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.

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.

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

Dec 10, 2018

So how DO you make those cool diagrams?

I write and speak lots about Kafka, and get a fair few questions from this. The most common question is actually nothing to do with Kafka, but instead: How do you make those cool diagrams? So here’s a short, and longer, answer! Update July 2019 I’ve moved away from Paper -> read more here tl;dr An iOS app called Paper, from a company called FiftyThree So, how DO you make those cool diagrams?

Jun 20, 2018

Syntax highlighting code for presentation slides

So you’ve got a code sample you want to share in a presentation, but whilst it looks beautiful in your text-editor with syntax highlighting, it’s fugly in Keynote? You could screenshot it and paste the image into your slide, but you just know that you’ll want to change that code, and end up re-snapshotting it…what a PITA. Better to have a nicely syntax-highlighted code snippet that you can paste as formatted text into Keynote and amend from there as needed.