that I
also attended, and we went out for drinks afterward, and
he's one of those people who you know, goes from
conference to conference to conference. And I asked him about,

(39:19):
you know, did he have any stressful experiences and he
told me of this time he was supposed to give
the closing keynoted the conference, and his flight was late,
so he literally got to the conference three minutes before
his talk, walked out of the taxi directly onto the stage,
and started speaking. So I asked them, were you really

(39:42):
stressed out? He said, kind of, but not as much
as the conference organizers, So so yes, conference organizing his
pretty stressful job, something I'm grateful that I've never done. Okay,
I agree with everything you said. And if there's one

(40:05):
annoying thing though, is that sometimes it's pretty difficult to
figure out if a conference does or does not cover expenses.
It's it should be upfront and straightforward, and sometimes it's
it's not. It's not for some reason, and when it
when it's not, it's kind of annoying. Let me see,
what's the next question I want to ask about. Oh, yeah,

(40:27):
this is a good one. How do you come up
with the topics to talk about one of the before
you start answering one of the I really try to
convince people that I work with, that I interact with
in the tech community to speak at conferences. And one
of the common responses that I hear is I don't

(40:49):
have anything to talk about. I have nothing interesting to tell.
There's nothing that I'm currently doing that's interesting to anybody
and so forth. Obviously that's not true, but there is
still a question of how to come up with the
actual confidence talk topics. So how do you go about it? Yeah,

(41:09):
let's start with you this time. You're never first.

Speaker 4 (41:15):
Yeah, So it's a it's a really good question, and
I think it changes throughout your career. So I would
say that if it's if it's an advice that I'm
giving to people that they want to talk about something
is like the first the first talk, that the first
topic that you're going to choose, that should be something
that you're very affluent in. You're very influent in, and

(41:37):
it doesn't matter if you feel that you you don't
have anything any value to give. You have value to give.
If that's something that you walk down, you have value
to give, definitely. But I would say that my choice
of topics now are combinations of either things that are
of interest to me, even if it's not something that

(41:57):
I do in my day job, but of interest to
me and I want to dive deep and I want
to be able to speak about them, or that's something
that I think would go well with the with the theme,
with the theme of the conference and the side gates
of the times, right, so I wouldn't give a talk
about react Tooks today.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Even ai ai ai.

Speaker 4 (42:19):
Ya I saw twenty twenty four.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, now it's MCP. I think we're just the AI Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
And for some reason, I think you do know a
little bit about MCP.

Speaker 4 (42:30):
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I read some tweets about it.
So so I think I think it's definitely it's definitely
a mix because it has to it has to be
something that you think would give value to the to
the audience, but it also it has to be something
that of interest to you. I wouldn't I wouldn't give
a talk about something that I wouldn't want to listen

(42:52):
to as a as an audience.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
How about you?

Speaker 3 (43:01):
I think this question is also maybe maybe it's about
phrases in the career, but I also feel like there's
style to it, you know, like there are each like
there are lecturers that have like a style, like I
can say that I know. My style is to to
take deep, deep concepts and to break them up to

(43:21):
the to the smallest pieces, and like just to like
I love explaining how things work and and it kind
of goes also back to the beginning of this conversation
of what's in it for me? Only until I break
a subject deep like I'm basically explaining it to myself.
I'm building the ideal explanation for myself and sharing it.

(43:42):
So I do I take technologies that not that I
do feel like, not technologies that they don't like, but
I like to take technologies that are to take deep
concepts and and to research the f out of them.
And really, I also feel like that kind of is

(44:07):
what helps with the imposters syndrome for some people that
they think that they don't have something to talk about,
or that they don't know enough research the f out
of it until you know that you have value because
nobody has invested.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
So much research in what you're going to talk about.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
And that's kind of what I try to do when
I both talk about things.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
I think I invest dozens of hours of research.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
Interestingly, I think my son once told me something along
the lines of that if you've read a book about
some topic, then you know more about that topic than
seventy or eighty percent of the people in the world,
even if you've read just one book about it. So, yeah,
don't underestimate the knowledge that you gained by working on

(44:53):
a particular topic as part of your day job.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
Yeah, but also you need research, Yeah for sure, probably.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
But the very least you know what to research. True
if you thought, how about you?

Speaker 5 (45:10):
Yeah, So for me, it's pretty easy, I think, because
I have my own niche that I only talk about
things that I build, So the topics are No, it's
actually not that easy because what I like doing and
my style of presentations is almost always live coding, So
I love and what I enjoy doing is take a

(45:32):
problem that I solved and break it down to the
audience in a way that actually teaches them something. And
the issue is and the challenges is identifying the small
enough but meaningful enough kind of problem for the audience
to actually relate to, but also be able to deliver
on a stage in a thirty minute timeframe. So what

(45:54):
I do is usually when building a library or when
building a tool, is find the lower level parts of
my libraries or the lower level solutions that I had
to come up with that I can actually share with
the audience and they will get some benefit from. So
sometimes it's a component of my system, just a unit

(46:20):
of my system. That I try to build together with
the audience and then create, and also something that I
had to solve, something that I needed to solve for myself,
and then walk the audience through the journey that I went.
So this is usually the type of talk that I choose,
and this is the topic that comes to mind, And
so it happens every time I continue building my tools

(46:42):
and adding more capabilities, I find new challenges and new
solutions for these challenges. So I come up with new
top ideas. And even though I have the same core
five main open source projects that I work on, the
talks never run out because I keep maintaining them and
keep coming up with new challenges as the story continues

(47:06):
with those packages.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Just a reminder to our audience that you were a
guest on our show speaking about the VEST testing framework
or testing.

Speaker 5 (47:15):
Library, validation framework.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Validation framework, or for forms, not for testing. It looks
like a testing library, but it's a form validation library.
Sorry for that confusion. Yeah, I totally aligned with that
in the sense that I think it has to do
with a way of thinking. Whenever somebody like I said,

(47:38):
tells me that I don't actually have a topic. In
a lot of cases, I asked them, Okay, tell me
what you're currently working on. Tell me a problem that
you had to solve in the context of your work.
Obviously you've had to solve some problems. Now I'll show
you how you can take that topic and transform it

(48:00):
into a conference talk. So it's a kind of a
way of thinking of like you said, you're working on
a problem, you're solving a problem, and then it kind
of clicks, Hey, this can be a talk topic, a
topic for a talk that I give it a conference.
And for me, at least in most cases, I don't
create talks for conferences. I don't know about you guys.

(48:23):
It works in a reverse. I have a talk idea,
I write it down, and then when conferences come along,
I try to align the the relevant ideas with the
talk with the conference based on what I perceived the
theme of the conference to be. It's it's very rare

(48:46):
for me to try to come up with a talk,
particularly or specifically for a conference just because I saw
a CFP for that conference. I won't say it never happened,
because I think it did, at least in the beginning,
but it's currently it's fairly rare for me. To do that. So, Okay,
you've got an idea, maybe you've written down the title,

(49:10):
you have some thoughts about what it is that you
want to show, but now you need to actually turn
it into a CFP. That means a title, that means
an abstract. Sometimes there are additional fields that they require
you to feel, like, what's in it for the audience?
How did you do go about the research and what
and so on and so forth? How do you go

(49:31):
about that particular process.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
You talk about finding a SAFP for a talk that
you've never given.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
I'm talking about taking a new talk idea that appeared
in your head and actually turning it into the content
that you fill in in the CFP form.

Speaker 2 (49:53):
Because it's not like a two point thing.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
You can do meetups like you can present it in
a non conference environment.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
You know there is I'll put it differently. You need
to come up with a title, You need to come
up with an abstract. You need to come up with
maybe additional information about that conference talk proposal, and those
need to be attractive because at the end of the day,
you know, it's a blind selection in most cases, and

(50:24):
a catchy title is better than a whole old hum
title and likewise with regard to the abstract, so those
do make a difference. So my question is what's your
process for turning the idea into a title and an abstract.

Speaker 4 (50:43):
First, first of all, I think it's it's it's pretty
maybe it's pretty obvious, but it's very helpful to keep
track of your past submissions because those you can't find
them anywhere if they're not on session EZ, so have
like a Google doc or something to track. First of
because it's very hepple to copy all of the other

(51:03):
relevant fields like bio and Twitter and links and everything,
and and the second and secondly, because some of the
talks are there, like variations of talks that you've already given,
so it's heppul to get them. But if it's a
new talk, I think that I'm also part of several committees,
so I know how it looks from the other side.

(51:23):
And as as much as you want to look into
every every submission in a committee, when you get a
thousand submissions, the title is very important and it should
be catchy, like you said, but it shouldn't be there.
It should be vague, so it shouldn't be like the
cool things that you can do with something. It should

(51:43):
be it should be aimed for the eyes of the
committee and afterwards for the eyes of the of the audience.
So I think it's an art of itself, of the title,
the title itself, and what.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Is the art?

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Do you think the title is equal to the abstract?

Speaker 4 (52:01):
So I think that. I mean, just think about yourself
as a conference goer. If even if you have the
agenda and you have four tracks of this conference, usually
what the title is everything you see, like if you
have an app or something, you have to click on
the title in order to read the abstract, right and
a lot of the time.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
Yeah, but that's the second step.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Like as as a content committee myself, I think I
focus more on the abstract than on the title and
not the experience of the speaker right the way, which
is really likely the most important thing.

Speaker 4 (52:32):
Yeah, but that's not something that you can control. When
you when I mean you can you can build it
in a way that you look appealing, but that's not
something you can control and you submit to SEFP. So again,
I agree, the abstract is important. But the thing I
want to say, a lot of the conferences give you
another part of the form that are speaking points. So
it's super important to differentiate abstract from speaking points. Speaking

(52:55):
points that's only for the eyes of the committee. An
abstract that's something that the committee they need to to
want to have it in the conference, and they need
to also also think that the audience is going to
like this abstract, right, So so you're actually writing for
two audiences, for the committee and the and that this

(53:16):
that's something.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
So how do it? So?

Speaker 4 (53:18):
I think for me, you know, I've been to a
lot of conferences and I am I've been to a
lot of committees. So I write something that I would
find appealing. If I'm going to, for example, a topic
but react hooks. So I'm going to write the abstract
in a way that's going to to explain to people
that already know or already heard about hooks, why that's

(53:42):
something that's going to be new to them. Because no
one will go to UH today to talk that say
let's explain let's let's let me explain to you about hooks.
So that that has to be catchy and the title
I would I'm trying to refrain with the you know,
play on words, let's get hooked or something like that.
I really want to respect the intelligence of whoever is

(54:04):
reading that, and and the title should be informative but
eye catching. I mean it's a case by case, right.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Do you run your titles by other people to get
feedback your titles your out.

Speaker 4 (54:19):
Oh definitely, yeah. At abstracts are something that are going
to be refined and refined and refined again. Yeah, definitely,
because it's helpful if you know people that like people
from committees or people that organize conferences, because they have
the best insights on that. But yeah, yeah, of course
I run it by people. I know people from the industry.

(54:41):
But do you think, would you go to this talk?
What do you think about about this abstract? Is it understandable?
Is it clear from the abstract that I'm going to
speak about ABC? Yeah? Definitely.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah. I I one of the talks that I am
giving this year at the con and I'll be speaking
at had a very different title and I it wasn't
accepted by a couple of conferences, and then I think,
I send it to tags and he suggested like a

(55:15):
completely different title for me, and we kind of settled
it was an iteration. I didn't immediately take his suggestion,
but we ended up on a very different title than
my original title, and apparently it works because it's gotten
accepted into two conferences. So yeah, for sure the title. Now,
obviously I can't know why it wasn't accepted before. Usually

(55:37):
you don't get the reason. But I do think the
new title is better. I recently had had the amusing
experience first time that this has happened to me. That
conference kind of censored my title, which is really so
my talk at no TLV is titled using heat.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Remember that one?

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Yeah, yeah, you're one of the committee there, you're one
of the people who edited.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
Yeah, of course you can't. I remember that title.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Now, so yeah, so no, please please say what was
the title?

Speaker 1 (56:18):
Then I'll start with the please no, I'll start with
the current one, and then I'll tell the original one.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
To talk about memory dumps.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Okay, to talk about hip dumps, memory dumps. So my
original title was taking a dump using heap dumps to
find and fix no JS memory and CPU problems, and
you removed the taking a dump part.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
I forgot about that. I want I want to give
a contradicting perception on this. And it happened to me
too that I filed cfpiece of talks that I haven't
given before. But to be honest, I I prefer to

(57:09):
present the.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Talk in my in my.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
Local area, so like in meetups, and and then the
abstract is not like something I need to make up
or the title I need to make up.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
I kind of like I.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Test run it in my local environment and then like
it also improves, and I and then I and then
I start submitting it, Like I don't really enjoy making
up abstract for that's what Also, that's pretty much what
makes it hard. And when you when you present a
talk in a meetup, they're not going to be like, oh,

(57:44):
your title is not perfect, your abstract is not this,
and you can take advantage of this local environment where
you can present it and to really like also define
your talk and understand the value that people get. And
and the abstract like again what kind of build itself.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
But it's a.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
Lot harder to write an abstract for a talk that
doesn't exist, Like it's it's a lot harder.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
I agree, But I will ask you, do you get
feedback from meetups on the quality of your abstract?

Speaker 3 (58:17):
Quight on the It's not about getting feedback on the
quality of the abstract, But I feel like what's hard
about writing an abstract for a talk that doesn't exist
is the fact that it doesn't exist. And when a
talk exists and you already know, like what what do
you what?

Speaker 2 (58:38):
What is an abstract about? What? What is it's about? Saying?
What are you going to talk about?

Speaker 3 (58:43):
Like?

Speaker 2 (58:43):
Why is it interesting? Why is it valuable?

Speaker 1 (58:45):
What?

Speaker 2 (58:46):
How does it solve a problem?

Speaker 3 (58:48):
And those you go through this process when you build
a talk, and so the moment you have the talk,
you already have all the key takeaways.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
But easier to an abstract.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
I agree. But let's go back in time. Let's say
I was giving a talk five years ago about react
hooks when they were new. Okay, I think they were
new five years ago.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
Let's talk about something new. Why are we so stuck on?

Speaker 1 (59:12):
I'm just giving I'm just giving examples. So just something
that popped in my head. So I could say, like
react hooks are the new mechanism for managing state blah
blah blah. Or I can say the all new React
hooks are the exciting new way like it. I think
the way that you phrase things does make a difference,
doesn't it.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
I don't think so, not unless you're worthy unless you're not.
But but to be honest with they want to see
that you know what you're talking about. They want to
see that you use the right keywords, and you use
the right keywords when you know what you're talking about.

Speaker 4 (59:48):
I actually, I think it does matter a lot because
in most of the conferences, especially international, you don't get
a chance to change the abstract. So of course you
don't get a chance to change it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
So I know of course you don't.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
So it should It should appeal, like I said, should
appeal to the audience. It should appeal to the audience.
Go to the conference. Gore, who now needs to decide
is now at lunch and needs to decide what talks
should I see after lunch, and they're like four different talks,
so it needs to appeal to them as well. Volding
is volding matters here.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
I think if you tell we've skipped you you've got
anything you want to add to this?

Speaker 5 (01:00:24):
Yeah, so just about what they had said. Actually, I
think conferences are pretty laid back about changing the abstract.
If it's a minor change, or if you want to
add some information, it's okay. You can make changes both
to the title and to the abstract as long as
you're not replacing the entire talk. So this part I
think is fine. But for me, the process is usually

(01:00:47):
I usually just come up with something and it usually works.
Like I come up with something, I come up with
two three titles. I pick from them. I write a
quick abstract that follow a very basic formula that I have,
like what is the issue that I'm tackling, or what
is what is the issue that I'm experiencing, what it

(01:01:11):
is that I'm going to present, and what are you
going to get out of it? It's going to be
usually one to two sentences for each of these in
the formula and for most cases and most conference talks
that I send that that's the formula that it works,
and the title I usually experiment with it. So I

(01:01:33):
have two three titles, I send them to multiple conferences,
and I see which one gets accepted first, and then
I go on with that one.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
Interesting, I do have to say that I not only
had to change the abstract once, but I actually had
to change the entire talk once. So I was I
got accepted to speak at I think it was CITYJS conference,
and then I found that Ryan Carniato was speaking there.
As well, so we decided to collaborate and you know,

(01:02:06):
run our talks by each other. He was giving a keynote,
I was giving a regular talk. So he went first
and he gives me his keynote and I say, oops,
there's a problem here, and he goes, what's the problem,
is said, your keynote and my talk are the same.
The organizers, Yeah, but look, he kind of his talk

(01:02:30):
kind of evolved, so his title was a bit vague.
So I'm not surprised that they didn't figure it out.
But I then reached out to the organizer and I
told him, hey, look there's a problem here. Ryan's talk
and my talk are the same talk. Maybe I should
switch a talk because he is a keynote after all.
So we ended up doing that, so I gave a

(01:02:50):
different talk than the one that was actually initially accepted,
which was funny anyway. You know, you you hang out
in the in Theseles long enough, and funny things happen
in various conferences.

Speaker 3 (01:03:04):
Anyway, just one last thing on this topic, from the
content commit from the content committee seat. You choose people
just as much as you choose sub like as you
choose their abstract or title.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
Sometimes depending on the conference.

Speaker 3 (01:03:24):
Okay, major conferences, that's true, they get a lot of
submissions and you do want to shine because you're in
a big competition. But for smaller conferences that are like
open minded to giving people chances and sometimes, like I
can say that in our conferences in Israel, if we

(01:03:44):
see it, we focus on the person presenting. So if
that person has experience and we like how how he
stands on the stage, and we like how he creates content,
and even if his subject is a bit off or
maybe not spot on for the conference, we would we
can approach them to like modify it. But I feel
like the most important thing is to like get blood

(01:04:06):
on your hands and like speak, go out, talken meetups,
like start small, but get that experience. It's quite hard
to start from a conference without.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
Any prior experience on stage.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
And also it's hard for a committee to accept you
when they don't have a lot of videos of your
like you know, a way to assess your abilities.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
Yeah, we can't forget the fact that at the end
of the day, conferences very often need to sell tickets,
and they need to get people excited to register, and
they need to get sponsorships and it's just easier to
do when you've got well known speakers as part of
the conference. If everybody is new and unknown, it's more
challenging to get people excited about the conference.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Yeah, but what I'm saying is that it's more important
to if you're in a new okay, if you're not
a known speaker. So it's more important to file a
safe when you already have like some some way to
give the committee to assess your abilities.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
So you you mean to start local.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Doing started a meetup and have recordings of those meetups
and you can send The challenge though, for at least
for Israeli speakers is that most meetups would be in Hebrew.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
You can speak in English and very type of features too.

Speaker 4 (01:05:22):
You can just say is it okay for speaking English,
especially if it's recorded.

Speaker 3 (01:05:27):
Yeah, and sometimes there are English speaking It happened to
be a few times as I spoken meetups individual in
English and there were English speakers in the crowds and
they were really happy that they did so.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
Yeah. Funnily, both no TLV and react Next wanted me
to speak in English.

Speaker 4 (01:05:42):
So you know, I in my first meetup because I
wanted it to be in English. I know. I knew
there's someone in the audience who's speaking English. I said, okay,
there's someone who's in English speakers, so I'll do it
in English. And she said, no, it's okay, I know Hebrew.
And I was like, okay, I'll do it in English anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
So we still have a few questions. We're starting to
run out of time. I'll try to pick the interesting one.
So we already suppose. I have one about getting accepted
in the strategy. I think we already spoke about that,
unless you have something special to add about getting into conferences.

(01:06:20):
For me, the only thing I would add is that
at the end of the day, it's a numbers game
and you just send a lot out there and you
get a lot of rejections. But if you submit to
twenty and you get three, you get accepted into three.
That's that's one in seven. But that's still good, and

(01:06:43):
you know, no hard feelings, and keep on going. Any
other thing to add to that.

Speaker 5 (01:06:50):
Totally agree, Yeah, don't be discouraged if it takes time,
because it does take time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Yeah, And the same talk that didn't get accepted into
five conferences suddenly gets accepted into a conference and then
you know, like I said, you really only need one.
It's it's like getting a date.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
It's a numbers game.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
It's a numbers game. When you or getting hired into
a position, it's it's it's always playing the numbers, and
my dog is barking, um okay. Moving on quickly to
the next question, how do you prepare the actual talk

(01:07:37):
and slides? Is there a process that you have and
also the structure of your slides do you like do
you do mostly texts, mostly images, mostly live coding. I
think if you you said that you only do live coding,
what do you what do you have to say about that?

Speaker 5 (01:07:53):
So I think each one here in this panel has
a completely different way of doing each of those. Me specifically,
most of my presentations and most of my talks are
structured in two. Half of it is a presentation slides,
and the slides are very light on text, like two

(01:08:16):
three words per per slide. And then I just chat.
I don't have anything scripted. If there's jokes, there's jokes,
I don't know. Whatever comes up when I speak. And
that's the first half. I introduced a problem, I introduced
the concept that I'm breaking down, and then I go forward,

(01:08:38):
switch to my editor live code, and everything is pretty
much downhill fall from there. No, it's it's usually works.
It usually works most of the time.

Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
Not all.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
I'm re minded of this time. I like a long
time ago when I attended this. It wasn't really conference,
it was more of a meetup thing, but it was
IBM presenting some technologies that they created. And I was
working in the enterprise software back then, and they had
this thing called WebSphere and they had this editor called

(01:09:14):
the clips and they were showing some integration or another clips. Yeah.
So yeah, anyway, the guy was showing some wizard that
did something, and it was like the Wizard that with
a hundred steps. So he goes he fills the one
thing in the wizard, and then the next, and then

(01:09:36):
the next, and then the next and after forth. Something
like forty minutes, he gets to the final step in
the wizard and the OK button or finish or start
or whatever is disabled, and he can't figure out why.
So he starts backtracking to see if he missed putting

(01:09:57):
in something, and the next by the end of the talk,
he was back at the beginning of the wizard and
he could never actually figure out that the why he
couldn't finish them with it. Yeah it was. It was sad,
but you know, these things happened. That's why I don't

(01:10:17):
like life coding that much. I've done it. Sometimes it
has value. It has a wild value, that's for sure,
and the audience is usually on your side, although sometimes
it feels like they're rooting for you to fail. It's
like watching a person walking on a high wire. But
to be honest, I've decided that it's it's not my style.
In most cases, I live.

Speaker 5 (01:10:40):
For the adrenaline, don't we allt it? And in regards
because it was a two part question, the other part
was about preparing for your talk. I think there was
a very big discussion a few weeks ago on that
WhatsApp group regarding whether we do dry runs or not.

(01:11:03):
I usually do just one before before the talk, one time,
not before each conference that I give that up, but
once for each presentation, and then before I give a
specific presentation, I just run by the slides see if
I remember vaguely everything that I want to do, live
code thing very quickly, just to see that I actually

(01:11:26):
remember still how to code in the era of AI,
and that's pretty much it I go on stage and
present the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Oh yeah, you're writing stuff down, so what do you
want to add?

Speaker 3 (01:11:39):
And it really depends on the subject because I kind
of feel like it builds itself, like the moment I
start my research at some point and I'm trying to
explain something to myself, Like for if anybody hasn't seen
any of my talk, my style is mostly finding visualizations

(01:12:04):
to to present, visualizing complex complex processes and.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
What a picture is worth a thousand words? That's your star? Yes, yes,
but is it diagrams or is it literally just pictures?

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
No, it's all moving. You see the whole flow of
what goes where. I think every time you taught me,
I think how to use a keynote, you created a monster.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
So it's really it's really style dependent.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
I I highly appreciate visualizations for my own learning as well,
so I try to explain that the flow visually as
much as I can. I also recently discovered that I
enjoy life coding, and so I recently gave recently gave

(01:13:02):
a talk and it was so fun and natural.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
But it was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
A subject I'm very, very fluent in, so I'm sure
it has a lot a lot to do with that
with that, but yeah, usually what I focus on is
finding the most perfect visualization and analogies to present to
explain very complicated subjects.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
I'm are you guys familiar with Toma Gabel?

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
Yeah, I probably should have invited him as well as
a good friend and great public speaker. His style, for example,
is usually having this one big, amusing picture and like
a word or two or a short sentence on each
slide and Lessi's showing diagrams. So that's also a style
that you can do. It's challenging because you do need

(01:13:52):
to find pictures that actually convey the relevant meaning, and
that's not always easy. It might be easier in this
day and age of AI generated images, but you know,
I'm not so sure.

Speaker 3 (01:14:06):
It sure is easier. And again, it really depends on
what kind of talk is it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
What are you talking about?

Speaker 3 (01:14:13):
Like I think there is and I find myself with
a lot of visualizations is because I choose very very
deep topics and then like breaking them down is visualization
is a very easy way to break.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Down these complex concepts.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
But if you're talking about like a feature that you
didn't work or something that like the code the visualization
or maybe you can even talk about it in human
language and people can understand.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
Like there's no right answer.

Speaker 3 (01:14:41):
I think it's all very dependent on the context, how.

Speaker 1 (01:14:45):
About you, leiad.

Speaker 4 (01:14:48):
So I try to look at my talks when it's possible,
as like a visual journey. So I'm more like on
the side of entertainment, I try to tell a story,
which means I'm trying to choose a theme for the
well in the visual side that some sort of a
theme and then have strong visuals that are really compelling

(01:15:10):
and when I when I come to build the presentation.
So my presentations are a really key part of my
talk in my in my eyes, it's not something that
accompanies me. It's it's the idea. So I'm trying to
think of the one takeaway that I want people to

(01:15:31):
take from from the entire talk, like the one sentence
that people would describe but what this talk was about.
That also helped me when I'm building the presentation to
see that I still stick to that sentence and I
didn't diverge. I try to identify the three takeaway points
that I can divide my talk to to three. But
these three three stages, especially if it's a technical talk,

(01:15:53):
so you need to start with something light and then
dive deeper and then come out with something like in
the medium. And I give myself a key of three
slides per minute, which I know it sounds a lot,
but in my in my style, when I do a
lot of animations and a lot of transition between slides,
it actually makes sense. It's a good beverage. Three slides
a minute. And also I try to allocate one hour

(01:16:16):
for every minute of the of the like one hour
of building every minute of the presentation.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
That's a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:16:23):
Yeah, I mean that's like that you know that that's
the maximum. But I'm trying to build a really visual presentation.
So so this is my style and this is what
I enjoy building, and I also enjoyed being in the
audience in in in those kind of talks.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
I have found that my question go for it.

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
And I just wanted to ask you about the takeaways.
Aren't they sometimes emergent from the process, like they always
pretty fine?

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
Like, oh no, I sometimes I find the message throughout working.

Speaker 4 (01:16:55):
Yeah, that's that's a really good point, because you're right
the emergent, but I try to keep them two three.
So if I if I take a look back at
my presentation and I see, oh I spoke about like
five different topics, that's obviously a lot for an audience
to to digest. So I try to minimize them into
like three subhaders. Yeah, sometimes somes, I can think of

(01:17:19):
them in advance. They always change. I always emergent, like
you said, But all the time I try to keep
it on like one sentence. If someone would go out
of this this talk and someone asked him what was
this talk about, and you'll say this one sentence, I
wanted to be what I meant for it to be.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
I totally agree that tech talks should preferably have a
city what's known as a cita, some sort of call
to action, kind of like websites should have a certain
call to action that means it's you know, some speakers

(01:17:56):
can give talks that are just pure entertainment and maybe
and the culture action is have a good time. I'm
not there. There needs to be some takeaway out of this. Now,
you're absolutely correct real that the takeaway can and often
does evolve during the talk. But if I if coming

(01:18:20):
into the talk, I don't have even a vague concept
of what I want the audience to take away from
the talk. That's a problem, that's in an indication that
my conception of the topic is premature. Also, I have found,
by the way, that my presentation style tends to change

(01:18:42):
and vary. Sometimes I mix it up just for fun.
Sometimes the topic demands a certain style of presentation rather
than another. For example, yeah, sometimes i'm more or like
I said, I go the I have done a couple

(01:19:03):
of live coding talks because sometimes I intentionally want to
show that a certain process is really easy to implement
or straightforward to implement. That's usually when I will do
a live coding session, because if it's complicated, there's not
just not going to be enough time, or I'm going
to rush through it if there's too much code on

(01:19:24):
the screen. By the way, my number one tip for
anybody creating a presentation is make your font as big
as possible, and then make it bigger and and and
then make it even bigger.

Speaker 3 (01:19:42):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:19:42):
And if that means having less texts on the slide, good,
have less texts on the slide, Have as little text
on the slide as possible. That way I like to make.

Speaker 3 (01:19:56):
To say about that about like as little texts as possible.
What I like to do is I like to write
down the messages that I want to think, like the
deepest thing I want some When I say a sentence
and I want the audience to remember the sentence as
I said it, I write it down.

Speaker 1 (01:20:17):
The worst thing you can do do is have a
lot of text on the screen, because then what ends
up is the audience reads the texts rather than listen
to you, and it becomes a show and tell or
a document rather than a presentation. By the way, one
of the problems that I have with live coding is

(01:20:38):
that in many cases that unless you can really distill
the issue down, you might end up with too much
code on the screen at once. And that's a challenge.

Speaker 4 (01:20:54):
Now to mention that your idea is full of a
lot of other things that are not the code, so
these are also distracting.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Yeah, then, well there are presentation modes in modern ideas.
But still you're correct.

Speaker 3 (01:21:08):
I would even say that when you have a lot
of text, not only that, the audience isn't isn't listening
to you because they're reading You're actually it's a cognitive
you're hurting them cognitively because they're suffering because somebody is
speaking to them while they are reading something.

Speaker 4 (01:21:27):
And then you have two bad choices. You're either reading
exactly what the text is and that way you're wasting
their time because you're reading slower than they can read. Oh,
you're trying to summarize what the text means. And then,
like a real said, it's like two conflicting streams.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
Of the only time that I might have text like
in the sort that I might kind of read text
off the slide is when I'm reading out a definition
of a thing if it's really important, or a quote
if it's really you're absolutely correct, if it's really important
for me to read a quote, and it needs to
be a short quote or definition. And again it needs

(01:22:01):
to be a short definition. And I literally said, and
in the case of definitions, are literally organized over each
word trying to remove it. And and only that's the
only case, and usually there might be like one or
maybe two slides like that, and that's it. The rest
need to be bullets that I expand on. They're not

(01:22:24):
intended to be read as as such. They're more is
a reminder to me and to the audience after I
said something, rather than the actual text of what I'm saying.

Speaker 4 (01:22:36):
By the way, small tip if you do have a
sentence on the screen is to highlight one or two
words that are the essence of this sentence and then
everyone in the audience can just attach these words and understand.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
Yeah, just don't underline them, because then everybody will think
there are links.

Speaker 4 (01:22:51):
Yeah they try to click there.

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
Yeah. Okay, let's see like we have I think we're
almost out of time, but so do you have so
one kind of final question or I'll mix two questions
together and you decide which one you want to answer.
So one question is we kind of touched on that

(01:23:17):
on the dry runs, is that how do you prepare
for delivering a talk? And the second question, the final question,
would be about the entertainment versus informative or specifically do
you put jokes in your talk? So let's start with
the first one. How do you prepare? Do you if

(01:23:37):
you tell you mentioned that you do one dry run
for a talk or at least whenever you significantly change
a talk or introduce a new talk. How about lead Arielle,
do you also do dry runs or not at all
or multiple dry runs? How do you go about it?

Speaker 2 (01:23:56):
You want to go firstly, and I can.

Speaker 4 (01:23:59):
I think it's to do dry run, and if only
for the sake of just to see that you're on
time or at least exactly less and the time that
you're given, because that's something that's really hard to estimate.
When you're walking on a talk. You can feel like
you're on time, but you always, first of all, on stage,
you always speak slower than us. Then you think you're

(01:24:22):
going to speak like it takes more time, and if
you have ninety slides, there's no way to estimate how long.

Speaker 1 (01:24:28):
Sometimes it's the reverse though. I remember speaking at a conference.
I was after some speaker, so I was lazing out
in the speaker's room looking at the clock. So, okay,
I still have twenty minutes. And she finished like she
finished a thirty minutes talk in ten minutes. So the

(01:24:48):
host runs up to me and says, come down, come down,
And it was.

Speaker 4 (01:24:53):
A dry run.

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
Could have solved it, Dragon, could have solved it. But
I totally agree. I actually, literally I did a dry
run of a talk today, of a new talk that
I'm giving it at the conference. And I did it
precisely because I wanted to make sure that it actually
fits into the loaded time and I was like two

(01:25:15):
minutes too long something like that on a twenty something
minute talk, So you know, I need to adjust it
a little bit. But the other point was that during
this dry run it I realized after when I got
the feedback, it's important to get feedback from the people

(01:25:35):
you give the dry run too, otherwise what's the point.
And I realized that one of the things that I
was trying to get across was not sufficiently clear, and
I need to change one of my examples because of that.
So I know how I'm going to change it based
on the feedback that I got from that dry run.
But I do that one dry run, not multiple dry run,

(01:25:59):
and I will want to add one more thing. And
that's my own personal tip, as it were for people
listening to us. I don't I never try to memorize
an entire talk. It just doesn't work. But I do
write down and try to memorize my first two or

(01:26:20):
three sentences because that way I can get up and running.
I don't have to worry about coming on stage and
go like, ugh, I'm stuck, I don't know what to say.
I know what my first two or three sentences are
going to be. I memorize those. Sometimes I kind of
even riff on those, but I still at least know
what I'm going to say, and from that point on

(01:26:41):
it flows. Oh yeah, what about you.

Speaker 2 (01:26:46):
I'm a nerd.

Speaker 3 (01:26:47):
I do a lot of dry runs a lot, and
I try to get as much feedback as I can,
and because I really try to take advantage topics but
to make them accessible, so even even for let's say
less experienced developers, and I want to talk about something deep,

(01:27:08):
so I try to also collect feedback from a variety
of of of levels of developers. And that way, like
when I do so many dry runs, I also like
I collect feedback and I make sure I also feel
like my talk is so complete.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
By the time I finished with.

Speaker 3 (01:27:30):
This like hard work process. And I also know that
it's adaptable for I know wich levels it's adaptable for.
And I never have to worry about time. I never
have to worry about remembering. You can wake me up
at three am, and I remember it because I've did
it like five times before I got.

Speaker 1 (01:27:49):
Don't don't you sometimes feel like you're overdoing it, like
too much of a good thing, as it were, overdoing it,
like to like.

Speaker 2 (01:28:00):
Do the collect the feedback together.

Speaker 3 (01:28:02):
So like I would invite like you know, four or
five friends and I do a dry run for like
a few friends together, like I did with the.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):
AD and I did with the Betel And.

Speaker 3 (01:28:12):
You're very welcome to I'm building a new talk, so
you only add can come all of three of you. Yeah,
you haven't heard this one as well. So I like
to like collect a few people and then and then
do it. But honestly, honestly, no, I feel like the
hard work pays off.

Speaker 2 (01:28:35):
It obviously does pay off.

Speaker 4 (01:28:37):
Yeah, it has this advantage like doing a lot of
dry runs that when you get to the stage, you
feel like you did all the hard work. Like I said,
it's like now the fun part we can because you've
run this talk. You did the hard part of running
it fixing, you're running it fixing run and now you
just have to have go on stage and have fun,
which is a great feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:28:58):
So runs are like tests. That's that's that's what I'll
call it. Dragons are tests. It's like having a lot
of tests.

Speaker 5 (01:29:07):
Like different because because I think I think that it's
anchored in the in in my conversational style of my talks.
I think that every time I give the same talk,
it's it's a completely different talk, like it has the
same bullet points maybe, but I give the different jokes.
I I say different things, different sentences I come with

(01:29:29):
sometimes even different takeaway because my talks are mostly conversational,
so dry running it again and again takes away from
the conversational style because I don't want to memorize my points.
I don't want to be accurate about what I say.
I just want to, I don't know, talk about what
I feel like talking about today. And this works for
me specifically in the style of talks that I usually.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
Give the first half of the talk as well.

Speaker 5 (01:29:56):
Yes, yes, so that's why I have just one sent
on the screen and I don't know, and it's like
for me, it's it's like a promptif I think about
this one today. So this this is the way I
prepare for my talks, just by not preparing much, just
seeing that I have the overall understanding of time and

(01:30:18):
that I can deliver it on time, that I know
what I should do about my life coding, and if
if everything else is all right, then yeah, I just
go with it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:29):
I would just add though that this really changes with experience.
When when you're an experienced speaker, it's much much easier
to just get up and talk about the topic. And
when you're a new speaker, like anything, like anything, practice
makes perfect. You're never perfect, at least we aren't, but

(01:30:50):
undoubtedly practice makes a significant difference.

Speaker 4 (01:30:56):
One point about timing, because that's the reason, one reason
you do dry even if you don't memorize everything. I
also don't like to memorize everything. You have to have
endcores in the presentation, in the talk that you know, okay,
after ten minutes, I should have gotten to this point
and if I if I didn't, that means that I'm
behind time or or ahead of time. So that's you
have to have endcurse.

Speaker 1 (01:31:16):
In the interesting. I usually don't I look at the
talk holistically. I don't try to find the anchor points
in the talk interesting. Okay, So the last comment anything
about jokes, yes or no entertainment for size content, I
would say.

Speaker 4 (01:31:35):
I would say that, I mean there should be a
wow moment in the talk, like preferably two in the
I'm very much on the side of entertainment. But if not,
there should be a moment. I mean, the most fun
part is when people like take out the cameras, like
the more cameras and just taking pictures of the of

(01:31:55):
the slide or writing things down. So those are things
that should be even if it's a fully informative talk,
I think, and it's.

Speaker 1 (01:32:05):
Not always possible though. I think sometimes talks are just informative.

Speaker 3 (01:32:11):
I not.

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
I mean, I know your talks, like you did this
talk about putting three D objects in the real world,
like the ar talk. That's a very well talk. The
entire talk was a wow moment. People kept taking pictures.
But you know, if I'm talking about a certain technical
topic that's really like in like you kind of refer
to it in the zeitgeist, then it's important and interesting

(01:32:35):
and informative, But there is no wow.

Speaker 3 (01:32:39):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:32:40):
Maybe I can stick an amusing thing into the side show,
maybe I can't. What do I do about it?

Speaker 4 (01:32:47):
There's always a wow, even if it's a technological wow,
even if it's like a huh wow.

Speaker 2 (01:32:55):
Yeah, it doesn't have to be many a wow.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
It could be an h.

Speaker 5 (01:33:00):
Or Rica moment, but.

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
It's not really the question.

Speaker 3 (01:33:04):
Like you you kind of asked about jokes, which I
think are crucial because when people laugh they listen to
you that creates engagement, Like jokes are actually necessary for engagement.

Speaker 1 (01:33:19):
Yeah, I totally agree. It's also if you can find
a funny slide that makes life even easier in that regard. So,
for example, I in a particular talk that I gave
a while back about web performance, I wanted to make
a point that correlation and causation are not the same thing.

(01:33:41):
So I found this amusing graph that shows a correlation
between the usage of Internet Explorer and murder rate in
the USA, and showed that as one decrease, so did
the other. And that was an amusing side to put
and I you know, it saved me the trouble of
coming up with a natural joke. Uh. The important thing

(01:34:04):
is you need to be amusing, but it's important to
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not a
stand up comic, so don't try to have it all jokes.
Don't try to be too funny unless unless you do
happen to be a comedian. I know some speak some
techt speakers who are I'm not.

Speaker 5 (01:34:23):
I think, at least for me, I think jokes are
like an integral part of my talk. But I never
know whether job jokes are going to be because they're
not Like I don't do enough knock jokes in my talks.
I don't prepare the funny parts in advents. I just
it's part of the conversational style of the talks that

(01:34:45):
I just come up with stuff as I go, depending
on what the previous sentence was. And usually that's how
it works for me. Talks end up with laughs and
there and they they do end up being funny, usually
even when it's a dry talk about I don't know CSS.

(01:35:06):
But the thing that I know to planning what is
funny is funny in a way, yes, really joke, but
nothing nothing that I plan in advance. But I end
up actually being even complimented on the humor in the
talk that wasn't even planned to begin with. So that's uh,

(01:35:28):
that's the way I do it. I just talk and
find out the funny thing or sometimes even after I
say it, I realized it was funny, mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:35:37):
Before we anything to add, before we finish, before we
wrap up, Uh, I have something, yeah, please do so.

Speaker 5 (01:35:46):
The one thing, and this is an important tip for
for everybody speaking, because going on stage is super scary
and it's it's frightening, and there's a lot going on,
and it's easy to get a blackout. And when you
do say something you don't intend to, or when you
forget what you're going to say, it's easy to spiral

(01:36:09):
down and just crash and have the entire talk or
the entire resire talk just go to waste. And the
one tape I found for good recover ability is realizing
that the audience doesn't really know what you're going to say,
they don't know the continuation of the talk, and just

(01:36:30):
pause for a second, recollect, and continue with the next
topic or whatever it is. And even if you made
a mistake, you can either say, oh, that was incorrect
and fix it. It's okay that you will, they will understand,
or just skip ahead before it's fine. They don't know
even what they missed.

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 4 (01:36:52):
Yeah, I would. I totally agree. And I would also
say that it's important to remember that you and the
audience you have the same goal. I mean, the audience
came to be entertained or to be tolt or to
be They don't come to grill you. Both of you
want you to succeed, to be able to give this
talk so it's easier if you think about it like that.

(01:37:13):
It's easier if you think about it. Oh, they're gonna
they're gonna have so much fun. They're gonna they're gonna
enjoy it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:18):
I totally agree with what you said. So the final
thing before I let you all go two things. Actually,
One is to give your contact information if people want
to get in touch with you, talk to you about
speak possible speaking engagement or ideas or whatever. And also
if you can name one of your favorite conferences or

(01:37:41):
one or two that throughout the years for whatever reason,
or alternatively your least favorite conference for whatever reason. So
who wants to go first?

Speaker 5 (01:37:58):
I will not rank them, because that's not that's not
a nice thing to do, but I will say I
will nominate one that was a noteworthy and this is
one that Ariel and I went to last year in
Hamburg and lead went there as as a conference goer,
as an audience and one yes Ariel's plus one, and

(01:38:23):
we went to KO Talks in Hamburg and that was
that was fine. It was a really good conference, good
party I heard. I didn't go to the party. I
had to fly to the other conference on the same night.
But Alongside that conference, there was a huge furry convention.
So three thousand engineers, five thousand fairies. You cannot make

(01:38:46):
this up. You cannot make this up.

Speaker 3 (01:38:48):
It was, it was.

Speaker 5 (01:38:48):
It was brilliant.

Speaker 2 (01:38:51):
They were laughing. I was scared.

Speaker 1 (01:38:55):
Well, you weren't wearing a costume, That's what it was. Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:39:06):
I can say that if someone who's listening is in
the front end of JavaScript word React Something and Jazz Nation,
those are two conferences that are very speaker friendly and
they like to give really good experience. They're back to
back one day React Something and afterwards.

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):
Jazz Nation and it's Amsterdam and it's Answer.

Speaker 4 (01:39:31):
Them, and they have the best speakers, like they have
new speakers, but also the best speakers from the JavaScript community.
So I truly recommend to always trying to submit to them.

Speaker 1 (01:39:41):
Yeah. The only downside with jazz Nation is that you
until fairly late in the process you don't know whether
you'll be invited to speak in person or online, which
is a bummer. You submit, you get accepted, and then
two weeks before the conference they tell you, yeah, but
it's going to be online. Well two weeks probably, I

(01:40:04):
don't think it was that not two weeks, but a
month or two before the conference they tell you it's
going to be online rather than in person, which is
a bit of a bummer. And how about you area.

Speaker 3 (01:40:17):
So I'm going to speak next month in web Expo
and drug I haven't been to the conference yet, but
just so far from from the organization, I have to
say that I'm in awe. Also on the web Expo,

(01:40:37):
I'm going to speak.

Speaker 2 (01:40:38):
It's my first time attending to ab Expo conference.

Speaker 3 (01:40:42):
But the organizers have had like one on one with
each and every one of the speakers. They group the
speakers to to do dry runs and feedback to each others.
You have like two full days of fun just for
the speakers before the conference. Like they have like children
activity in the conference, so people that have kids, can

(01:41:02):
I come and enjoy it the full day. Like they
really give such attend They give attention to every small detail.

Speaker 2 (01:41:09):
And I've yet to see such such.

Speaker 3 (01:41:13):
An organization that goes down to these levels. So I'm
very excited to see how how would that how would
WebEx booth feel like?

Speaker 2 (01:41:21):
I will let you guys know next month.

Speaker 1 (01:41:23):
I really speaking about conferences, I like I really liked
the various JS conferences. I spoke at a couple and
they were always very well organized and also very top
note speakers and the people who are running it were
very attentive to detail and very friendly. Also, i'll give

(01:41:44):
to you another one is unfortunately on hiatus. I think
it was Front and Zurich, which was also very well organized,
very friendly, and gave a stipend to every speaker, which
was unexpected. They say, hey, now take this money, which
was really nice of them to do. And also this
a conference which is no longer active. I mentioned O'Riley Fluent,

(01:42:08):
so I was actually supposed at one Riley Fluent. I
gave a workshop. So you know, you think, hey, I'm
going to give a workshop. How many people will participate
in a workshop? Ten people, twenty people? Can you guess
how many people were in my workshop?

Speaker 2 (01:42:25):
Oh? No, oh, no, fifty?

Speaker 1 (01:42:32):
Over two hundred in a workshop.

Speaker 2 (01:42:35):
In a workshop, in a workshop.

Speaker 1 (01:42:39):
Yeah, giving a workshop for two hundred and something people.
That was interesting anyway, sounds I actually worked out in
the end, But they were lucky because my workshop was
structured in such a way that I basically the whole
concept was people opening the chrome dev tools and writing

(01:43:02):
things into the console. So that's something I could do
to a large group of people. If it had been
something like do this and that and vis code and
get and I don't know what, that would never have flown.

Speaker 2 (01:43:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:43:14):
I was kind of shocked. I walked into this huge
auditorium and they were like a huge number of people.
This is the workshop anyway. Yeah, it was really weird. Anyway,
thank you. So you forgot to give your contact information?
How do people reach out in contact you? Accept real

(01:43:35):
for some reason doesn't want to be contacted.

Speaker 3 (01:43:37):
You can contact me truly and just rightly, and on Twitter.

Speaker 1 (01:43:45):
So you're LinkedIn though, right I have LinkedIn?

Speaker 4 (01:43:50):
Yeah, yeah for now, so for me obviously, you can
always DM on Twitter. It's lead yousef on Twitter and
LinkedIn and feel free to ask questions, give comments anythink
I'm open?

Speaker 5 (01:44:07):
How about you of your tell Yeah, I'm not very
active on Twitter. You can already you can always find
me there, but I'm not very active. It's abitar l
e v y A t A r E L. And
the rest of my contact details are on my website
elus dot com, so e A l U s h
dot com. Most of it is there, I think.

Speaker 1 (01:44:29):
Okay, guys, thank you very much for participating. I think
this was really interesting and more importantly informative, like we
like our conference talks to be. So thank you all,
and thank you to our audience for listening in. And
that's it. Bye bye bye, thank you,

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Speaking Up: The Developer’s Guide to Conference Talks & Career Growth - JSJ 682

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Speaking Up: The Developer’s Guide to Conference Talks & Career Growth - JSJ 682