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| Giving a Conference Talk |
Speaking at a tech conference or community meetup can be a great way to accelerate your career. It gives you a chance to share something you have learned and is a great way to challenge yourself technically. Speaking at a conference is also an opportunity to meet interesting people within the tech community.
Choose a Topic
Pick a topic that interests you! Topics that you are passionate about or about which you can tell a great story work best. Brainstorming can help narrow down your ideas to the ones that are truly great.
There are a lot of conferences that like having speakers who are earlier in their career. They bring a fresh perspective and are often working on things that are exciting.
Start Small
If you are interested in public speaking/giving a tech talk, you can start small. Many communities have meetup groups for a wide range of technologies. You could give a lightning talk (a short talk, usually 5 minutes) version of the talk you want to propose elsewhere.
Create an Outline
Organize your thoughts in a bulleted list. This will help you when you write your talk, and when you submit an abstract to a call for proposals (CFP).
Submit Proposal to Conferences
You can find conferences on websites such as PaperCall, through social media by following profiles like Call Back Women on twitter, or simply by using a search engine.
Most of the time, you can submit a proposal to multiple conferences, or you can submit multiple proposals to the same conference. If you do either, you increase your chance of being accepted. You should pay attention to what the conference organizers are looking for in submittals and edit your submittal to match.
Many conferences do an initial blind review, meaning that your identity is not revealed to the reviewers. When submitting to a conference with that practice, do not include any identifiable information in your submittal. Sometimes conferences will ask whether or not you are a first-time speaker, because they want to see new people at the podium.
It is not uncommon for a conference to have an acceptance rate of around 20%. Do not be discouraged if you don't get accepted the first time you submit a proposal. You can edit it and submit it to another conference.
Complete Presentation
When you are accepted to speak at a conference, it is time to finish writing your talk. Take your outline and fill in the gaps.
Create your slide deck and add speaker notes so you know what you are going to say for each slide. Be aware of any slide guidelines that the conference might have (aspect ratio, acceptable colors, font, font size, etc.) and stick to them.
Practice
Practice as much as you need to feel relaxed. You should time yourself giving the presentation a few different occasions to make sure that you are well within the time limit—you don't want to be cut off because your talk goes over time. Try your best to not be dependent on your notes/slides so that you can engage the audience by making eye contact as much as possible.
Enjoy the Conference
You may be nervous (that's okay!) but try to enjoy the other talks and events that the conference has to offer.
Give yourself plenty of time to be at your speaking location beforehand and bring a friend to see your talk if possible. Be aware that many conferences now record talks and prepare for this ahead of time. Take several deep breaths before you go on and try to have a nice time. If people can see that you are happy to be there, they will most likely be happy to hear what you have to say.