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