Jan 16, 2020

How to win [or at least not suck] at the conference abstract submission game

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. Remind me…how does this conference game work? Before we really get into it, let’s recap how this whole game works, because plenty of people are new to conference speaking.

Sep 19, 2019

Staying sane on the road as a Developer Advocate

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.

Sep 2, 2019

Where I’ll be on the road for the remainder of 2019

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.

Mar 19, 2019

Quick Thoughts on Not Making a Crap Slide Deck

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.

Mar 1, 2019

Preparing a New Talk

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.

Feb 9, 2019

Travelling for Work, with Kids at Home

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.

Dec 19, 2018

Quick Thoughts on Not Writing a Crap Abstract

I’ve reviewed a bunch of abstracts in the last couple of days, here are some common suggestions I made: No need to include your company name in the abstract text. Chances are I’ve not heard of your company, and even if I have, what does it add to my comprehension of your abstract and what you’re going to talk about? Possible exception would be the "hot" tech companies where people will see a talk just because it’s Netflix etc