Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the JavaScript
Speaker 1: Jobber podcast. Today, I'm flying solo as a host, Dan Shapiro,
Speaker 1: coming to you from Tel Aviv. But I've got plenty
Speaker 1: of guests with me, Ariel Schulmann, Lead Josef and de
Speaker 1: Viota Alush, and together we're going to have this really
Speaker 1: interesting discussion. I think about public speaking, speaking at conferences,
Speaker 1: speaking at any venue where you can talk about tech,
Speaker 1: what we think about it, how you should go about it,
Speaker 1: the upsides, the downsides, tips and suggestions and whatnot. I
Speaker 1: think it's going to be a great conversation. But first
Speaker 1: let me I'll let you introduce yourself. So ladies first,
Speaker 1: Darrielle please go.
Speaker 2: Liad please go.
Speaker 3: And I'm Ariel.
Speaker 2: Sorry, here's my friend. I'm Al and I'm Mary.
Speaker 3: I'm a full stack developer at elmex I've.
Speaker 2: Been I think I did my first conference.
Speaker 3: Three years ago and very passionate about it and have
Speaker 3: a few upcoming conferences also this week this year, sorry
Speaker 3: not this week, and I think that's it also coming
Speaker 3: live from.
Speaker 1: Theelvi Yeah, Tel Avi is the place to be today.
Speaker 1: We are all Israeli on this podcast, so I hope
Speaker 1: it works. Well, anyway, Leads, how about you yourself. You've
Speaker 1: You've given some of the best talks I've heard. I
Speaker 1: have to say I've listened to you, for example at
Speaker 1: the Reversing conference. You always give these amazing talks. So
Speaker 1: please describe yourself as in general and as a public speaker.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, first of all, yeah, thank you. I'm lead.
Speaker 4: I'm currently a principal engineering Shopify. I've been in companies
Speaker 4: like Douda. I've been a consultant to too many companies,
Speaker 4: and one of my patients is public speaking and specifically
Speaker 4: tech public speaking. I think I gave my I gave
Speaker 4: my first talk at the conference about six years ago,
Speaker 4: and it started. I gave talks and meetups before that
Speaker 4: and ever since. I'm trying to give really entertaining talsic conferences.
Speaker 4: So we'll probably dive into that later. And yeah, added
Speaker 4: than that, I am also coming like from Tel Aviv
Speaker 4: right now, and again, public sticking is one of my hobbies.
Speaker 4: So I'm looking forward.
Speaker 1: To any any upcoming talk conferences that you scheduled to
Speaker 1: speak at.
Speaker 4: There are there are a few, actually this year. I'm
Speaker 4: in the content committee of a lot of conferences, and
Speaker 4: there are also a few meetups and private company lectures
Speaker 4: that I'm giving in the in the coming months.
Speaker 1: Oh we don't count tails. Yeah, okay, cool and a viata.
Speaker 1: How about you.
Speaker 5: I'm Avatar. I'm a software engineer at Meta for the
Speaker 5: past five years or so a little bit more, and
Speaker 5: also a public speaker. Been speaking in conferences on and
Speaker 5: off for the past six years, almost six years. First
Speaker 5: conference was in twenty nineteen. You mentioned Reversing conference, so
Speaker 5: that was the first one I spoke. I spoke at
Speaker 5: Reversing twenty nineteen, so yeah, that's pretty cool. And I
Speaker 5: also have a few upcoming this year as well.
Speaker 1: That's nice. So also I'll introduce myself as a speaker.
Speaker 1: I'm older than all of you, so I've been speaking
Speaker 1: for longer together. Yeah, not quite, not quite that old,
Speaker 1: I don't think. I think I spoke at a conference
Speaker 1: for the first time approximately twenty years ago, probably before
Speaker 1: Yell was born.
Speaker 2: Um, I was starting elementary school.
Speaker 1: I've I'm currently principal engineer at some Sense. I also
Speaker 1: really enjoy public speaking. This year, I've got three upcoming talks.
Speaker 1: I'll be speaking at JS Heroes in Romania in about
Speaker 1: a month, and I'm also speaking at React next and
Speaker 1: at no TLV two conferences here in Tel Aviv, and
Speaker 1: I've got some submitted cfps, so you know, keeping my
Speaker 1: finger crossed for some additional talks. We will see anyway.
Speaker 1: So now that we've all introduced ourselves and we can
Speaker 1: start talking about, you know, conference speaking specifically, I think
Speaker 1: the first question that I want to post to you
Speaker 1: and feel free to answer in whatever order is why
Speaker 1: why is it that you want to speak at conferences
Speaker 1: that you know you submit to? The conference goes through
Speaker 1: the whole challenge of coming up with the talk, what's
Speaker 1: the upside? Why do you actually do it?
Speaker 5: It goes first, I can go. I can go because
Speaker 5: it's pretty simple. So before even becoming a public speaker,
Speaker 5: I mean, I wanted to be a public speaker for
Speaker 5: a long time. But one of the things that I
Speaker 5: enjoy doing is working on open source projects. I have
Speaker 5: a bunch of open source projects, and I always come
Speaker 5: up with more, and it's usually I even spoke about
Speaker 5: one of those here on the podcast last year, I think.
Speaker 5: And every time we'll working on libraries and tools for
Speaker 5: other developed developers, I come up with the challenges that
Speaker 5: are non trivial things that the everyday developers don't always
Speaker 5: face because they're lower level or they come from a
Speaker 5: different paradigm from a product developer, because I build tools
Speaker 5: and not products, and sometimes I need to find special
Speaker 5: solutions in genius solutions and sometimes even break the rules.
Speaker 5: And what I like doing is take the audience with
Speaker 5: me on a journey of like a detective story, solving
Speaker 5: the same problem that I did, and seeing them experience
Speaker 5: the same development and learning journey that I went through.
Speaker 5: Is some of the most empowerant things that I enjoy
Speaker 5: doing is as a public speaker.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to take AJ's role a little bit
Speaker 1: in the sense that I'm going to push back a
Speaker 1: little bit on what you just said, because what you
Speaker 1: described to an extent you kind of corrected at the end,
Speaker 1: But to an extent, you described the value that your
Speaker 1: audience gets from your talk. But I'm actually asking a
Speaker 1: different question. I'm asking about the value that you derive
Speaker 1: from giving the talk. What is it about public speaking?
Speaker 1: You know, you do it at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: We do it for us. I mean, you know, we
Speaker 1: obviously like to share. We want to see the industry
Speaker 1: move forward. If we can help people that's great, but
Speaker 1: you know, we let's be honest, we do it for us.
Speaker 1: So what is it about giving public talks that is
Speaker 1: enjoyable to you?
Speaker 5: Of course I do it for the traveling accommodation, no more. Seriously,
Speaker 5: it is something that of course I do talk about
Speaker 5: my open source projects, mostly to gain attraction to those projects,
Speaker 5: to gain visibility to projects, but I also like to
Speaker 5: educate the audience about new ways of solving issues. It's
Speaker 5: not just for them, it's for me. It's to get
Speaker 5: some sort of validation that the things that I do
Speaker 5: and the things that I come up with actually work
Speaker 5: and are interesting and are valuable to other people other
Speaker 5: than just me. So it is kind of both cool.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, it's like the value that you
Speaker 1: derive from doing those open source projects in a sense
Speaker 1: that you like to share. Basically, yes, cool, how about you, earliad?
Speaker 1: What's in it for you?
Speaker 4: So? I actually really like that this is the first question,
Speaker 4: because that's, like, I think, the hardest one. But I
Speaker 4: I used to I really like giving talks, not just
Speaker 4: on tech, even since I was in high school. Like
Speaker 4: I'm standing in front of an audience and speaking about
Speaker 4: something that's also something that I did in the in
Speaker 4: the military a little bit. And I think that I
Speaker 4: noticed that I really enjoy seeing this aha moment in
Speaker 4: the eyes of the audience when I try to tell
Speaker 4: them about things that that are new to them or
Speaker 4: things that I did that all of a sudden they
Speaker 4: look at it in a different way, and that that
Speaker 4: that doesn't the exact moments that I'm looking for, whether
Speaker 4: I'm speaking in a room of fifty people or two
Speaker 4: thousand people. So I think that's like the high that
Speaker 4: I'm getting from standing standing.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it is a rush, I agree.
Speaker 4: And so so that's that's one thing that's what's in
Speaker 4: it for me. And I think I used to refrain
Speaker 4: from even submitting to conferences for a long time. And
Speaker 4: then I heard this kind of someone like saying that
Speaker 4: someone told me because I thought I had nothing interesting
Speaker 4: to say because everybody knows everything. But then someone told me,
Speaker 4: I can bet that you did in the past year,
Speaker 4: you did at least five things that no one else did,
Speaker 4: like no one that you can you can talk about
Speaker 4: no one else did.
Speaker 1: You're jumping the gun on a future question of mine.
Speaker 1: So let's put that aside for a minute. I mostly
Speaker 1: want to, So I want to concentrate less on what
Speaker 1: it is that you decide to talk about or the
Speaker 1: topics you bring to the table. I'm again more focusing
Speaker 1: in this question on the value that we derive from
Speaker 1: public speaking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I'll just I'll end up by saying that
Speaker 4: obviously there's the value of putting myself out there and
Speaker 4: making myself a little bit of content. It's not content expert,
Speaker 4: but someone who speaks about react to speaks about those
Speaker 4: kinds of things, And like Kevital said, when you build,
Speaker 4: when you build a talk, you have to really dive
Speaker 4: into things, right to explain to explain it to someone
Speaker 4: in thirty minutes, you have to know it very deeply.
Speaker 4: So that's part of the value that I derive from it,
Speaker 4: of understanding the topic really well and also being being
Speaker 4: the person that understands the topic really well so they
Speaker 4: can talk about it.
Speaker 1: Oh, I totally agree with you. I can get the
Speaker 1: same value from talks also from this podcast. By the way,
Speaker 1: that when you need to speak intelligently about the topic,
Speaker 1: it requires you to learn it, to understand it, to
Speaker 1: actually be able to articulate it means that you have
Speaker 1: to internalize at first, so it's a great way of
Speaker 1: learning new topics. But you also brought up a certain
Speaker 1: point in the past. We actually had this great episode
Speaker 1: on the show with the Moad Stone from Wicks about
Speaker 1: building your personal technological brand, and you mentioned that. But
Speaker 1: I do have to ask about this. Do you feel
Speaker 1: that your public speaking has actually promoted your brand in
Speaker 1: a sense which furthered your career?
Speaker 4: Let's say, yeah, I can answer for myself. Definitely. Definitely.
Speaker 4: I feel like my career. You can slit the career
Speaker 4: into two. Before I started public speaking and after. You
Speaker 4: can't compete with this kind of freach. You can't compete
Speaker 4: with an audience of people who sit and listen to you,
Speaker 4: and you have you have the chance, You have the
Speaker 4: opportunity two to present yourself as as an an expert,
Speaker 4: as a domain experts, as someone who can speak intelligently
Speaker 4: like you say so, Definitely, it has a huge impact
Speaker 4: on the brand I think. I think it's the highest
Speaker 4: value for effort that you can you can get.
Speaker 1: You're a very senior role principal engineer the very well
Speaker 1: known company Shopify. Do you think that your public speaking
Speaker 1: was had a significant impact on your ability to get
Speaker 1: this position.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. I can't count the number of messages that
Speaker 4: I got. Hey, I saw your video in this conference,
Speaker 4: so I saw you in this conference, or someone from
Speaker 4: my company told me about this talk that you gave
Speaker 4: and when you like, a lot of messages come with
Speaker 4: links to my to YouTube of my top So so
Speaker 4: I think I wouldn't say that I wouldn't get to
Speaker 4: this point otherwise. But but definitely it helps a lot.
Speaker 4: It helps a lot put you out there to get
Speaker 4: your name to be known. That's something that yeah, you
Speaker 4: can't really do in any other way.
Speaker 1: How about your real.
Speaker 2: I think they saw all of my arguments like that first,
Speaker 2: and it was both of you. That's still it.
Speaker 3: It's it's absolutely likely I said it's a and also
Speaker 3: what Avitel said it for me, the value, like the
Speaker 3: crowds benefit and my benefit are strictly equal. Like when
Speaker 3: I see people's a harm moment like that that fills me.
Speaker 3: So I am dependent on like their experience is my experience.
Speaker 3: And and also the rush of seeing like you know,
Speaker 3: a thousand people focused completely like only.
Speaker 2: On every word that you say.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible feeling that's very hard to describe. And
Speaker 3: also the amount of opportunities that came out of.
Speaker 2: This is unbelievable.
Speaker 3: And I will say that I also had I was
Speaker 3: interviewed recently about like public speaking and branding, and I
Speaker 3: think that specifically when you talk about branding, when people
Speaker 3: do public speaking not in the purpose of creating a brand,
Speaker 3: but in the purpose of delivering and giving other people value,
Speaker 3: the brand kind of builds itself. And it's really easy
Speaker 3: to differentiate between speakers that the best speakers are not
Speaker 3: in it for the branding. The branding built itself because
Speaker 3: they're passionate. And I can see a lot of like
Speaker 3: people pushing themselves towards public speaking for the sake of branding,
Speaker 3: and it just doesn't create the same content because it's
Speaker 3: quite obvious right when you're building. When you're creating content,
Speaker 3: are you thinking about your brand or are you thinking
Speaker 3: about how does my crowd benefit from this to the maximum?
Speaker 2: And it really creates a completely different experience if you
Speaker 2: ask me.
Speaker 1: I do want to add one point. If you tell
Speaker 1: you kind of joked about the travel and accommodation, but
Speaker 1: for me, it's actually not so much of a joke.
Speaker 1: Almost every time I go to a conference overseas, I
Speaker 1: try to turn it into a trip, a vacation, a tour.
Speaker 1: So for example, about two years ago, I spoke at
Speaker 1: the Web Directions in Sydney, Australia, and I brought my
Speaker 1: wife along and we toured four months in Australia after
Speaker 1: this conference. Now, obviously we don't need the conference in
Speaker 1: order to do that, but it's really nice when somebody
Speaker 1: pays for half your plane tickets. Uh And and that's
Speaker 1: a fairly significant factor for me of basically just visiting
Speaker 1: places that I might not have gone to otherwise. If
Speaker 1: not for that, for those conferences.
Speaker 3: You if you weren't that passionate about JavaScript, I don't
Speaker 3: know if you would have made it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. But you know it's like you
Speaker 1: know they say about real programmers that you know, we're
Speaker 1: always surprised at how much we earned doing something we
Speaker 1: would have done for free. And I guess it's kind
Speaker 1: of the same about the conferences, the conference scene. I
Speaker 1: I probably would have done it otherwise, but it's a
Speaker 1: great benefit. I will say, just and I'll give you
Speaker 1: the the I'll let you speak in a second yad.
Speaker 1: I will say that if a conference does not cover
Speaker 1: my expenses and it's not a conference that my job
Speaker 1: decides to send me to, then I'm highly unlikely to
Speaker 1: go there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you spoke about the accommodation and the flight,
Speaker 4: and that's actually that raises another point. Another benefit of
Speaker 4: speaking conferences, especially high profile conferences, is the other speakers.
Speaker 4: So you have a lot of opportunities to connect with
Speaker 4: people that are legends in the field, and you sit
Speaker 4: with them to speakers dinner, and you talk to them
Speaker 4: and you create connections, and that's something that it's a
Speaker 4: personal benefit. It's not why you do the conferences, but
Speaker 4: that's something that helps build your brand and build your connections,
Speaker 4: and coming as a speaker obviously put you in a
Speaker 4: different category than just coming to the conference.
Speaker 1: I'm actually a host here on this podcast because of that,
Speaker 1: because I was speaking at O'Reilly Fluent when that process,
Speaker 1: when that conference still existed a few years ago, and
Speaker 1: the state it's like six years ago, it's not so
Speaker 1: few anymore, six or seven. And I met Amy Knight,
Speaker 1: who was one of the hosts at JavaScript Jabber back then,
Speaker 1: and she basically kind of invited me on the show
Speaker 1: and things got rolling and eventually I became a host.
Speaker 1: So for sure. I met ken C. Dodds, I met
Speaker 1: Kyle Simpson, I made the tagus. The list goes on
Speaker 1: and on, you know, some just some people off the
Speaker 1: top of my head. But the speakers dinners tend to
Speaker 1: be awesome. And also I like to say that probably
Speaker 1: that in many conferences the most interesting place in the
Speaker 1: conference is the speaker's room.
Speaker 4: Speakers room. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if even if you're not speaking, I recommend sneaking
Speaker 1: into the speaker's room. Yeah. There usually isn't a guard
Speaker 1: at the door. You can basically just get in if
Speaker 1: you've got the.
Speaker 5: Don't tell the secret.
Speaker 4: So yeah, but by the way, about personal branda that
Speaker 4: you ask, I remember that. I think only after my
Speaker 4: third or fourth talk ever, I think it was Guilty
Speaker 4: Hear that came to me and say, hey, maybe you
Speaker 4: do want to put your details, like your contact details
Speaker 4: at the end of the of the talk, just so
Speaker 4: people will know you know who you who you are.
Speaker 4: And I was so focused on giving the value that
Speaker 4: didn't think about it. But that's something that if you
Speaker 4: want to use conferences to increase your person brand, you
Speaker 4: have to do that, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Gil I actually met at Wix, but he's
Speaker 1: one of the great people you can meet at conferences.
Speaker 1: Another one was Rich Harris. I met him at the conference.
Speaker 1: A lot of amazing people, Ryan Carniato. The list goes
Speaker 1: on and on and on. I even remember a funny story,
Speaker 1: like way back when I was at Google ioe and
Speaker 1: I wasn't even speaking there. I was just, you know,
Speaker 1: visiting and walking around, and I met Jason Miller, the
Speaker 1: creator of pre Act, and I met I forget his name,
Speaker 1: the guy who created Webpack Socra I forget anyway, so
Speaker 1: we were sitting together, and then we were walking around together,
Speaker 1: just talking about stuff. And then I see this guy
Speaker 1: walking towards us, and there's this look of recognition in
Speaker 1: his eyes, and he walks up to us, all excited,
Speaker 1: and I'm wondering who will he speak to, the creator
Speaker 1: of pre Act to my right or the creator of
Speaker 1: web back to my left. And he goes to me
Speaker 1: and he says, Dan, I saw your talk at this
Speaker 1: and that conference. It was so good, and I was like, yes,
Speaker 1: So it does create a certain brand recognition and it's
Speaker 1: a great feeling when that happens. Anyway, moving on to
Speaker 1: the next question that I prepared. So we talked about
Speaker 1: our background to speakers about why we got into public speaking.
Speaker 1: But after talking about the why, let's talk about the how.
Speaker 1: How did you actually get into public speaking? What was
Speaker 1: the process for you? Wants to go first? This time,
Speaker 1: meet this time, go for it.
Speaker 3: And as a matter of fact, I was really outside
Speaker 3: of the whole.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say the industry.
Speaker 3: But like I wasn't really in this world of conferences,
Speaker 3: and I was barely going to twenty meetimes, so I
Speaker 3: had no idea how what of a brand it could
Speaker 3: create and which opportunities is it going to give me?
Speaker 2: Like I just went I changed jobs after I worked
Speaker 2: in Licensed.
Speaker 3: And in my new job, I suddenly I wasn't in
Speaker 3: a team full of senior developers, and I suddenly saw
Speaker 3: that I have value to give other developers. You were
Speaker 3: the senior, yes, And suddenly I saw that I that
Speaker 3: I have a lot of things I can teach others,
Speaker 3: and and I wanted more. I wanted more than just
Speaker 3: the five developers I was working with. And I was
Speaker 3: looking for for a connection to speak in a in
Speaker 3: a meetup, and I went to reverse in conference and
Speaker 3: I started the mingling and caught some guy that that
Speaker 3: connected Gilad you guys know him, and he connected me
Speaker 3: with some community to speak in a meetup. It was
Speaker 3: I gave a talk about GIT actually how how it works,
Speaker 3: and and it just blew up. It was really quite insane,
Speaker 3: Like after that talk, I had so many, so many
Speaker 3: different industries approaching me. I was, I gave that talk
Speaker 3: like probably everywhere in the military, and then the conference
Speaker 3: approach to me to come to file to file a SFP,
Speaker 3: and and it really just got so crazy so fast.
Speaker 3: Without any intention of I had no idea what I'm
Speaker 3: going to what's in it for me, Like.
Speaker 2: What we talked about earlier.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to to teach people stuff.
Speaker 2: And I was like, like I can talk about this.
Speaker 3: I like, like, I think it's beautiful, and and one
Speaker 3: thing led to another, and now I'm flying for four
Speaker 3: convinces in the year.
Speaker 1: Each each one have has their own concept of beauty.
Speaker 1: You don't think it is I think. I think KITS
Speaker 1: is beautiful on the inside. I think the command line
Speaker 1: interface leaves a lot to be desired if.
Speaker 2: You would listen to my talk. I don't recommend that
Speaker 2: much using the command line.
Speaker 3: I just recommend understanding how it works, and then you
Speaker 3: can use the beautiful doing interfaces.
Speaker 1: Point taken. Have you told how about you? How did
Speaker 1: you get into actually public speaking?
Speaker 5: Funny story, No, so first one, like I initially wanted
Speaker 5: to become a public speaker, like years before. I remember
Speaker 5: going to a conference in twenty fifteen, and I think
Speaker 5: it was the first you got a left front at
Speaker 5: in twenty fifteen, and I saw I think it was
Speaker 5: Douglas Crawford and on the stage and and and I
Speaker 5: was odd because for the first time that I go
Speaker 5: to a conference, I see it wasn't about him, but
Speaker 5: it was about him being actually being valued enough to
Speaker 5: be flown all the way to another country and actually
Speaker 5: delivering value to an audience. And already at that point,
Speaker 5: I was like, I want to be there. I want
Speaker 5: to be on that stage, be able to deliver value
Speaker 5: and valued enough so that I can be sent or
Speaker 5: invited to such conferences. And I had no idea what
Speaker 5: that that means being invited to a conference. And in
Speaker 5: twenty nineteen came my first option, or my first opportunity,
Speaker 5: where my company pretty much promoted and advocated for engineers
Speaker 5: to apply for the Reversing conference, which was a local conference,
Speaker 5: so it was pretty easy. The process was pretty easy
Speaker 5: to follow up, and there was a voting process, and
Speaker 5: I got in and gave a lightning talk, a fifteen
Speaker 5: minute lightning talk about one of my open source projects.
Speaker 5: But then a year after COVID hit and I was like,
Speaker 5: how do I go to conferences? And now how do
Speaker 5: I join conferences?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 5: How do I apply? I didn't even work at the
Speaker 5: same place, nobody advocated for it, and I didn't really
Speaker 5: still know any any speakers or anybody. And I didn't
Speaker 5: know which door should I knock? What is the secret
Speaker 5: code for actually applying to conferences? How do I get invited?
Speaker 5: And it was like a very weird process of trial
Speaker 5: and error and actually understanding there's no secret code, there
Speaker 5: is no speakeasy bar. It's just a simple cfp kofa
Speaker 5: papers form that you need to file and come up
Speaker 5: with an interesting enough idea. And I filed enough of
Speaker 5: those that I started getting accepted to back. It was
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, so online conferences because everything was online in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, and suddenly that opened the door to real
Speaker 5: life conferences, first in Poland and then in Germany, and
Speaker 5: another one in Germany, and like a bunch of those
Speaker 5: worldwide years after.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the COVID period was tough. Oh yeah, sure.
Speaker 1: Why wasn't it tough for you?
Speaker 2: I was surfing in Australia.
Speaker 1: Oh well, okay, that's that's yeah. I can dig it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can dig it. I can envy you. That's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's It's interesting because my reaction to COVID was actually
Speaker 1: a bit of the opposite of yours. I've been speaking
Speaker 1: for a while before COVID, and when COVID hit, initially,
Speaker 1: I also registered for a couple of online conferences just
Speaker 1: to keep the ball rolling. The assumption was, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll probably get out of this mess in about six
Speaker 1: months or so. So I did a couple of those,
Speaker 1: and my overall experience with them was terrible, felt like
Speaker 1: I was talking to a wall, and I basically just
Speaker 1: gave up on those. So for the most of the
Speaker 1: duration of COVID, I did not speak at conferences at all,
Speaker 1: and only got back to it after COVID hit. After
Speaker 1: COVID ended, and then the war happened, and you know,
Speaker 1: the last couple of years have not been easy anyway, I.
Speaker 5: Completely agree, But I saw that as a ladder for
Speaker 5: me because that was the beginning of my career as
Speaker 5: a speaker today. I completely agree with your with your
Speaker 5: perception of online conferences. Many people like them, maybe as
Speaker 5: an audience. As a speaker, you don't get audience engagement
Speaker 5: and you don't even know if you come through to
Speaker 5: the audience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. How about Julia, how did you get
Speaker 1: into the game.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I have been giving internal talks in DUDA
Speaker 4: because I was leading the front, and so I did
Speaker 4: a lot of small talks like Ariel in Duda, and
Speaker 4: there was I think it was early twenty nineteen, like
Speaker 4: January twenty nineteen, where they came to me and say
Speaker 4: do they come to me and say, hey, we're going
Speaker 4: to host a meetup of a group called the React
Speaker 4: as well. Do you want to give a talk there
Speaker 4: about like the React migration that we did. And I
Speaker 4: said okay, and I took I think a whole week.
Speaker 4: I built this talk like a whole week, full time,
Speaker 4: went into tuning because it was my first talk in
Speaker 4: the meetup, and I gave it and it got really
Speaker 4: good results. And actually my experience was the opposite of
Speaker 4: guitars By. I didn't submit anything, but right after the
Speaker 4: meetup Adam Klein, from one of the organizers of React Next.
Speaker 4: It took me aside and say, hey, do you want
Speaker 4: to speak at the React next. I mean, do you
Speaker 4: want to give some sort of a talkic React Next? Yeah,
Speaker 4: of course, And then I gave a talk at at
Speaker 4: React Next. It was in whole By, which is a
Speaker 4: smaller one, and I prepared for it a lot, so
Speaker 4: I was a little bit disappointed, but it was crowded,
Speaker 4: it was full, full, full room, and it also got
Speaker 4: I think it got like the best talk in the
Speaker 4: conference or something like that, and that really opened the
Speaker 4: door for conference in Israel and as for the conferences abroad.
Speaker 4: So actually the COVID times were really helpful for me,
Speaker 4: like if you tas said, because it was online conferences,
Speaker 4: and because it was online, there were a lot of tracks,
Speaker 4: so a lot of talks could be accepted, so it
Speaker 4: was really easy to start building your name and reputation
Speaker 4: in those online conferences. I gave I think six or
Speaker 4: seven different during the half year of the COVID day.
Speaker 4: I recorded one of them from Greece. So we were
Speaker 4: in a house in Greece and I sat with the
Speaker 4: laptop and I recorded them because I had to submit
Speaker 4: them and afterwards afterwards it opened the door to like
Speaker 4: international conferences. I spoke in REACT Summit and GEST Nation,
Speaker 4: all the all the big conferences, which yeah, and the
Speaker 4: rest is history. By the way, I have to say
Speaker 4: that before before I started speaking conferences, I went to
Speaker 4: a lot of conferences like Avatar. I went to YGLF
Speaker 4: You Got a Left Front in twenty fifteen. I think
Speaker 4: it was like the infliction for a lot of us.
Speaker 4: And the talk that that affected me the most, there
Speaker 4: were two of them. The first one was Gilt I
Speaker 4: hours so I looked at Guilt Talk and it was
Speaker 4: so out of this world and as I want to be.
Speaker 4: I don't know how, but I want to be there
Speaker 4: on the stage one day. And the second, the second
Speaker 4: one was the closing talk from I don't remember his name,
Speaker 4: some from Smashing magazine who gave a talk that was
Speaker 4: thirty minutes something like nine hundred slides like and it
Speaker 4: was such a such a rush running through the stock.
Speaker 4: I really enjoyed it, even though I didn't understand like
Speaker 4: half of the things. So I said, okay, I want
Speaker 4: to be the kind of people, this kind of person
Speaker 4: that stands on and.
Speaker 1: You mean Vitally Itally.
Speaker 4: Friedman, Yeah, I think I think it was Itally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's another guy I met at a couple of conferences.
Speaker 1: He is a great guy. We should probably have him
Speaker 1: on the show some.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's a great entertainer. I mean that Gill and
Speaker 4: Vitally was the like my epitom of how how a
Speaker 4: good speaker should be. It should be informative and entertained.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So just to give my own background story,
Speaker 1: I was working at this small company, a startup, and
Speaker 1: we were playing in the field with a lot of
Speaker 1: larger companies. We were trying to get the message out
Speaker 1: and I actually leveraged conferences initially basically is a means
Speaker 1: to promote our company and our technology. So it was
Speaker 1: not a sponsored I was. I was not. I was
Speaker 1: really careful not to do it like to marketing. So
Speaker 1: I was talking about technologies and stuff like that, but
Speaker 1: I was still getting just the fact that I could say,
Speaker 1: and we're using this technology, or I could use our
Speaker 1: products as examples for useful stuff, and enabled me to
Speaker 1: get the word out. And then I got and I
Speaker 1: and then I started working at WIS. And one of
Speaker 1: the great things about WIS is that WIS really pushes
Speaker 1: its employees to speak at conferences and even covers expenses
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And I also got into a
Speaker 1: web performance relatively early, and that became a really hot topic.
Speaker 1: So for a while there it was fairly straightforward to
Speaker 1: get into conferences speaking about web performance. Anyway, moving on
Speaker 1: to the next question, how do you find and select
Speaker 1: speaking opportunities? What are your selection criteria for deciding which
Speaker 1: conferences to try to speak at? Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, go first again. Yeah, I'm thinking do I want
Speaker 5: to get more competition or not?
Speaker 1: You don't want you know, you don't need to name
Speaker 1: the conferences if no, no, no, it's fine.
Speaker 5: It's fine. I was just kidding. There are enough conferences
Speaker 5: in enough areas that it's okay, and and we always
Speaker 5: in all conferences, I think, welcoming speakers as well, so
Speaker 5: it's completely fine. So first of all, there are many
Speaker 5: online repositories for for conferences, so like a bunch of websites,
Speaker 5: there is a trailer board and airtable board. I just
Speaker 5: found a new one recently that just have the list
Speaker 5: of all upcoming, all upcoming conferences, and they usually also
Speaker 5: say if the conferences cover travel and accommodation.
Speaker 4: What it is about? What is the date?
Speaker 5: So these are very good utilities and tools and websites.
Speaker 5: Usually you should just look up on Google CFP and
Speaker 5: maybe we can later on on the show notes just
Speaker 5: a bunch of them. So yeah, yeah, so that we
Speaker 5: can so that the audience can find them. But also
Speaker 5: there is think.
Speaker 1: By the way, before you go on, what do you
Speaker 1: think of sessionized sessionize?
Speaker 5: It's it's a good tool for actually applying, but I
Speaker 5: don't think it's a good discovery tool from conferences. I
Speaker 5: I do not enjoy it for discoverability.
Speaker 1: MM. Probably need to get you to share some of
Speaker 1: your links with me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be on the show notes, I think,
Speaker 5: but before that they'll get to you. And also there
Speaker 5: is a really cool initiative in the Israeli community. That's
Speaker 5: What's up group for. I don't know how many we
Speaker 5: are there already, but at least do at least dozens
Speaker 5: of speakers from Israel that we actually share cfps that
Speaker 5: are about to close soon. And there's even a website
Speaker 5: for that community where we voluntarily upload a list of
Speaker 5: cfps that we find. So that's pretty cool for sure.
Speaker 5: Members of it yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how I recruited you for this conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how about you. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, in addition to those resucess that Evita mentioned, I
Speaker 4: think at some point in your career and your speaking career,
Speaker 4: where you have conferences that you either gave more than
Speaker 4: one talking or you gave a really good talking, you
Speaker 4: start to get inbound requests for full speaking. For example
Speaker 4: that get nation conferences sometimes approached me and say, hey,
Speaker 4: we have reactions on it next year, do you want
Speaker 4: to speak? Or the Giggle, which is like a network
Speaker 4: of a lot of online conferences. They usually they have
Speaker 4: a lot of inbound requests. And so so in addition
Speaker 4: to those kind of conferences, I know people in the
Speaker 4: community that share with me, Hey we're going to speak,
Speaker 4: or we're applying to decent this conference, or there's this
Speaker 4: really interesting conference that that's happening. So I think like
Speaker 4: building a network of speakers, that's also something that's really
Speaker 4: really important.
Speaker 1: In order to building networks is always a good thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are you? And anything to add.
Speaker 3: Take a viotar's links, I think I think I got
Speaker 3: like maybe four conferences since I asked the votar for
Speaker 3: his resources.
Speaker 5: Oh I got the best links.
Speaker 1: Links for us. But that's what you guys described is
Speaker 1: how you find conferences. But how do you choose conferences?
Speaker 1: I mean, I assume you don't submit to each and
Speaker 1: every conference. How do you choose which conferences to submit too?
Speaker 2: Why not submit and then refuse like you can?
Speaker 3: You can submit as many as you like, you can
Speaker 3: refuse like, oh, yeah, honestly, I don't. I would submit
Speaker 3: to anything that has travel and accommodations covered and it's
Speaker 3: not a place that I wouldn't like to be at.
Speaker 3: And I it happened to me to decline to conferences, Like,
Speaker 3: it's fine, it happens. I think it's better to have
Speaker 3: the opportunity to decline than.
Speaker 2: Not to have it at all.
Speaker 1: Well, obviously you occasionally need to decline, you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: strictly for personal reasons. Sometimes because you submit for three
Speaker 1: conferences and they all happen at more or less the
Speaker 1: same date, so you can't physically be three and you
Speaker 1: get in into all three and you don't know that
Speaker 1: in advance. So that I did go to you you
Speaker 1: spoke at three conferences at the same time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I went to two conferences, like there were one
Speaker 5: day apart in two different countries in Europe.
Speaker 3: So yeah, even overlapped the overlap today and you got
Speaker 3: late to the other conference.
Speaker 5: I would even though I do know a speaker who
Speaker 5: flew from It was Hilla Fish who flew from Dublin
Speaker 5: to who spoke at a conference in Dublin, flew to
Speaker 5: Germany to give her talk, and flew back to Dublin again,
Speaker 5: both conferences at the same day.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: I would also add a rule of thumb for me
Speaker 4: that it should be a conference that I can see
Speaker 4: myself coming as a guest. I mean that that's I
Speaker 4: think like that the top tiers of conferences that I
Speaker 4: would apply to a conferences that I would want to
Speaker 4: be in, even not as a speaker.
Speaker 1: I forget, by the way, who it was. He's a
Speaker 1: well known C plus plus speaker whose name escapes me
Speaker 1: right now, and he spoke at the conference that I
Speaker 1: also attended, and we went out for drinks afterward, and
Speaker 1: he's one of those people who you know, goes from
Speaker 1: conference to conference to conference. And I asked him about,
Speaker 1: you know, did he have any stressful experiences and he
Speaker 1: told me of this time he was supposed to give
Speaker 1: the closing keynoted the conference, and his flight was late,
Speaker 1: so he literally got to the conference three minutes before
Speaker 1: his talk, walked out of the taxi directly onto the stage,
Speaker 1: and started speaking. So I asked them, were you really
Speaker 1: stressed out? He said, kind of, but not as much
Speaker 1: as the conference organizers, So so yes, conference organizing his
Speaker 1: pretty stressful job, something I'm grateful that I've never done. Okay,
Speaker 1: I agree with everything you said. And if there's one
Speaker 1: annoying thing though, is that sometimes it's pretty difficult to
Speaker 1: figure out if a conference does or does not cover expenses.
Speaker 1: It's it should be upfront and straightforward, and sometimes it's
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not for some reason, and when it
Speaker 1: when it's not, it's kind of annoying. Let me see,
Speaker 1: what's the next question I want to ask about. Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a good one. How do you come up
Speaker 1: with the topics to talk about one of the before
Speaker 1: you start answering one of the I really try to
Speaker 1: convince people that I work with, that I interact with
Speaker 1: in the tech community to speak at conferences. And one
Speaker 1: of the common responses that I hear is I don't
Speaker 1: have anything to talk about. I have nothing interesting to tell.
Speaker 1: There's nothing that I'm currently doing that's interesting to anybody
Speaker 1: and so forth. Obviously that's not true, but there is
Speaker 1: still a question of how to come up with the
Speaker 1: actual confidence talk topics. So how do you go about it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's start with you this time. You're never first.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So it's a it's a really good question, and
Speaker 4: I think it changes throughout your career. So I would
Speaker 4: say that if it's if it's an advice that I'm
Speaker 4: giving to people that they want to talk about something
Speaker 4: is like the first the first talk, that the first
Speaker 4: topic that you're going to choose, that should be something
Speaker 4: that you're very affluent in. You're very influent in, and
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter if you feel that you you don't
Speaker 4: have anything any value to give. You have value to give.
Speaker 4: If that's something that you walk down, you have value
Speaker 4: to give, definitely. But I would say that my choice
Speaker 4: of topics now are combinations of either things that are
Speaker 4: of interest to me, even if it's not something that
Speaker 4: I do in my day job, but of interest to
Speaker 4: me and I want to dive deep and I want
Speaker 4: to be able to speak about them, or that's something
Speaker 4: that I think would go well with the with the theme,
Speaker 4: with the theme of the conference and the side gates
Speaker 4: of the times, right, so I wouldn't give a talk
Speaker 4: about react Tooks today.
Speaker 1: Even ai ai ai.
Speaker 4: Ya I saw twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now it's MCP. I think we're just the AI Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And for some reason, I think you do know a
Speaker 1: little bit about MCP.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I read some tweets about it.
Speaker 4: So so I think I think it's definitely it's definitely
Speaker 4: a mix because it has to it has to be
Speaker 4: something that you think would give value to the to
Speaker 4: the audience, but it also it has to be something
Speaker 4: that of interest to you. I wouldn't I wouldn't give
Speaker 4: a talk about something that I wouldn't want to listen
Speaker 4: to as a as an audience.
Speaker 1: How about you?
Speaker 3: I think this question is also maybe maybe it's about
Speaker 3: phrases in the career, but I also feel like there's
Speaker 3: style to it, you know, like there are each like
Speaker 3: there are lecturers that have like a style, like I
Speaker 3: can say that I know. My style is to to
Speaker 3: take deep, deep concepts and to break them up to
Speaker 3: the to the smallest pieces, and like just to like
Speaker 3: I love explaining how things work and and it kind
Speaker 3: of goes also back to the beginning of this conversation
Speaker 3: of what's in it for me? Only until I break
Speaker 3: a subject deep like I'm basically explaining it to myself.
Speaker 3: I'm building the ideal explanation for myself and sharing it.
Speaker 3: So I do I take technologies that not that I
Speaker 3: do feel like, not technologies that they don't like, but
Speaker 3: I like to take technologies that are to take deep
Speaker 3: concepts and and to research the f out of them.
Speaker 3: And really, I also feel like that kind of is
Speaker 3: what helps with the imposters syndrome for some people that
Speaker 3: they think that they don't have something to talk about,
Speaker 3: or that they don't know enough research the f out
Speaker 3: of it until you know that you have value because
Speaker 3: nobody has invested.
Speaker 2: So much research in what you're going to talk about.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of what I try to do when
Speaker 3: I both talk about things.
Speaker 2: I think I invest dozens of hours of research.
Speaker 1: Interestingly, I think my son once told me something along
Speaker 1: the lines of that if you've read a book about
Speaker 1: some topic, then you know more about that topic than
Speaker 1: seventy or eighty percent of the people in the world,
Speaker 1: even if you've read just one book about it. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: don't underestimate the knowledge that you gained by working on
Speaker 1: a particular topic as part of your day job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also you need research, Yeah for sure, probably.
Speaker 1: But the very least you know what to research. True
Speaker 1: if you thought, how about you?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So for me, it's pretty easy, I think, because
Speaker 5: I have my own niche that I only talk about
Speaker 5: things that I build, So the topics are No, it's
Speaker 5: actually not that easy because what I like doing and
Speaker 5: my style of presentations is almost always live coding, So
Speaker 5: I love and what I enjoy doing is take a
Speaker 5: problem that I solved and break it down to the
Speaker 5: audience in a way that actually teaches them something. And
Speaker 5: the issue is and the challenges is identifying the small
Speaker 5: enough but meaningful enough kind of problem for the audience
Speaker 5: to actually relate to, but also be able to deliver
Speaker 5: on a stage in a thirty minute timeframe. So what
Speaker 5: I do is usually when building a library or when
Speaker 5: building a tool, is find the lower level parts of
Speaker 5: my libraries or the lower level solutions that I had
Speaker 5: to come up with that I can actually share with
Speaker 5: the audience and they will get some benefit from. So
Speaker 5: sometimes it's a component of my system, just a unit
Speaker 5: of my system. That I try to build together with
Speaker 5: the audience and then create, and also something that I
Speaker 5: had to solve, something that I needed to solve for myself,
Speaker 5: and then walk the audience through the journey that I went.
Speaker 5: So this is usually the type of talk that I choose,
Speaker 5: and this is the topic that comes to mind, And
Speaker 5: so it happens every time I continue building my tools
Speaker 5: and adding more capabilities, I find new challenges and new
Speaker 5: solutions for these challenges. So I come up with new
Speaker 5: top ideas. And even though I have the same core
Speaker 5: five main open source projects that I work on, the
Speaker 5: talks never run out because I keep maintaining them and
Speaker 5: keep coming up with new challenges as the story continues
Speaker 5: with those packages.
Speaker 1: Just a reminder to our audience that you were a
Speaker 1: guest on our show speaking about the VEST testing framework
Speaker 1: or testing.
Speaker 5: Library, validation framework.
Speaker 1: Validation framework, or for forms, not for testing. It looks
Speaker 1: like a testing library, but it's a form validation library.
Speaker 1: Sorry for that confusion. Yeah, I totally aligned with that
Speaker 1: in the sense that I think it has to do
Speaker 1: with a way of thinking. Whenever somebody like I said,
Speaker 1: tells me that I don't actually have a topic. In
Speaker 1: a lot of cases, I asked them, Okay, tell me
Speaker 1: what you're currently working on. Tell me a problem that
Speaker 1: you had to solve in the context of your work.
Speaker 1: Obviously you've had to solve some problems. Now I'll show
Speaker 1: you how you can take that topic and transform it
Speaker 1: into a conference talk. So it's a kind of a
Speaker 1: way of thinking of like you said, you're working on
Speaker 1: a problem, you're solving a problem, and then it kind
Speaker 1: of clicks, Hey, this can be a talk topic, a
Speaker 1: topic for a talk that I give it a conference.
Speaker 1: And for me, at least in most cases, I don't
Speaker 1: create talks for conferences. I don't know about you guys.
Speaker 1: It works in a reverse. I have a talk idea,
Speaker 1: I write it down, and then when conferences come along,
Speaker 1: I try to align the the relevant ideas with the
Speaker 1: talk with the conference based on what I perceived the
Speaker 1: theme of the conference to be. It's it's very rare
Speaker 1: for me to try to come up with a talk,
Speaker 1: particularly or specifically for a conference just because I saw
Speaker 1: a CFP for that conference. I won't say it never happened,
Speaker 1: because I think it did, at least in the beginning,
Speaker 1: but it's currently it's fairly rare for me. To do that. So, Okay,
Speaker 1: you've got an idea, maybe you've written down the title,
Speaker 1: you have some thoughts about what it is that you
Speaker 1: want to show, but now you need to actually turn
Speaker 1: it into a CFP. That means a title, that means
Speaker 1: an abstract. Sometimes there are additional fields that they require
Speaker 1: you to feel, like, what's in it for the audience?
Speaker 1: How did you do go about the research and what
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth? How do you go
Speaker 1: about that particular process.
Speaker 2: You talk about finding a SAFP for a talk that
Speaker 2: you've never given.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about taking a new talk idea that appeared
Speaker 1: in your head and actually turning it into the content
Speaker 1: that you fill in in the CFP form.
Speaker 2: Because it's not like a two point thing.
Speaker 3: You can do meetups like you can present it in
Speaker 3: a non conference environment.
Speaker 1: You know there is I'll put it differently. You need
Speaker 1: to come up with a title, You need to come
Speaker 1: up with an abstract. You need to come up with
Speaker 1: maybe additional information about that conference talk proposal, and those
Speaker 1: need to be attractive because at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a blind selection in most cases, and
Speaker 1: a catchy title is better than a whole old hum
Speaker 1: title and likewise with regard to the abstract, so those
Speaker 1: do make a difference. So my question is what's your
Speaker 1: process for turning the idea into a title and an abstract.
Speaker 4: First, first of all, I think it's it's it's pretty
Speaker 4: maybe it's pretty obvious, but it's very helpful to keep
Speaker 4: track of your past submissions because those you can't find
Speaker 4: them anywhere if they're not on session EZ, so have
Speaker 4: like a Google doc or something to track. First of
Speaker 4: because it's very hepple to copy all of the other
Speaker 4: relevant fields like bio and Twitter and links and everything,
Speaker 4: and and the second and secondly, because some of the
Speaker 4: talks are there, like variations of talks that you've already given,
Speaker 4: so it's heppul to get them. But if it's a
Speaker 4: new talk, I think that I'm also part of several committees,
Speaker 4: so I know how it looks from the other side.
Speaker 4: And as as much as you want to look into
Speaker 4: every every submission in a committee, when you get a
Speaker 4: thousand submissions, the title is very important and it should
Speaker 4: be catchy, like you said, but it shouldn't be there.
Speaker 4: It should be vague, so it shouldn't be like the
Speaker 4: cool things that you can do with something. It should
Speaker 4: be it should be aimed for the eyes of the
Speaker 4: committee and afterwards for the eyes of the of the audience.
Speaker 4: So I think it's an art of itself, of the title,
Speaker 4: the title itself, and what.
Speaker 1: Is the art?
Speaker 2: Do you think the title is equal to the abstract?
Speaker 4: So I think that. I mean, just think about yourself
Speaker 4: as a conference goer. If even if you have the
Speaker 4: agenda and you have four tracks of this conference, usually
Speaker 4: what the title is everything you see, like if you
Speaker 4: have an app or something, you have to click on
Speaker 4: the title in order to read the abstract, right and
Speaker 4: a lot of the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's the second step.
Speaker 3: Like as as a content committee myself, I think I
Speaker 3: focus more on the abstract than on the title and
Speaker 3: not the experience of the speaker right the way, which
Speaker 3: is really likely the most important thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's not something that you can control. When
Speaker 4: you when I mean you can you can build it
Speaker 4: in a way that you look appealing, but that's not
Speaker 4: something you can control and you submit to SEFP. So again,
Speaker 4: I agree, the abstract is important. But the thing I
Speaker 4: want to say, a lot of the conferences give you
Speaker 4: another part of the form that are speaking points. So
Speaker 4: it's super important to differentiate abstract from speaking points. Speaking
Speaker 4: points that's only for the eyes of the committee. An
Speaker 4: abstract that's something that the committee they need to to
Speaker 4: want to have it in the conference, and they need
Speaker 4: to also also think that the audience is going to
Speaker 4: like this abstract, right, So so you're actually writing for
Speaker 4: two audiences, for the committee and the and that this
Speaker 4: that's something.
Speaker 1: So how do it? So?
Speaker 4: I think for me, you know, I've been to a
Speaker 4: lot of conferences and I am I've been to a
Speaker 4: lot of committees. So I write something that I would
Speaker 4: find appealing. If I'm going to, for example, a topic
Speaker 4: but react hooks. So I'm going to write the abstract
Speaker 4: in a way that's going to to explain to people
Speaker 4: that already know or already heard about hooks, why that's
Speaker 4: something that's going to be new to them. Because no
Speaker 4: one will go to UH today to talk that say
Speaker 4: let's explain let's let's let me explain to you about hooks.
Speaker 4: So that that has to be catchy and the title
Speaker 4: I would I'm trying to refrain with the you know,
Speaker 4: play on words, let's get hooked or something like that.
Speaker 4: I really want to respect the intelligence of whoever is
Speaker 4: reading that, and and the title should be informative but
Speaker 4: eye catching. I mean it's a case by case, right.
Speaker 1: Do you run your titles by other people to get
Speaker 1: feedback your titles your out.
Speaker 4: Oh definitely, yeah. At abstracts are something that are going
Speaker 4: to be refined and refined and refined again. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 4: because it's helpful if you know people that like people
Speaker 4: from committees or people that organize conferences, because they have
Speaker 4: the best insights on that. But yeah, yeah, of course
Speaker 4: I run it by people. I know people from the industry.
Speaker 4: But do you think, would you go to this talk?
Speaker 4: What do you think about about this abstract? Is it understandable?
Speaker 4: Is it clear from the abstract that I'm going to
Speaker 4: speak about ABC? Yeah? Definitely.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I I one of the talks that I am
Speaker 1: giving this year at the con and I'll be speaking
Speaker 1: at had a very different title and I it wasn't
Speaker 1: accepted by a couple of conferences, and then I think,
Speaker 1: I send it to tags and he suggested like a
Speaker 1: completely different title for me, and we kind of settled
Speaker 1: it was an iteration. I didn't immediately take his suggestion,
Speaker 1: but we ended up on a very different title than
Speaker 1: my original title, and apparently it works because it's gotten
Speaker 1: accepted into two conferences. So yeah, for sure the title. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously I can't know why it wasn't accepted before. Usually
Speaker 1: you don't get the reason. But I do think the
Speaker 1: new title is better. I recently had had the amusing
Speaker 1: experience first time that this has happened to me. That
Speaker 1: conference kind of censored my title, which is really so
Speaker 1: my talk at no TLV is titled using heat.
Speaker 2: Remember that one?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you're one of the committee there, you're one
Speaker 1: of the people who edited.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course you can't. I remember that title.
Speaker 3: Now, so yeah, so no, please please say what was
Speaker 3: the title?
Speaker 1: Then I'll start with the please no, I'll start with
Speaker 1: the current one, and then I'll tell the original one.
Speaker 2: To talk about memory dumps.
Speaker 1: Okay, to talk about hip dumps, memory dumps. So my
Speaker 1: original title was taking a dump using heap dumps to
Speaker 1: find and fix no JS memory and CPU problems, and
Speaker 1: you removed the taking a dump part.
Speaker 3: I forgot about that. I want I want to give
Speaker 3: a contradicting perception on this. And it happened to me
Speaker 3: too that I filed cfpiece of talks that I haven't
Speaker 3: given before. But to be honest, I I prefer to
Speaker 3: present the.
Speaker 2: Talk in my in my.
Speaker 3: Local area, so like in meetups, and and then the
Speaker 3: abstract is not like something I need to make up
Speaker 3: or the title I need to make up.
Speaker 2: I kind of like I.
Speaker 3: Test run it in my local environment and then like
Speaker 3: it also improves, and I and then I and then
Speaker 3: I start submitting it, Like I don't really enjoy making
Speaker 3: up abstract for that's what Also, that's pretty much what
Speaker 3: makes it hard. And when you when you present a
Speaker 3: talk in a meetup, they're not going to be like, oh,
Speaker 3: your title is not perfect, your abstract is not this,
Speaker 3: and you can take advantage of this local environment where
Speaker 3: you can present it and to really like also define
Speaker 3: your talk and understand the value that people get. And
Speaker 3: and the abstract like again what kind of build itself.
Speaker 1: But it's a.
Speaker 3: Lot harder to write an abstract for a talk that
Speaker 3: doesn't exist, Like it's it's a lot harder.
Speaker 1: I agree, But I will ask you, do you get
Speaker 1: feedback from meetups on the quality of your abstract?
Speaker 3: Quight on the It's not about getting feedback on the
Speaker 3: quality of the abstract, But I feel like what's hard
Speaker 3: about writing an abstract for a talk that doesn't exist
Speaker 3: is the fact that it doesn't exist. And when a
Speaker 3: talk exists and you already know, like what what do
Speaker 3: you what?
Speaker 2: What is an abstract about? What? What is it's about? Saying?
Speaker 2: What are you going to talk about?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: Why is it interesting? Why is it valuable?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: How does it solve a problem?
Speaker 3: And those you go through this process when you build
Speaker 3: a talk, and so the moment you have the talk,
Speaker 3: you already have all the key takeaways.
Speaker 2: But easier to an abstract.
Speaker 1: I agree. But let's go back in time. Let's say
Speaker 1: I was giving a talk five years ago about react
Speaker 1: hooks when they were new. Okay, I think they were
Speaker 1: new five years ago.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about something new. Why are we so stuck on?
Speaker 1: I'm just giving I'm just giving examples. So just something
Speaker 1: that popped in my head. So I could say, like
Speaker 1: react hooks are the new mechanism for managing state blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. Or I can say the all new React
Speaker 1: hooks are the exciting new way like it. I think
Speaker 1: the way that you phrase things does make a difference,
Speaker 1: doesn't it.
Speaker 3: I don't think so, not unless you're worthy unless you're not.
Speaker 3: But but to be honest with they want to see
Speaker 3: that you know what you're talking about. They want to
Speaker 3: see that you use the right keywords, and you use
Speaker 3: the right keywords when you know what you're talking about.
Speaker 4: I actually, I think it does matter a lot because
Speaker 4: in most of the conferences, especially international, you don't get
Speaker 4: a chance to change the abstract. So of course you
Speaker 4: don't get a chance to change it.
Speaker 2: So I know of course you don't.
Speaker 4: So it should It should appeal, like I said, should
Speaker 4: appeal to the audience. It should appeal to the audience.
Speaker 4: Go to the conference. Gore, who now needs to decide
Speaker 4: is now at lunch and needs to decide what talks
Speaker 4: should I see after lunch, and they're like four different talks,
Speaker 4: so it needs to appeal to them as well. Volding
Speaker 4: is volding matters here.
Speaker 1: I think if you tell we've skipped you you've got
Speaker 1: anything you want to add to this?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so just about what they had said. Actually, I
Speaker 5: think conferences are pretty laid back about changing the abstract.
Speaker 5: If it's a minor change, or if you want to
Speaker 5: add some information, it's okay. You can make changes both
Speaker 5: to the title and to the abstract as long as
Speaker 5: you're not replacing the entire talk. So this part I
Speaker 5: think is fine. But for me, the process is usually
Speaker 5: I usually just come up with something and it usually works.
Speaker 5: Like I come up with something, I come up with
Speaker 5: two three titles. I pick from them. I write a
Speaker 5: quick abstract that follow a very basic formula that I have,
Speaker 5: like what is the issue that I'm tackling, or what
Speaker 5: is what is the issue that I'm experiencing, what it
Speaker 5: is that I'm going to present, and what are you
Speaker 5: going to get out of it? It's going to be
Speaker 5: usually one to two sentences for each of these in
Speaker 5: the formula and for most cases and most conference talks
Speaker 5: that I send that that's the formula that it works,
Speaker 5: and the title I usually experiment with it. So I
Speaker 5: have two three titles, I send them to multiple conferences,
Speaker 5: and I see which one gets accepted first, and then
Speaker 5: I go on with that one.
Speaker 1: Interesting, I do have to say that I not only
Speaker 1: had to change the abstract once, but I actually had
Speaker 1: to change the entire talk once. So I was I
Speaker 1: got accepted to speak at I think it was CITYJS conference,
Speaker 1: and then I found that Ryan Carniato was speaking there.
Speaker 1: As well, so we decided to collaborate and you know,
Speaker 1: run our talks by each other. He was giving a keynote,
Speaker 1: I was giving a regular talk. So he went first
Speaker 1: and he gives me his keynote and I say, oops,
Speaker 1: there's a problem here, and he goes, what's the problem,
Speaker 1: is said, your keynote and my talk are the same.
Speaker 1: The organizers, Yeah, but look, he kind of his talk
Speaker 1: kind of evolved, so his title was a bit vague.
Speaker 1: So I'm not surprised that they didn't figure it out.
Speaker 1: But I then reached out to the organizer and I
Speaker 1: told him, hey, look there's a problem here. Ryan's talk
Speaker 1: and my talk are the same talk. Maybe I should
Speaker 1: switch a talk because he is a keynote after all.
Speaker 1: So we ended up doing that, so I gave a
Speaker 1: different talk than the one that was actually initially accepted,
Speaker 1: which was funny anyway. You know, you you hang out
Speaker 1: in the in Theseles long enough, and funny things happen
Speaker 1: in various conferences.
Speaker 3: Anyway, just one last thing on this topic, from the
Speaker 3: content commit from the content committee seat. You choose people
Speaker 3: just as much as you choose sub like as you
Speaker 3: choose their abstract or title.
Speaker 2: Sometimes depending on the conference.
Speaker 3: Okay, major conferences, that's true, they get a lot of
Speaker 3: submissions and you do want to shine because you're in
Speaker 3: a big competition. But for smaller conferences that are like
Speaker 3: open minded to giving people chances and sometimes, like I
Speaker 3: can say that in our conferences in Israel, if we
Speaker 3: see it, we focus on the person presenting. So if
Speaker 3: that person has experience and we like how how he
Speaker 3: stands on the stage, and we like how he creates content,
Speaker 3: and even if his subject is a bit off or
Speaker 3: maybe not spot on for the conference, we would we
Speaker 3: can approach them to like modify it. But I feel
Speaker 3: like the most important thing is to like get blood
Speaker 3: on your hands and like speak, go out, talken meetups,
Speaker 3: like start small, but get that experience. It's quite hard
Speaker 3: to start from a conference without.
Speaker 2: Any prior experience on stage.
Speaker 3: And also it's hard for a committee to accept you
Speaker 3: when they don't have a lot of videos of your
Speaker 3: like you know, a way to assess your abilities.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we can't forget the fact that at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, conferences very often need to sell tickets,
Speaker 1: and they need to get people excited to register, and
Speaker 1: they need to get sponsorships and it's just easier to
Speaker 1: do when you've got well known speakers as part of
Speaker 1: the conference. If everybody is new and unknown, it's more
Speaker 1: challenging to get people excited about the conference.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but what I'm saying is that it's more important
Speaker 3: to if you're in a new okay, if you're not
Speaker 3: a known speaker. So it's more important to file a
Speaker 3: safe when you already have like some some way to
Speaker 3: give the committee to assess your abilities.
Speaker 2: So you you mean to start local.
Speaker 1: Doing started a meetup and have recordings of those meetups
Speaker 1: and you can send The challenge though, for at least
Speaker 1: for Israeli speakers is that most meetups would be in Hebrew.
Speaker 2: You can speak in English and very type of features too.
Speaker 4: You can just say is it okay for speaking English,
Speaker 4: especially if it's recorded.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and sometimes there are English speaking It happened to
Speaker 3: be a few times as I spoken meetups individual in
Speaker 3: English and there were English speakers in the crowds and
Speaker 3: they were really happy that they did so.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Funnily, both no TLV and react Next wanted me
Speaker 1: to speak in English.
Speaker 4: So you know, I in my first meetup because I
Speaker 4: wanted it to be in English. I know. I knew
Speaker 4: there's someone in the audience who's speaking English. I said, okay,
Speaker 4: there's someone who's in English speakers, so I'll do it
Speaker 4: in English. And she said, no, it's okay, I know Hebrew.
Speaker 4: And I was like, okay, I'll do it in English anyway.
Speaker 1: So we still have a few questions. We're starting to
Speaker 1: run out of time. I'll try to pick the interesting one.
Speaker 1: So we already suppose. I have one about getting accepted
Speaker 1: in the strategy. I think we already spoke about that,
Speaker 1: unless you have something special to add about getting into conferences.
Speaker 1: For me, the only thing I would add is that
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it's a numbers game
Speaker 1: and you just send a lot out there and you
Speaker 1: get a lot of rejections. But if you submit to
Speaker 1: twenty and you get three, you get accepted into three.
Speaker 1: That's that's one in seven. But that's still good, and
Speaker 1: you know, no hard feelings, and keep on going. Any
Speaker 1: other thing to add to that.
Speaker 5: Totally agree, Yeah, don't be discouraged if it takes time,
Speaker 5: because it does take time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the same talk that didn't get accepted into
Speaker 1: five conferences suddenly gets accepted into a conference and then
Speaker 1: you know, like I said, you really only need one.
Speaker 1: It's it's like getting a date.
Speaker 2: It's a numbers game.
Speaker 1: It's a numbers game. When you or getting hired into
Speaker 1: a position, it's it's it's always playing the numbers, and
Speaker 1: my dog is barking, um okay. Moving on quickly to
Speaker 1: the next question, how do you prepare the actual talk
Speaker 1: and slides? Is there a process that you have and
Speaker 1: also the structure of your slides do you like do
Speaker 1: you do mostly texts, mostly images, mostly live coding. I
Speaker 1: think if you you said that you only do live coding,
Speaker 1: what do you what do you have to say about that?
Speaker 5: So I think each one here in this panel has
Speaker 5: a completely different way of doing each of those. Me specifically,
Speaker 5: most of my presentations and most of my talks are
Speaker 5: structured in two. Half of it is a presentation slides,
Speaker 5: and the slides are very light on text, like two
Speaker 5: three words per per slide. And then I just chat.
Speaker 5: I don't have anything scripted. If there's jokes, there's jokes,
Speaker 5: I don't know. Whatever comes up when I speak. And
Speaker 5: that's the first half. I introduced a problem, I introduced
Speaker 5: the concept that I'm breaking down, and then I go forward,
Speaker 5: switch to my editor live code, and everything is pretty
Speaker 5: much downhill fall from there. No, it's it's usually works.
Speaker 5: It usually works most of the time.
Speaker 3: Not all.
Speaker 1: I'm re minded of this time. I like a long
Speaker 1: time ago when I attended this. It wasn't really conference,
Speaker 1: it was more of a meetup thing, but it was
Speaker 1: IBM presenting some technologies that they created. And I was
Speaker 1: working in the enterprise software back then, and they had
Speaker 1: this thing called WebSphere and they had this editor called
Speaker 1: the clips and they were showing some integration or another clips. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, anyway, the guy was showing some wizard that
Speaker 1: did something, and it was like the Wizard that with
Speaker 1: a hundred steps. So he goes he fills the one
Speaker 1: thing in the wizard, and then the next, and then
Speaker 1: the next, and then the next and after forth. Something
Speaker 1: like forty minutes, he gets to the final step in
Speaker 1: the wizard and the OK button or finish or start
Speaker 1: or whatever is disabled, and he can't figure out why.
Speaker 1: So he starts backtracking to see if he missed putting
Speaker 1: in something, and the next by the end of the talk,
Speaker 1: he was back at the beginning of the wizard and
Speaker 1: he could never actually figure out that the why he
Speaker 1: couldn't finish them with it. Yeah it was. It was sad,
Speaker 1: but you know, these things happened. That's why I don't
Speaker 1: like life coding that much. I've done it. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: has value. It has a wild value, that's for sure,
Speaker 1: and the audience is usually on your side, although sometimes
Speaker 1: it feels like they're rooting for you to fail. It's
Speaker 1: like watching a person walking on a high wire. But
Speaker 1: to be honest, I've decided that it's it's not my style.
Speaker 1: In most cases, I live.
Speaker 5: For the adrenaline, don't we allt it? And in regards
Speaker 5: because it was a two part question, the other part
Speaker 5: was about preparing for your talk. I think there was
Speaker 5: a very big discussion a few weeks ago on that
Speaker 5: WhatsApp group regarding whether we do dry runs or not.
Speaker 5: I usually do just one before before the talk, one time,
Speaker 5: not before each conference that I give that up, but
Speaker 5: once for each presentation, and then before I give a
Speaker 5: specific presentation, I just run by the slides see if
Speaker 5: I remember vaguely everything that I want to do, live
Speaker 5: code thing very quickly, just to see that I actually
Speaker 5: remember still how to code in the era of AI,
Speaker 5: and that's pretty much it I go on stage and
Speaker 5: present the thing.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you're writing stuff down, so what do you
Speaker 1: want to add?
Speaker 3: And it really depends on the subject because I kind
Speaker 3: of feel like it builds itself, like the moment I
Speaker 3: start my research at some point and I'm trying to
Speaker 3: explain something to myself, Like for if anybody hasn't seen
Speaker 3: any of my talk, my style is mostly finding visualizations
Speaker 3: to to present, visualizing complex complex processes and.
Speaker 1: What a picture is worth a thousand words? That's your star? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: but is it diagrams or is it literally just pictures?
Speaker 3: No, it's all moving. You see the whole flow of
Speaker 3: what goes where. I think every time you taught me,
Speaker 3: I think how to use a keynote, you created a monster.
Speaker 2: So it's really it's really style dependent.
Speaker 3: I I highly appreciate visualizations for my own learning as well,
Speaker 3: so I try to explain that the flow visually as
Speaker 3: much as I can. I also recently discovered that I
Speaker 3: enjoy life coding, and so I recently gave recently gave
Speaker 3: a talk and it was so fun and natural.
Speaker 2: But it was.
Speaker 3: A subject I'm very, very fluent in, so I'm sure
Speaker 3: it has a lot a lot to do with that
Speaker 3: with that, but yeah, usually what I focus on is
Speaker 3: finding the most perfect visualization and analogies to present to
Speaker 3: explain very complicated subjects.
Speaker 1: I'm are you guys familiar with Toma Gabel?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I probably should have invited him as well as
Speaker 1: a good friend and great public speaker. His style, for example,
Speaker 1: is usually having this one big, amusing picture and like
Speaker 1: a word or two or a short sentence on each
Speaker 1: slide and Lessi's showing diagrams. So that's also a style
Speaker 1: that you can do. It's challenging because you do need
Speaker 1: to find pictures that actually convey the relevant meaning, and
Speaker 1: that's not always easy. It might be easier in this
Speaker 1: day and age of AI generated images, but you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not so sure.
Speaker 3: It sure is easier. And again, it really depends on
Speaker 3: what kind of talk is it.
Speaker 2: What are you talking about?
Speaker 3: Like I think there is and I find myself with
Speaker 3: a lot of visualizations is because I choose very very
Speaker 3: deep topics and then like breaking them down is visualization
Speaker 3: is a very easy way to break.
Speaker 2: Down these complex concepts.
Speaker 3: But if you're talking about like a feature that you
Speaker 3: didn't work or something that like the code the visualization
Speaker 3: or maybe you can even talk about it in human
Speaker 3: language and people can understand.
Speaker 2: Like there's no right answer.
Speaker 3: I think it's all very dependent on the context, how.
Speaker 1: About you, leiad.
Speaker 4: So I try to look at my talks when it's possible,
Speaker 4: as like a visual journey. So I'm more like on
Speaker 4: the side of entertainment, I try to tell a story,
Speaker 4: which means I'm trying to choose a theme for the
Speaker 4: well in the visual side that some sort of a
Speaker 4: theme and then have strong visuals that are really compelling
Speaker 4: and when I when I come to build the presentation.
Speaker 4: So my presentations are a really key part of my
Speaker 4: talk in my in my eyes, it's not something that
Speaker 4: accompanies me. It's it's the idea. So I'm trying to
Speaker 4: think of the one takeaway that I want people to
Speaker 4: take from from the entire talk, like the one sentence
Speaker 4: that people would describe but what this talk was about.
Speaker 4: That also helped me when I'm building the presentation to
Speaker 4: see that I still stick to that sentence and I
Speaker 4: didn't diverge. I try to identify the three takeaway points
Speaker 4: that I can divide my talk to to three. But
Speaker 4: these three three stages, especially if it's a technical talk,
Speaker 4: so you need to start with something light and then
Speaker 4: dive deeper and then come out with something like in
Speaker 4: the medium. And I give myself a key of three
Speaker 4: slides per minute, which I know it sounds a lot,
Speaker 4: but in my in my style, when I do a
Speaker 4: lot of animations and a lot of transition between slides,
Speaker 4: it actually makes sense. It's a good beverage. Three slides
Speaker 4: a minute. And also I try to allocate one hour
Speaker 4: for every minute of the of the like one hour
Speaker 4: of building every minute of the presentation.
Speaker 1: That's a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that's like that you know that that's
Speaker 4: the maximum. But I'm trying to build a really visual presentation.
Speaker 4: So so this is my style and this is what
Speaker 4: I enjoy building, and I also enjoyed being in the
Speaker 4: audience in in in those kind of talks.
Speaker 1: I have found that my question go for it.
Speaker 3: And I just wanted to ask you about the takeaways.
Speaker 3: Aren't they sometimes emergent from the process, like they always
Speaker 3: pretty fine?
Speaker 2: Like, oh no, I sometimes I find the message throughout working.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's a really good point, because you're right
Speaker 4: the emergent, but I try to keep them two three.
Speaker 4: So if I if I take a look back at
Speaker 4: my presentation and I see, oh I spoke about like
Speaker 4: five different topics, that's obviously a lot for an audience
Speaker 4: to to digest. So I try to minimize them into
Speaker 4: like three subhaders. Yeah, sometimes somes, I can think of
Speaker 4: them in advance. They always change. I always emergent, like
Speaker 4: you said, But all the time I try to keep
Speaker 4: it on like one sentence. If someone would go out
Speaker 4: of this this talk and someone asked him what was
Speaker 4: this talk about, and you'll say this one sentence, I
Speaker 4: wanted to be what I meant for it to be.
Speaker 1: I totally agree that tech talks should preferably have a
Speaker 1: city what's known as a cita, some sort of call
Speaker 1: to action, kind of like websites should have a certain
Speaker 1: call to action that means it's you know, some speakers
Speaker 1: can give talks that are just pure entertainment and maybe
Speaker 1: and the culture action is have a good time. I'm
Speaker 1: not there. There needs to be some takeaway out of this. Now,
Speaker 1: you're absolutely correct real that the takeaway can and often
Speaker 1: does evolve during the talk. But if I if coming
Speaker 1: into the talk, I don't have even a vague concept
Speaker 1: of what I want the audience to take away from
Speaker 1: the talk. That's a problem, that's in an indication that
Speaker 1: my conception of the topic is premature. Also, I have found,
Speaker 1: by the way, that my presentation style tends to change
Speaker 1: and vary. Sometimes I mix it up just for fun.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the topic demands a certain style of presentation rather
Speaker 1: than another. For example, yeah, sometimes i'm more or like
Speaker 1: I said, I go the I have done a couple
Speaker 1: of live coding talks because sometimes I intentionally want to
Speaker 1: show that a certain process is really easy to implement
Speaker 1: or straightforward to implement. That's usually when I will do
Speaker 1: a live coding session, because if it's complicated, there's not
Speaker 1: just not going to be enough time, or I'm going
Speaker 1: to rush through it if there's too much code on
Speaker 1: the screen. By the way, my number one tip for
Speaker 1: anybody creating a presentation is make your font as big
Speaker 1: as possible, and then make it bigger and and and
Speaker 1: then make it even bigger.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And if that means having less texts on the slide, good,
Speaker 1: have less texts on the slide, Have as little text
Speaker 1: on the slide as possible. That way I like to make.
Speaker 3: To say about that about like as little texts as possible.
Speaker 3: What I like to do is I like to write
Speaker 3: down the messages that I want to think, like the
Speaker 3: deepest thing I want some When I say a sentence
Speaker 3: and I want the audience to remember the sentence as
Speaker 3: I said it, I write it down.
Speaker 1: The worst thing you can do do is have a
Speaker 1: lot of text on the screen, because then what ends
Speaker 1: up is the audience reads the texts rather than listen
Speaker 1: to you, and it becomes a show and tell or
Speaker 1: a document rather than a presentation. By the way, one
Speaker 1: of the problems that I have with live coding is
Speaker 1: that in many cases that unless you can really distill
Speaker 1: the issue down, you might end up with too much
Speaker 1: code on the screen at once. And that's a challenge.
Speaker 4: Now to mention that your idea is full of a
Speaker 4: lot of other things that are not the code, so
Speaker 4: these are also distracting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then, well there are presentation modes in modern ideas.
Speaker 1: But still you're correct.
Speaker 3: I would even say that when you have a lot
Speaker 3: of text, not only that, the audience isn't isn't listening
Speaker 3: to you because they're reading You're actually it's a cognitive
Speaker 3: you're hurting them cognitively because they're suffering because somebody is
Speaker 3: speaking to them while they are reading something.
Speaker 4: And then you have two bad choices. You're either reading
Speaker 4: exactly what the text is and that way you're wasting
Speaker 4: their time because you're reading slower than they can read. Oh,
Speaker 4: you're trying to summarize what the text means. And then,
Speaker 4: like a real said, it's like two conflicting streams.
Speaker 1: Of the only time that I might have text like
Speaker 1: in the sort that I might kind of read text
Speaker 1: off the slide is when I'm reading out a definition
Speaker 1: of a thing if it's really important, or a quote
Speaker 1: if it's really you're absolutely correct, if it's really important
Speaker 1: for me to read a quote, and it needs to
Speaker 1: be a short quote or definition. And again it needs
Speaker 1: to be a short definition. And I literally said, and
Speaker 1: in the case of definitions, are literally organized over each
Speaker 1: word trying to remove it. And and only that's the
Speaker 1: only case, and usually there might be like one or
Speaker 1: maybe two slides like that, and that's it. The rest
Speaker 1: need to be bullets that I expand on. They're not
Speaker 1: intended to be read as as such. They're more is
Speaker 1: a reminder to me and to the audience after I
Speaker 1: said something, rather than the actual text of what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: By the way, small tip if you do have a
Speaker 4: sentence on the screen is to highlight one or two
Speaker 4: words that are the essence of this sentence and then
Speaker 4: everyone in the audience can just attach these words and understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just don't underline them, because then everybody will think
Speaker 1: there are links.
Speaker 4: Yeah they try to click there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, let's see like we have I think we're
Speaker 1: almost out of time, but so do you have so
Speaker 1: one kind of final question or I'll mix two questions
Speaker 1: together and you decide which one you want to answer.
Speaker 1: So one question is we kind of touched on that
Speaker 1: on the dry runs, is that how do you prepare
Speaker 1: for delivering a talk? And the second question, the final question,
Speaker 1: would be about the entertainment versus informative or specifically do
Speaker 1: you put jokes in your talk? So let's start with
Speaker 1: the first one. How do you prepare? Do you if
Speaker 1: you tell you mentioned that you do one dry run
Speaker 1: for a talk or at least whenever you significantly change
Speaker 1: a talk or introduce a new talk. How about lead Arielle,
Speaker 1: do you also do dry runs or not at all
Speaker 1: or multiple dry runs? How do you go about it?
Speaker 2: You want to go firstly, and I can.
Speaker 4: I think it's to do dry run, and if only
Speaker 4: for the sake of just to see that you're on
Speaker 4: time or at least exactly less and the time that
Speaker 4: you're given, because that's something that's really hard to estimate.
Speaker 4: When you're walking on a talk. You can feel like
Speaker 4: you're on time, but you always, first of all, on stage,
Speaker 4: you always speak slower than us. Then you think you're
Speaker 4: going to speak like it takes more time, and if
Speaker 4: you have ninety slides, there's no way to estimate how long.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's the reverse though. I remember speaking at a conference.
Speaker 1: I was after some speaker, so I was lazing out
Speaker 1: in the speaker's room looking at the clock. So, okay,
Speaker 1: I still have twenty minutes. And she finished like she
Speaker 1: finished a thirty minutes talk in ten minutes. So the
Speaker 1: host runs up to me and says, come down, come down,
Speaker 1: And it was.
Speaker 4: A dry run.
Speaker 1: Could have solved it, Dragon, could have solved it. But
Speaker 1: I totally agree. I actually, literally I did a dry
Speaker 1: run of a talk today, of a new talk that
Speaker 1: I'm giving it at the conference. And I did it
Speaker 1: precisely because I wanted to make sure that it actually
Speaker 1: fits into the loaded time and I was like two
Speaker 1: minutes too long something like that on a twenty something
Speaker 1: minute talk, So you know, I need to adjust it
Speaker 1: a little bit. But the other point was that during
Speaker 1: this dry run it I realized after when I got
Speaker 1: the feedback, it's important to get feedback from the people
Speaker 1: you give the dry run too, otherwise what's the point.
Speaker 1: And I realized that one of the things that I
Speaker 1: was trying to get across was not sufficiently clear, and
Speaker 1: I need to change one of my examples because of that.
Speaker 1: So I know how I'm going to change it based
Speaker 1: on the feedback that I got from that dry run.
Speaker 1: But I do that one dry run, not multiple dry run,
Speaker 1: and I will want to add one more thing. And
Speaker 1: that's my own personal tip, as it were for people
Speaker 1: listening to us. I don't I never try to memorize
Speaker 1: an entire talk. It just doesn't work. But I do
Speaker 1: write down and try to memorize my first two or
Speaker 1: three sentences because that way I can get up and running.
Speaker 1: I don't have to worry about coming on stage and
Speaker 1: go like, ugh, I'm stuck, I don't know what to say.
Speaker 1: I know what my first two or three sentences are
Speaker 1: going to be. I memorize those. Sometimes I kind of
Speaker 1: even riff on those, but I still at least know
Speaker 1: what I'm going to say, and from that point on
Speaker 1: it flows. Oh yeah, what about you.
Speaker 2: I'm a nerd.
Speaker 3: I do a lot of dry runs a lot, and
Speaker 3: I try to get as much feedback as I can,
Speaker 3: and because I really try to take advantage topics but
Speaker 3: to make them accessible, so even even for let's say
Speaker 3: less experienced developers, and I want to talk about something deep,
Speaker 3: so I try to also collect feedback from a variety
Speaker 3: of of of levels of developers. And that way, like
Speaker 3: when I do so many dry runs, I also like
Speaker 3: I collect feedback and I make sure I also feel
Speaker 3: like my talk is so complete.
Speaker 2: By the time I finished with.
Speaker 3: This like hard work process. And I also know that
Speaker 3: it's adaptable for I know wich levels it's adaptable for.
Speaker 3: And I never have to worry about time. I never
Speaker 3: have to worry about remembering. You can wake me up
Speaker 3: at three am, and I remember it because I've did
Speaker 3: it like five times before I got.
Speaker 1: Don't don't you sometimes feel like you're overdoing it, like
Speaker 1: too much of a good thing, as it were, overdoing it,
Speaker 1: like to like.
Speaker 2: Do the collect the feedback together.
Speaker 3: So like I would invite like you know, four or
Speaker 3: five friends and I do a dry run for like
Speaker 3: a few friends together, like I did with the.
Speaker 2: AD and I did with the Betel And.
Speaker 3: You're very welcome to I'm building a new talk, so
Speaker 3: you only add can come all of three of you. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you haven't heard this one as well. So I like
Speaker 3: to like collect a few people and then and then
Speaker 3: do it. But honestly, honestly, no, I feel like the
Speaker 3: hard work pays off.
Speaker 2: It obviously does pay off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it has this advantage like doing a lot of
Speaker 4: dry runs that when you get to the stage, you
Speaker 4: feel like you did all the hard work. Like I said,
Speaker 4: it's like now the fun part we can because you've
Speaker 4: run this talk. You did the hard part of running
Speaker 4: it fixing, you're running it fixing run and now you
Speaker 4: just have to have go on stage and have fun,
Speaker 4: which is a great feeling.
Speaker 3: So runs are like tests. That's that's that's what I'll
Speaker 3: call it. Dragons are tests. It's like having a lot
Speaker 3: of tests.
Speaker 5: Like different because because I think I think that it's
Speaker 5: anchored in the in in my conversational style of my talks.
Speaker 5: I think that every time I give the same talk,
Speaker 5: it's it's a completely different talk, like it has the
Speaker 5: same bullet points maybe, but I give the different jokes.
Speaker 5: I I say different things, different sentences I come with
Speaker 5: sometimes even different takeaway because my talks are mostly conversational,
Speaker 5: so dry running it again and again takes away from
Speaker 5: the conversational style because I don't want to memorize my points.
Speaker 5: I don't want to be accurate about what I say.
Speaker 5: I just want to, I don't know, talk about what
Speaker 5: I feel like talking about today. And this works for
Speaker 5: me specifically in the style of talks that I usually.
Speaker 2: Give the first half of the talk as well.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, so that's why I have just one sent
Speaker 5: on the screen and I don't know, and it's like
Speaker 5: for me, it's it's like a promptif I think about
Speaker 5: this one today. So this this is the way I
Speaker 5: prepare for my talks, just by not preparing much, just
Speaker 5: seeing that I have the overall understanding of time and
Speaker 5: that I can deliver it on time, that I know
Speaker 5: what I should do about my life coding, and if
Speaker 5: if everything else is all right, then yeah, I just
Speaker 5: go with it.
Speaker 1: I would just add though that this really changes with experience.
Speaker 1: When when you're an experienced speaker, it's much much easier
Speaker 1: to just get up and talk about the topic. And
Speaker 1: when you're a new speaker, like anything, like anything, practice
Speaker 1: makes perfect. You're never perfect, at least we aren't, but
Speaker 1: undoubtedly practice makes a significant difference.
Speaker 4: One point about timing, because that's the reason, one reason
Speaker 4: you do dry even if you don't memorize everything. I
Speaker 4: also don't like to memorize everything. You have to have
Speaker 4: endcores in the presentation, in the talk that you know, okay,
Speaker 4: after ten minutes, I should have gotten to this point
Speaker 4: and if I if I didn't, that means that I'm
Speaker 4: behind time or or ahead of time. So that's you
Speaker 4: have to have endcurse.
Speaker 1: In the interesting. I usually don't I look at the
Speaker 1: talk holistically. I don't try to find the anchor points
Speaker 1: in the talk interesting. Okay, So the last comment anything
Speaker 1: about jokes, yes or no entertainment for size content, I
Speaker 1: would say.
Speaker 4: I would say that, I mean there should be a
Speaker 4: wow moment in the talk, like preferably two in the
Speaker 4: I'm very much on the side of entertainment. But if not,
Speaker 4: there should be a moment. I mean, the most fun
Speaker 4: part is when people like take out the cameras, like
Speaker 4: the more cameras and just taking pictures of the of
Speaker 4: the slide or writing things down. So those are things
Speaker 4: that should be even if it's a fully informative talk,
Speaker 4: I think, and it's.
Speaker 1: Not always possible though. I think sometimes talks are just informative.
Speaker 3: I not.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know your talks, like you did this
Speaker 1: talk about putting three D objects in the real world,
Speaker 1: like the ar talk. That's a very well talk. The
Speaker 1: entire talk was a wow moment. People kept taking pictures.
Speaker 1: But you know, if I'm talking about a certain technical
Speaker 1: topic that's really like in like you kind of refer
Speaker 1: to it in the zeitgeist, then it's important and interesting
Speaker 1: and informative, But there is no wow.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Maybe I can stick an amusing thing into the side show,
Speaker 1: maybe I can't. What do I do about it?
Speaker 4: There's always a wow, even if it's a technological wow,
Speaker 4: even if it's like a huh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't have to be many a wow.
Speaker 1: It could be an h.
Speaker 5: Or Rica moment, but.
Speaker 2: It's not really the question.
Speaker 3: Like you you kind of asked about jokes, which I
Speaker 3: think are crucial because when people laugh they listen to
Speaker 3: you that creates engagement, Like jokes are actually necessary for engagement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree. It's also if you can find
Speaker 1: a funny slide that makes life even easier in that regard. So,
Speaker 1: for example, I in a particular talk that I gave
Speaker 1: a while back about web performance, I wanted to make
Speaker 1: a point that correlation and causation are not the same thing.
Speaker 1: So I found this amusing graph that shows a correlation
Speaker 1: between the usage of Internet Explorer and murder rate in
Speaker 1: the USA, and showed that as one decrease, so did
Speaker 1: the other. And that was an amusing side to put
Speaker 1: and I you know, it saved me the trouble of
Speaker 1: coming up with a natural joke. Uh. The important thing
Speaker 1: is you need to be amusing, but it's important to
Speaker 1: I don't know about you guys, but I'm not a
Speaker 1: stand up comic, so don't try to have it all jokes.
Speaker 1: Don't try to be too funny unless unless you do
Speaker 1: happen to be a comedian. I know some speak some
Speaker 1: techt speakers who are I'm not.
Speaker 5: I think, at least for me, I think jokes are
Speaker 5: like an integral part of my talk. But I never
Speaker 5: know whether job jokes are going to be because they're
Speaker 5: not Like I don't do enough knock jokes in my talks.
Speaker 5: I don't prepare the funny parts in advents. I just
Speaker 5: it's part of the conversational style of the talks that
Speaker 5: I just come up with stuff as I go, depending
Speaker 5: on what the previous sentence was. And usually that's how
Speaker 5: it works for me. Talks end up with laughs and
Speaker 5: there and they they do end up being funny, usually
Speaker 5: even when it's a dry talk about I don't know CSS.
Speaker 5: But the thing that I know to planning what is
Speaker 5: funny is funny in a way, yes, really joke, but
Speaker 5: nothing nothing that I plan in advance. But I end
Speaker 5: up actually being even complimented on the humor in the
Speaker 5: talk that wasn't even planned to begin with. So that's uh,
Speaker 5: that's the way I do it. I just talk and
Speaker 5: find out the funny thing or sometimes even after I
Speaker 5: say it, I realized it was funny, mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Before we anything to add, before we finish, before we
Speaker 1: wrap up, Uh, I have something, yeah, please do so.
Speaker 5: The one thing, and this is an important tip for
Speaker 5: for everybody speaking, because going on stage is super scary
Speaker 5: and it's it's frightening, and there's a lot going on,
Speaker 5: and it's easy to get a blackout. And when you
Speaker 5: do say something you don't intend to, or when you
Speaker 5: forget what you're going to say, it's easy to spiral
Speaker 5: down and just crash and have the entire talk or
Speaker 5: the entire resire talk just go to waste. And the
Speaker 5: one tape I found for good recover ability is realizing
Speaker 5: that the audience doesn't really know what you're going to say,
Speaker 5: they don't know the continuation of the talk, and just
Speaker 5: pause for a second, recollect, and continue with the next
Speaker 5: topic or whatever it is. And even if you made
Speaker 5: a mistake, you can either say, oh, that was incorrect
Speaker 5: and fix it. It's okay that you will, they will understand,
Speaker 5: or just skip ahead before it's fine. They don't know
Speaker 5: even what they missed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would. I totally agree. And I would also
Speaker 4: say that it's important to remember that you and the
Speaker 4: audience you have the same goal. I mean, the audience
Speaker 4: came to be entertained or to be tolt or to
Speaker 4: be They don't come to grill you. Both of you
Speaker 4: want you to succeed, to be able to give this
Speaker 4: talk so it's easier if you think about it like that.
Speaker 4: It's easier if you think about it. Oh, they're gonna
Speaker 4: they're gonna have so much fun. They're gonna they're gonna
Speaker 4: enjoy it.
Speaker 1: I totally agree with what you said. So the final
Speaker 1: thing before I let you all go two things. Actually,
Speaker 1: One is to give your contact information if people want
Speaker 1: to get in touch with you, talk to you about
Speaker 1: speak possible speaking engagement or ideas or whatever. And also
Speaker 1: if you can name one of your favorite conferences or
Speaker 1: one or two that throughout the years for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: or alternatively your least favorite conference for whatever reason. So
Speaker 1: who wants to go first?
Speaker 5: I will not rank them, because that's not that's not
Speaker 5: a nice thing to do, but I will say I
Speaker 5: will nominate one that was a noteworthy and this is
Speaker 5: one that Ariel and I went to last year in
Speaker 5: Hamburg and lead went there as as a conference goer,
Speaker 5: as an audience and one yes Ariel's plus one, and
Speaker 5: we went to KO Talks in Hamburg and that was
Speaker 5: that was fine. It was a really good conference, good
Speaker 5: party I heard. I didn't go to the party. I
Speaker 5: had to fly to the other conference on the same night.
Speaker 5: But Alongside that conference, there was a huge furry convention.
Speaker 5: So three thousand engineers, five thousand fairies. You cannot make
Speaker 5: this up. You cannot make this up.
Speaker 3: It was, it was.
Speaker 5: It was brilliant.
Speaker 2: They were laughing. I was scared.
Speaker 1: Well, you weren't wearing a costume, That's what it was. Okay.
Speaker 4: I can say that if someone who's listening is in
Speaker 4: the front end of JavaScript word React Something and Jazz Nation,
Speaker 4: those are two conferences that are very speaker friendly and
Speaker 4: they like to give really good experience. They're back to
Speaker 4: back one day React Something and afterwards.
Speaker 1: Jazz Nation and it's Amsterdam and it's Answer.
Speaker 4: Them, and they have the best speakers, like they have
Speaker 4: new speakers, but also the best speakers from the JavaScript community.
Speaker 4: So I truly recommend to always trying to submit to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The only downside with jazz Nation is that you
Speaker 1: until fairly late in the process you don't know whether
Speaker 1: you'll be invited to speak in person or online, which
Speaker 1: is a bummer. You submit, you get accepted, and then
Speaker 1: two weeks before the conference they tell you, yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's going to be online. Well two weeks probably, I
Speaker 1: don't think it was that not two weeks, but a
Speaker 1: month or two before the conference they tell you it's
Speaker 1: going to be online rather than in person, which is
Speaker 1: a bit of a bummer. And how about you area.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to speak next month in web Expo
Speaker 3: and drug I haven't been to the conference yet, but
Speaker 3: just so far from from the organization, I have to
Speaker 3: say that I'm in awe. Also on the web Expo,
Speaker 3: I'm going to speak.
Speaker 2: It's my first time attending to ab Expo conference.
Speaker 3: But the organizers have had like one on one with
Speaker 3: each and every one of the speakers. They group the
Speaker 3: speakers to to do dry runs and feedback to each others.
Speaker 3: You have like two full days of fun just for
Speaker 3: the speakers before the conference. Like they have like children
Speaker 3: activity in the conference, so people that have kids, can
Speaker 3: I come and enjoy it the full day. Like they
Speaker 3: really give such attend They give attention to every small detail.
Speaker 2: And I've yet to see such such.
Speaker 3: An organization that goes down to these levels. So I'm
Speaker 3: very excited to see how how would that how would
Speaker 3: WebEx booth feel like?
Speaker 2: I will let you guys know next month.
Speaker 1: I really speaking about conferences, I like I really liked
Speaker 1: the various JS conferences. I spoke at a couple and
Speaker 1: they were always very well organized and also very top
Speaker 1: note speakers and the people who are running it were
Speaker 1: very attentive to detail and very friendly. Also, i'll give
Speaker 1: to you another one is unfortunately on hiatus. I think
Speaker 1: it was Front and Zurich, which was also very well organized,
Speaker 1: very friendly, and gave a stipend to every speaker, which
Speaker 1: was unexpected. They say, hey, now take this money, which
Speaker 1: was really nice of them to do. And also this
Speaker 1: a conference which is no longer active. I mentioned O'Riley Fluent,
Speaker 1: so I was actually supposed at one Riley Fluent. I
Speaker 1: gave a workshop. So you know, you think, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: going to give a workshop. How many people will participate
Speaker 1: in a workshop? Ten people, twenty people? Can you guess
Speaker 1: how many people were in my workshop?
Speaker 2: Oh? No, oh, no, fifty?
Speaker 1: Over two hundred in a workshop.
Speaker 2: In a workshop, in a workshop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, giving a workshop for two hundred and something people.
Speaker 1: That was interesting anyway, sounds I actually worked out in
Speaker 1: the end, But they were lucky because my workshop was
Speaker 1: structured in such a way that I basically the whole
Speaker 1: concept was people opening the chrome dev tools and writing
Speaker 1: things into the console. So that's something I could do
Speaker 1: to a large group of people. If it had been
Speaker 1: something like do this and that and vis code and
Speaker 1: get and I don't know what, that would never have flown.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was kind of shocked. I walked into this huge
Speaker 1: auditorium and they were like a huge number of people.
Speaker 1: This is the workshop anyway. Yeah, it was really weird. Anyway,
Speaker 1: thank you. So you forgot to give your contact information?
Speaker 1: How do people reach out in contact you? Accept real
Speaker 1: for some reason doesn't want to be contacted.
Speaker 3: You can contact me truly and just rightly, and on Twitter.
Speaker 1: So you're LinkedIn though, right I have LinkedIn?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah for now, so for me obviously, you can
Speaker 4: always DM on Twitter. It's lead yousef on Twitter and
Speaker 4: LinkedIn and feel free to ask questions, give comments anythink
Speaker 4: I'm open?
Speaker 5: How about you of your tell Yeah, I'm not very
Speaker 5: active on Twitter. You can already you can always find
Speaker 5: me there, but I'm not very active. It's abitar l
Speaker 5: e v y A t A r E L. And
Speaker 5: the rest of my contact details are on my website
Speaker 5: elus dot com, so e A l U s h
Speaker 5: dot com. Most of it is there, I think.
Speaker 1: Okay, guys, thank you very much for participating. I think
Speaker 1: this was really interesting and more importantly informative, like we
Speaker 1: like our conference talks to be. So thank you all,
Speaker 1: and thank you to our audience for listening in. And
Speaker 1: that's it. Bye bye bye, thank you,