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From YouTube: Sharing is Caring: How to Begin Speaking at Conferences - Jenny Burcio & Ashlynn Polini, Docker

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Sharing is Caring: How to Begin Speaking at Conferences - Jenny Burcio & Ashlynn Polini, Docker

For many, the idea of speaking in front of a bunch of strangers can be enough to prevent you from ever responding to a CFP. But don't let it! Speaking at conferences, meetups, or even at your own company is a fantastic way to share you knowledge, meet others, advance your career, and give back. Whether you are on the fence, have decided to take the plunge and submit a CFP, or have already even a few talks, this session is for you. Jenny Burcio and Ashlynn Polini will outline tips and strategies for turning your idea into a winning proposal and ultimately a compelling talk. Drawing on their experience reviewing DockerCon CFPs and prepping speakers (including themselves) for a variety of conferences, they will share how to submit and prepare for your first - or next - conference talk.

https://sched.co/UaYJ

A

All right so I'm Jenny. This is ashlynn we're here today to share our experience, reviewing CFPs and prepping speakers for dr. Cohn, with the hope that everyone in this room would like to take the plunge and submit a talk and speak at a conference over the next twenty twenty-five minutes. We are going to cover why public speaking is important. Why sharing is caring and you should share your knowledge, different ways and places to get started?

A

Then we're gonna break down the CFP, which is the call for papers, we'll teach you how to figure out what you're going to talk about and also how to write an abstract and then from there we're gonna help you prepare and take that abstract and deliver a really compelling talk, and then, lastly, we'll share some tips for the day of to help. You not be nervous when you're up here in front of everyone.

A

I just want to take a moment to thank everyone for coming to this talk, you had a lot of choices and it means a lot that you chose to come to this talk. So, thank you and, like I said, we hope to equip and inspire you to do the same. At some point, awesome.

B

So we have a roomful of people attending a talk about speaking at conferences. I would hope that some of you are interested in speaking yourselves or I'd paid you to be here thanks guys for coming.

B

So, let's start off by talking about why public speaking is really beneficial. Jenny and I took to Twitter versus ask for some stories and what we came back with were a ton of people saying telling us how public speaking has immensely impacted their career growth as well as just their self-confidence. We got a lot of stories around becoming better technologists when you have to prepare a presentation on a technical subject. When you do this, you have to get so granular that you become the best teacher of this subject.

B

Another added benefit is that it just it. It increases your ability to communicate your thoughts and your ideas as well, which is very, very important and sharing, is caring. The one of the best ways to get back to this community is sharing the knowledge you know so I think you may be kind of convinced now, but where do you get started if you're a little nervous about speaking for the first time, a good place to start and our recommendation is somewhere small?

B

Even if you aren't worried about nerves, start small, it's good for practice and you can work on your delivery. There so start at work. Maybe it's stepping up and giving a presentation to your team, maybe you're presenting at an internal Tech, Talk or an all-hands. These are great places. Another great place to start is a meet-up. Meetups are always looking for speakers, so reach out to a local organizer and get some practice in there. They'd be happy to help you.

B

Maybe you are ready to take the plunge or there's a conference that you really want to attend and speak at, do what we did we've submitted as co-presenters. It helps you know, kind of calm, the nerves and and do that or present a panel or ask to be on a panel when you're up here on stage with someone else. It helps.

B

So, no matter what talk you decide that you want to do, whether it's a solo, talk or a panel. The first step is going to be around the CFP.

A

Alright and the CFP is essentially an application to have your talk delivered at a conference, and the conference organizers will put together a set of questions that you will have to go through and answer by a deadline. Make sure you take a look, read everything the CFP actually gives a lot of ideas on what they want you to talk a talk about, they will share topics, so take a look at that, but also think about.

A

Maybe there's a problem that you've solved in in you know the last month or so or maybe there's something you've just been really excited about and sharing with your colleagues. That might be a great thing to present about. Maybe you have an interesting use case or a different perspective and I will say perhaps like sometimes with CFP suggested topics.

A

If you want to talk about something, that's not on the list with all conferences except for coupon, because they limit you on how many submissions you can do I said, go for it I think like with dr.

A

Khan, specifically, we added a track to talk about non technology to technologists, because we received so many submissions from people wanting to share that, and so it's a great it's a great message to your organizers on what the audience would ultimately want to learn but make sure if you're doing something off the reservation make it extremely clear why it's relevant to your audience and why that conference should kind of think outside the box.

A

So um the other thing to do and you'll see this advice repeated over and over in this talk is phone a friend, so Ashlyn and I wanted to speak at cube con. We didn't know what we wanted to talk about. Every idea we had. We didn't really think we should be the ones to talk about it, and so.

C

A

Phoned mr. Stephen pholis over here- and he said he suggested this talk and the title guys. So he did a great job, but he he said you know the prep process that you put speakers through for dr. Khan was actually really helpful to me and I'm an experienced speaker and it's not something I've really had to do anywhere else.

A

So maybe other people would really like to learn from that and then, when you combine that with the ratio of talks that actually get accepted, I think in Seattle it was 13% I, don't know what it was this year, it's pretty small and it's a pretty rigorous process. So we thought great, let's like show a little insight on the process that we used and the way that we ultimately help. Our speakers deliver really great talks at conferences.

A

So the most important part of your CFP is the abstract. This is the entree of of your proposal and it's really, but not only the reviewers are gonna spend time looking at. But ultimately, if you get selected the audience, look at this to decide whether or not they want tender talk. Ashlynn came up with this fabulous acronym to help you remember how to write a good abstract and it all starts with focus, be very focused in the intent of your talk.

A

You do not want to be cryptic or creative such that you are making the reviewers spend any mental energy trying to figure out what you're talking about like put yourself in their shoes. They are looking at so many abstracts. If there's a reason to say no they're gonna say it just makes it easier at the other point of being focused is words matter, be concise, again they're reading, so many don't use extra words to make the same point.

A

Next, you want to identify your audience and very specifically the relevance of the topic to your audience and your relevance to delivering that topic. Next, remember that a talk is just a story and as a speaker, you are the storyteller. Your audience doesn't want to walk in this room and leave in the same place. They want to be taken on a journey and your abstract is your opportunity to share the journey your going to take them on. To that end.

A

Teach them something right, give them takeaways, give them something that they can bring back to work or life and immediately use. Most people are here at this conference to learn and network, make it extremely easy for them to understand why they should put your talk on the schedule and why the audience should attend your talk and I'm gonna, like we recommend you literally say it like you, takeaways will be the audience, will learn and list it up. That makes it crystal clear for anyone reviewing a CFP. You.

B

Know you like it makes a huge difference when you're reading that many, how many don't say that and it's just an easy trick to do so. Let's take a look at a couple examples of abstracts. This actually happens to be our abstract that we submitted through the keuken CFP I'll brag for Jenny. This is a pretty well written, see if CFP abstract. It starts with the problem statement. A lot of people are nervous about speaking at calm, and it can be generally hard to get a talk accepted. Then it goes into identifying the audience.

B

You know who should attend this talk and why they would be interested in attending it. It also qualifies us, as the speakers and our relevance to the subject on you know, being being through the dr. Cohn cfp process, as well as helping speakers prepped. Lastly, it gives you a clear take away. Everyone should leave this talk, understanding how to outline an abstract how to prep for a talk, and you should leave feeling ready to submit for your first talk or your next talk like super good job. Thank you, yep.

B

The next I want to take a look at is a submission that we accepted to dr. Cohn earlier this year by ana Medina from gremlin. Now this one is an interesting one to take a look at and I want to talk about this one because it comes from a vendor.

B

Now, vendor pitch is a bit of a buzzword to us, but if you weren't familiar with the word vendor pitch, it's essentially when a talk given by a person that works at a company or is representing that company or product in their talk now, there's definitely a time and a place for all vendor pitches at conferences, it's usually in a sponsored paid tract now. The issue here is when you're trying to submit a talk to an open C of P under of a vendors name. It can be an uphill battle.

B

Gareth rush Grove actually wrote a really great blog post a couple years ago when he was at at puppet in his summaries. His recommendations were one write, a really strong abstract.

B

If you're submitting as a vendor write a really strong abstract follow fast, like we recommend and own your bias to focus on your experiences and your learnings at your company or within your job and not focus on the product, that's really helpful and that's why I like Anna, it's like she's talking about a zoomed-out topic that is relevant to her, but it's not about Gremlin products. It can relate, but it is not a product pitch. So typically we don't. We want to stay away from that.

B

Okay, so we have seen a couple examples. Now we want you to go write your app tracks. This is before you've submitted. We want you to write multiple abstracts and then go a B test. Those send them to a couple different people and see how they're received the key to this is start early. Don't wait until the last night to submit your your call for papers? Don't wait to loot that line right because you want to get feedback. This is a very iterative process, so a/b tests.

B

Those then talk to your reviewers and ask them what they thought your takeaways were. If they repeat back something that you didn't think, that's not what you were anticipating your talk to be on, then you probably need to work on your details of that abstract. A little bit more. Another indicator is if your reviewer is very intrigued in the topic, or has more questions and follow up. That's a good sign, you're onto something. If not, you probably want to start this process over and write a couple more abstracts.

B

One last thing: so that's all about writing the abstract and the juicy part of your CFP submission see if peace typically have a lot of fields and other questions, but make sure you do all of that fill out the CFP read it thoroughly, read all the details that they're asking me for you don't want to get put into a disqualified bucket just because you didn't fill out all the relevant information.

B

A

D

A

Right, you've got mail, you open your mail, congratulations! Your talk is accepted now the hard part starts. You need to take that winning abstract and create a compelling talk. Now we recommend you start with an outline. It just brings a tremendous amount of clarity to get your story out on paper, so work on your outline and and I actually recommend applying the fast principles backwards. At this point so start with your takeaways, then fill out your story.

A

Remember it's a story so use examples to illustrate your points, so you can connect with your audience, then be ruthless in editing your content to make sure it supports all of the takeaways and the message that you're trying to deliver, in other words, stay focused all right after you have your outline. You need to call a friend, and this friend should be someone in your target audience or familiar with your target audience, and you need to just talk through your outline with them and get their feedback.

A

You can certainly start to like make notes on what you might want to slow for show / slides, but don't start slide yet there's a lot of talks that that morph a lot at this face all right after you've gotten your feedback sit down and spend some time flushing out your talk, track and I don't know about for other people, but this is actually a lot harder for me. I'm I find that I am bringing up the same point in multiple areas. The first time I do this or my story keeps popping up.

A

So it really shows me that mmm I'm not as tight on that point as I need to be also transitions are a lot harder than you think, and this. If you get to that level of detail, you can really see how the flow is going to go. Then, once you have your talk track, you can really start to start on your slides.

A

Now. This talk is not about how to create slides for a presentation. That's a whole nother talk and I highly encourage anyone who knows anything about that to submit that to a conference, um but slides should support your talk, not distract from it. It is incredibly helpful, especially in technology, to use images and diagrams to explain complex topics, but generally less is more and any time that the audience is reading your slide.

A

They're not listening to you now I get how ironic it is that I am telling you don't put too many words on a slide while showing you a slide that has the most words but I made about three or four versions of this slide. All the others had less words and my audience voted for this one.

A

So go with what the audience says when all else fails all right now, you need to find your friend again same same friend are different just again, someone in the audience or they understand your audience and you're gonna want to sit down and do what I call a table read you don't have to stand up and deliver your presentation. You don't know it that well yet sit down and talk through your talk, track against your slides and get feedback. Are your slide supporting your point? Is everything flowing?

A

Is there a better example that your friend can help you think of there's a lot of ways to then improve and refine at that point? And then my next point, which is kind of one of my favorite ones, revisit your abstracts, so you're, not the same person that submitted that talk three four five months ago and you've actually done a lot of work. Developing a story. Maybe you bit off more than you could chew in your original abstract and you actually have to really refine what you're going to talk about.

A

I've read a lot of reviews from talks from dr. Cohn and I can tell you that the audience doesn't like it when their expectations aren't met and the abstract is your opportunity to invite them to the talk that you're actually delivering, so don't be afraid to reach back out to the conference organizer and provide an updated abstract. The conference and an attendees will. Thank you, okay, and this one practice right.

A

Like practice by yourself practice with your dog practice with your kids, like literally practice with anyone that owes you a favor, this part is not about your content anymore. You are solid on your content. This is 100% about owning your delivery and getting really comfortable with the words that you're gonna have to say, I, even recommend signing up to deliver the set of meetups like before the talk or sign up for like an internal Tech Talk, because one you won't wait till last minute.

A

Cuz you have an earlier deadline and to write like no practice can replicate what it feels like to stand in front of people staring at you listening to what you have to say and talks are a much better experience. The second time that you deliver them awesome.

B

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the day of your big day, you're coming to talk up until this point of the talk, our presentation, I, hope, you've gathered that speaking at conferences is a lot of work. So let's make sure that you're prepared and your day of goes off without a hitch. So a couple warm-ups we'll go over. We were fortunate enough through docker con to have a couple resources for our internal speakers like presentation, health and also improv training, and what improv training taught me is the importance of a warm-up.

B

Not only does it warm up your voice, it also helps you get comfortable and a little bit out of your element. So when you get up on stage you're a little bit more comfortable, you know I've seen like numerous executives, and you know: CEOs quacking like a duck backstage in the green room, to get warmed up, but I guarantee they go up on stage and they're they're feeling a little bit better because they were just quacking back there. So a warm-ups super-important go online, find a routine that you're comfortable with job movements, vocal warm-ups.

B

All that and do them the next one, highly highly recommend two minutes of a power pose before you walk on stage. Actually, let's, let's practice this, can everyone stand up? Do you mind yeah, so I'd like everyone to shrug and have bad posture, yeah and I'd, like you to say, I'm awesome I'm did you feel awesome, No?

B

Okay, let's stand feet shoulder width apart hands on your hips, good posture, shoulders back I want you to say, I'm a failure, I'm a failure. Okay, everyone could sit down. Thank you for entertaining you guys are not convincing I, don't believe you you're not failures. So your body language directly, impacts your confidence. Your posture will directly impact the way you stand up on stage. So, let's not let all this work that we've just prepped over months go to waste.

B

Let's be be doing two minutes of power pose before get up on stage being your best self. Okay, now we're on stage here's just a couple. Little things that we've picked up I want to talk really quickly about visual versus heard now. My point here is that again, we've done a lot of work. We've practiced we've rehearsed. We owe all of our friends drinks because we've owned them so many times, don't don't get up on stage and let your don't get caught up on your words.

B

Let's actually do one more exercise if everyone can make an okay hand like this, now put it on your cheek, oh I. Did it wrong? Put it on your chin? I blew it. Okay, sorry, the exercises do this, put it on your chin, normally you're doing what I say and not on your chin. Okay, because my emotions in my you're watching my visual is more impactful than the words that came out of my mouth. Actually, communications broken down into three segments.

B

It's verbal, your words that you speak vocal, the quality of your voice and visual, which is everything else all the nonverbal cues and in communication and daily communication, your bit, your visual visual. Thank you. Your visual is 58% of how you communicate. Do you guys know what the words are only 7% of what someone hears so my point here again: don't get caught up on words. Do your power poses rehearse practice, be confident on stage and no one's gonna pick apart those words, you know, walk the stage use hand gestures.

B

That's all gonna carry you very far another point when you're doing those practices definitely work on your timing. We're you're pacing. If you get feedback that you go a little slow or fast, like I, do like I'm sure I sped through all of this, but work on that in practice and before you get up on stage, take a deep breath and remind yourself about your pacing and your delivery.

B

Cubes eye contact, just one last tip in general, come up on stage, find a couple people to make eye contact with whether your friends or you don't know them just pick a couple people and rotate through, because the general rule of thumb is, if you stare at someone for longer than five seconds. If he comes a little bit awkward- and you don't want to do your whole talk like this, because Phil would just be so perplexed through there all right awesome, so those are kind of our on stage.

B

The very last tip we are going to recommend for you is to rinse and repeat your talk every every time you do. This you've done that. Well, back up, you've done a lot of work. Don't don't do all of this prep for one time for 30 minutes on stage you should take this talk, refine it and deliver it again.

B

It's always gonna be better. The second time you're gonna come up here and pick yourself apart and say: I should have added a slide on that and I missed this point. Take those notes for yourself go back and do it again. It's gonna be much better. You also meet people after the talk. They'll give you feedback on on how it went your content, take that feedback and do it again so definitely definitely highly recommend you.

B

You do this talk more than once, submit it to another conference or go, do it at a meet-up yeah, and if you, if you keep switching topics and okay I, did a talk on this Jenny. Let's go. Do another talk for four year up on a different topic: we're gonna burn ourselves out. If you keep doing that, it's a vicious cycle so use yeah, use your practice and do it on it. That's kind of all we got for you guys, yeah.

A

We are open for questions.

E

B

Tuck Thanks my.

E

Biggest challenge with talking at conferences is that I don't seem to know my schedule like one week from now, let alone three months from now. What are some tips for getting last minute talking slots and preparing for those so.

A

I recommend that you reach out to conference organizers, because some conferences will have a list of talks ready to go with someone cancels and generally every conference. Something happens and someone cancels maybe you're attending a conference. And you just have a talk in your back pocket that you are ready to give like right now.

A

Yeah, but I would I would definitely reach out to the organizers and let them know that you would be prepared to give a talk and send them an amazing abstract about what it would be and they will there's an opening I'm sure they would yeah.

B

That was a little tough because, like on the reverse side, it takes a lot to to put together an agenda and content. So there are things that fall through. Maybe it's not a full-blown 35 minute talk, but if you, if your schedule frees up and you're able to do it, make sure you're taking those two like I'm, not sure. What's that cube, convert like birds of a feather soar, open, Theatre talks or things like that, there's a lot of areas within conferences that you can participate and I, don't know if it's.

B

If your motivation is this, but if you're trying to give back to the community and share your knowledge at conferences, big ones like this, there should be a lot of different facilities other than just a breakout talk.

F

Hi a great talk: where do you find the who is asking for ahrefs RFC's like? Is there a for or like? How do you know when Q Kong is it's a 50-degree.

B

Create a swag but.

A

For you, yeah, so I spent a lot of time in my career called like curating all the CFP deadlines, because there isn't one place to go and find them. Twitter is great because most people announce their or if you're, following people in your industry, someone will share wanna, see if peas. Do um you.

G

Guys don't have any recommendations.

A

A

B

Just to repeat that your your company may have an invent organizer that has a better beat on upcoming conferences and those things pay per call. That's the one.

A

Yeah there's a paper called bio right and session eyes. I haven't heard a session eyes yet yeah.

B

Paper call IO is a good one, I print them and.

A

Then put put the deadline in your calendar yep and give yourself like a week before deadline too, because I can't tell you how many times it shows up like. Oh, no, that's due tonight, I haven't done the pre work. I need to so know yourself and how you prep and make sure you put in a couple calendar invites to make sure that you do not miss the deadline because, generally conferences don't allow you to submit after the deadline, I.

B

Would say generally as well like call for papers are usually open about six months before the show date, maybe eight to six months. Given the timeline, it takes the plane all that content. So if you you know, I want to submit for a coupon, and you looked three weeks ago was probably far too late.

A

You like cube con Europe, is open right now and closing soon I believe there you go next week. There you go. You know this.

C

Was incredibly helpful, thank you for the concrete examples. Question about integrating demo live demos in your talk, any suggestions because it gets really clunky for me and when you're so dependent on internet connection too. So.

A

We are big fans of live demos. We know our audience really appreciates that, and- and everyone has gives this speaker a lot of grace when you're doing a live demo.

A

If it doesn't work perfectly, have your plan on what you're going to do, if not create a recording that you can pull up instead, that you can play if it doesn't work and figure out how you will transition or how you will address when things go wrong, just prepare for it to not work yep but practice making it work over and over and again, I highly recommend for technical talk. Do demos that that matter and support your overall story as much as possible.

B

Yeah but the most typically for technical conference or I mean it depends on the track and what you're speaking to I'll speak for dr. Khan. We had a highly like a deep dive. We called it a black belt track and we wanted speakers to be all code. Very little slides right. One tip I will say that Jenny that Jenny touched upon is is make a video recording and figure out how you can incorporate that and Jenny said it again, but the audience is so forgiving like they're on your side. So something goes wrong.

B

The internet goes out, you say well, I prepared for this button right like and you can talk through it and follow along goes back to practicing as well, but it's a very common problem so.

G

Do you have any advice for like kind of comparing yourself to other companies and I mean that in the sense, that's like I work for a non-profit where there are 12 developers, we moved to kubernetes and it was the coolest thing for us to be able to go and use that it helped our process out, but compared to a lot of other companies. We have like maybe 80 users or something you know. So it's not like. Oh this awesome. We can scale out and do this but like for us.

G

It was really cool and I'd like to you know, talk about it.

B

C

B

So a lot of a lot of great ones that we see are telling a story like maybe wrap in what your nonprofit does like I love me, a good nonprofit story, so I am I, always was more than happy to have. Small teams come up, try to incorporate a really compelling story.

B

Yes, you do have an uphill battle, because they're going against, you know larger scale deployments and all these things, but that's my recommendation is try to find a story in there with what you guys were doing, how what the how the work your small team is doing is impacting the rest of the world.

A

Sorry, really quickly, don't just apply to one conference right like there is a place for your story at a variety of conferences. If you're excited about something share, it I mean that's how that's how kubernetes grew in popularity and.

H

Add on to that companies are conferences of success stories. Yes,.

B

H

You know like coop comparably days they they didn't have enough. People could actually show that people were using kubernetes. So anytime you had like hey here's a customer. Actually using this thing in production, they would love that that story you're. You know people love that kind of thing. We did this thing. It worked so yeah. That's very good.

G

How would you do things differently if you're, given a lightning talk versus a long-form talk.

A

Well, lightning talk is sometimes harder because you really have to take someone on a journey in five minutes.

A

I'd, probably just be like super ruthless and editing, and don't pick a topic too large, like figure out what that learnings gonna. Be that one that one learning and support that yeah very narrow.

B

Yeah so yeah right, if you prepare like a 35 minute talk, this happens sometimes you'll provide a full session abstract and maybe you get selected for a lightning talk and said pick one chapter of that talk and focus on that I.

D

Have a question no matter how much I practice I always say: um hey, like you, have any tips I'm like not make it sound like you know, we're hanging out at the bar and I'm actually just giving a presentation instead of humming my way to success. I guess so.

B

We actually had someone come in and give a talk about communication, which is where I got a couple of these things. Her recommendation was to find someone in your life that you're very close with a best friend like a best work colleague, a husband and wife, a partner and have them call you out every single day and slowly but surely like. If you have the confidence to do that between each other, then you will slowly start to address. She told the story when she was in college, she said or something and you did it again.

B

You did it again and just completely nagging, but she eventually a couple months stopped saying it was a much more eloquent speaker and then her roommate went home and said, um um but yeah fighting a friend, I think find a close colleague, someone that you can trust and have them help you work on it. It's a hard one. Okay,.

D

And that's it. Thank you. Thanks.

B