Some would say that the perfect blog article takes the reader on a journey on in which the development process looks like this:

As we enter December and 2022 draws to a close, so does a significant chapter in my working career—later this month I’ll be leaving Confluent and onto pastures new.

It’s nearly six years since I wrote a 'moving on' blog entry, and as well as sharing what I’ll be working on next (and why), I also want to reflect on how much I’ve benefited from my time at Confluent and particularly the people with whom I worked.

If you’ve ever been to a conference, particularly as a speaker whose submitted a paper that may or may not have been accepted, you might wonder quite how conferences choose the talks that get accepted.

I had the privilege of chairing the program committee for Current and Kafka Summit this year and curating the final program for both. Here’s a glimpse behind the curtains of how we built the program for Current 2022. It was originally posted as a thread on Twitter.

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Lightning talks are generally 5-10 minutes. As the name implies - they are quick!

A good lightning talk is not just your breakout talk condensed into a shorter time frame. You can’t simply deliver the same material faster, or the same material at a higher level, or the same material with a few bits left out

Building the program for any conference is not an easy task. There will always be a speaker disappointed that their talk didn’t get in—or perhaps an audience who are disappointed that a particular talk did get in. As the chair of the program committee for Current 22 one of the things that I’ve found really useful in building out the program this time round are the comments that the program committee left against submissions as they reviewed them.

There were some common patterns I saw, and I thought it would be useful to share these here. Perhaps you’re an aspiring conference speaker looking to understand what mistakes to avoid. Maybe you’re an existing speaker whose abstracts don’t get accepted as often as you’d like. Or perhaps you’re just curious as to what goes on behind the curtains :)

I’m convinced that a developer advocate can be effective remotely. As a profession, we’ve all spent two years figuring out how to do just that. Some of it worked out great. Some of it, less so.

I made the decision during COVID to stop travelling as part of my role as a developer advocate. In this article, I talk about my experience with different areas of advocacy done remotely.

I recently started writing an abstract for a conference later this year and realised that I’m not even sure if I want to do it. Not the conference—it’s a great one—but just the whole up on stage doing a talk thing. I can’t work out if this is just nerves from the amount of time off the stage, or something more fundamental to deal with.

Back in March 2020 the western world came to somewhat of a juddering halt, thanks to COVID-19. No-one knew then what would happen, but there was the impression that whilst the next few months were a write-off for sure, maybe things would pick up again later in the year.

It’s now early December 2020, and nothing is picking up any time soon. Summer provided a respite from the high levels of infection and mortality (in the UK at least), but then numbers spiked again in many places around the world and what was punted down the river back in March is being firmly punted yet again now.

Is a blog even a blog nowadays if it doesn’t include a "Here is my home office setup"?

Thanks to conferences all being online, and thus my talks being delivered from my study—and my habit of posting a #SpeakerSelfie each time I do a conference talk—I often get questions about my setup. Plus, I’m kinda pleased with it so I want to show it off too ;-)

I had the pleasure of presenting at DataEngBytes recently, and am delighted to share with you the 🗒️ slides, 👾 code, and 🎥 recording of my ✨brand new talk✨:

🤖Building a Telegram bot with Apache Kafka, Go, and ksqlDB

🦠COVID-19 has well and truly hit the tech scene this week. As well as being full of "WFH tips" for all the tech workers suddenly banished from their offices, my particular Twitter bubble is full of DevRel folk musing and debating about what this interruption means to our profession. For sure, in the short term, the Spring conference season is screwed— all the conferences are cancelled (or postponed).

But what about the future? No-one would ever want to take such a forced hiatus but what an excellent opportunity it is to take a step back and consider why we’re doing what we’re doing - and if we should go back to business as usual once things calm down.

Just over a year ago, I put together the crudely-titled "Quick Thoughts on Not Writing a Crap Abstract" after reviewing a few dozen conference abstracts. This time around I’ve had the honour of being on a conference programme committee and with it the pleasure of reading 250+ abstracts—from which I have some more snarky words of wisdom to impart on the matter.

I’ve been a full-time Developer Advocate for nearly 1.5 years now, and have learnt lots along the way. The stuff I’ve learnt about being an advocate I’ve written about elsewhere (here/here/here); today I want to write about something that’s just as important: staying sane and looking after yourself whilst on the road. This is also tangentially related to another of my favourite posts that I’ve written: Travelling for Work, with Kids at Home.

I’ve had a relaxing couple of weeks off work over the summer, and came back today to realise that I’ve got a fair bit of conference and meetup travel to wrap my head around for the next few months :)

If you’re interested in where I’ll be and want to come and say hi, hear about Kafka—or just grab a coffee or beer, herewith my itinerary as it currently stands.

This post is the companion to an earlier one that I wrote about conference abstracts. In the same way that the last one was inspired by reviewing a ton of abstracts and noticing a recurring pattern in my suggestions, so this one comes from reviewing a bunch of slide decks for a forthcoming conference. They all look like good talks, but in several cases these great talks are fighting to get out from underneath the deadening weight of slides.

Herewith follows my highly-opinionated, fairly-subjective, and extremely-terse advice and general suggestions for slide decks. You can also find relating ramblings in this recent post too. My friend and colleague Vik Gamov also wrote a good post on this same topic, and linked to a good video that I’d recommend you watch.

I’ve written quite a few talks over the years, but usually as a side-line to my day job. In my role as a Developer Advocate, talks are part of What I Do, and so I can dedicate more time to it. A lot of the talks I’ve done previously have evolved through numerous iterations, and with a new talk to deliver for the "Spring Season" of conferences, I thought it would be interesting to track what it took from concept to actual delivery.

I began travelling for my job when my first child was three months old. But don’t mistake correlation for causation…it wasn’t the broken nights' sleep that forced me onto the road, but an excellent job opportunity that seemed worth the risk. Nearly eight years later and I’m in a different job but still with a bunch of travel involved. How much I travel has varied. It’s tended to average around 30%, but has peaked at way more than that. I’ve worked in consultancy, business development, and as a developer advocate in that time.

I’ve reviewed a bunch of abstracts in the last couple of days, here are some common suggestions I made: