I went to a talk about talking by @wscsf where @caitie spoke about speaking. Twitter hosted. Their lobby is not the most meetup-friendly place, but I do like their elevators. There was also another meetup about automated testing in java being hosted at the same time, although of course the office was more than big enough for all. (We never even saw them once we got upstairs.)

~20+ people attended- some coming late, some leaving early.

There were three impromptu lightning talks before the main talk:

  • ruby examples from my github
  • “Hero” programmers (with lego slides!)
    • “I am a responsibility sponge”
    • “You get bitten by a radioactive spider and now theres a repo you have to take care of or people will be mad at you”
    • “If you’re not a hero, go find one, and save them”
  • wordcount with Apache Spark by @holdenkarau

Some interesting takeaways for me from the main talk:

  • Orleans “a framework that provides a straight-forward approach to building distributed high-scale computing applications” (used in Halo 4)
  • Saga pattern: failure management pattern, also described in the book SOA patterns
    • “A saga is a long lived transaction that can be broken up into a collection of sub-transactions that can be interleaved w/ other transactions. Each sub transaction in the saga has a compensating transaction which from a semantic point of view undoes actions of the sub transaction” source
  • craftcon budapest! (next week)
  • Tip for what to talk about: rip off talks that you wanted to be better! If you see a talk description that’s like “omg so cool!” and the talk is like “eh” then write your own version of that talk.
  • After your talk is accepted, if you don’t know yet
    • Ask how many hotel nights the conf covers. Expect the entire conference, + a day or weekend if it is a very long trip.
    • If the conf travel allocation is not enough for your flight, messsage them and see if they can help.
    • Do not feel bad about asking for-profit conferences for nice things (politely!)
    • Will talks be streamed / recorded? (Make sure to be clear on this if you have preferences)
  • If you are asked to fill “the woman/diversity speaker slot”
    • This can be insulting, of course
    • Take it if it is useful to you and you want to (travel, meeting other speakers, exposure)
    • If you can’t / don’t want to, recommend someone else if you feel like helping the conf out
  • I like the speaker’s style of fast speaking and deep technical content (in example presentation abstracts)
  • “I don’t know how speaker fees work, other than keynote slots…”
  • @callbackwomen and @techspeakdigest
  • Speaking at meetups is a good way to get started. Meetup organizers frequently want speakers, are less prepared to support speakers than full conferences, ymmv
  • summarize at the end of your talk so the audience knows when to clap
  • have a thank you slide, then a questions slide (with your twitter handle if you are willing to talk to people)
  • Preparing for a talk: “a month and a half of doing mostly this in my free time”
  • talk resources
  • What happens when people misuse/hog your Q&A time? “tech boy tantrums” loll
  • Submit a talk on something that you want to know more about. If it gets accepted, you will learn a lot! (Only if you have time to do good research)

Post-presentation presentations:

  • pitch deck from Sentri - home monitoring
  • Abstract for a talk on Apache Spark

There were a lot of people from the health industry for some reason (like ~25%!). Also, I am interested in talking more to the people who described themselves as “in civic tech” but not sure who they are.

“Well, I hate myself and these slides…”

I am not terribly excited about speaking, but I am decent at it and it is useful for career stuff (and I enjoy conferences)… mostly I attended this meetup 1. to see Twitter 2. for some brain variety 3. cool people