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.

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

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.