 Okay, hi. Thanks everyone for coming today. I will be speaking about speaking and talking about talking Specifically, I will be talking about speaking at red dot RubyConf 2017, which is coming in a few months My name is Gregor. I work for the company called Caligo Travel Solutions as the name suggests we build travel solutions Red dot RubyConf is an annual Ruby conference that is organized in Singapore. I think it will be 7th edition this year Every year it's organized around June and this year it will be the same It's the biggest conference in Southeast Asia when it comes to when it comes to Ruby and I encourage everyone to join this conference and I want all of you and I mean every single person here to not only attend this conference But also to submit a talk proposal and now you might be thinking why do I care about you? No, not really So first I want to have more proposals because it means more choice for the people who will be reviewing those proposals More choice means better quality which means better conference Which means better experience and I want to have good experience because I'm going to attend the conference Okay, so it's all very selfish and to help me have a good experience at the conference And to help yourself if you're going to attend you should absolutely submit the you should submit the proposal But before before we get to the to the details of how to submit and what to submit I Want to talk about why it's worth attending the conference So there are a few reasons that Basically, basically it's one reason the only reason to go to a technical conference is to meet people But why is it worth meeting people? So first because you learn more about the industry About the community of programmers You may get new ideas and inspirations and then you have a chance and it's a unique chance to talk to experienced programmers and experienced speakers It's one of the very few Chances to talk to Aaron Patterson or or even Mads who will be attending the conference this year So all of it all all these together. I think these are very valid reasons But it's it's it's really just one. It's it's to meet people and I know a few people who attend the conferences To see the presentations and if this is the reason if you want to go to a conference to see the presentations it's absolutely not worth it you will only spend your money and You can watch the same talks at home because everything will be recorded and it will be available for free and at home You can pause the presentation and go out of the room or you can speed it up or you can slow it down If you don't understand something So, yeah, at home you can watch all the talks you can watch them as many times as you want But at home you cannot ask questions So you cannot ask questions after representation you cannot come to the speaker and ask something you cannot discuss the topic with them Well, you can write them an email, right? But it's definitely not the same and you never know if they will respond if you approach them right after representation They are they are forced to respond at least to say hey, sorry not now Also, yeah, at home you cannot talk to speakers And this is wonderful opportunity to speak to many great programmers about The projects that you work on about the projects that they are working on about getting more involved in the community in the open source projects and Etc. So Now attending the conference is is just first step But for those of you who've been to a few conferences You know that the next step is is to become a speaker and this is Entirely different experience if you are a speaker and and if you're attending so The first reason especially for at least for me the first and the most important reason to attend the conference as a speaker Is to share my knowledge share my experience. I really like talking to other people about what I've learned and When when I present something then usually people approach me and they want to they want to explore the topic They want to discuss it. They want to argue and most importantly For them it's something new it's something something interesting that they want to learn more about and that gives me a lot a lot of satisfaction But there are more reasons to become a speaker. So the second one is that you get valuable experience Both as a speaker because you learn more about public speaking you get used to speaking on the stage You overcome the fear of the stage, which is which is very common but also as a programmer because when I when when I speak at the conference lots of people approach me and they They have some ideas. They have some thoughts about my presentation and they share it with me and and thanks to that I can learn from them The third reason is that networking becomes easier. This is especially true if you're introvert like me I when I when I attended my first conferences, I had I really struggled to talk to people at the conference I was like, you know just occupying my own corner in the room and that's it But when I started speaking people started approaching me and I felt like hey So if I'm speaking and everyone in the room can just approach me then if I'm not speaking I can just approach other speakers, right? And and that's how I how networking became way easier for me and In the end you can gain some recognition. Of course, it will not be fame like a pop star But I got three out of four my full-time jobs. Thanks to conferences. Thanks to meeting people at conferences and then contacting them Not I didn't get the job directly, but I get some contact that led me to that led me to the to the full-time job So now how to become a speaker at red dot rubicon step-by-step Once again, we have four steps first is to think and Then when you think about the topic about what you would like to share with others You need to prepare the abstract and the outline abstract and the outline are the pieces of text that you will later submit on the CFP dot red Rubicon dot com and then the last step after you submit everything is to wait for the results So now People often Struggle with the topics. They don't know what can I talk about and for me? This this goes to the the most the most important question when I think what can I talk about at the conference is What can I teach others? What have I done this year or in the past few months? What have I learned? What have I built that is? Interesting and that others can learn something from this from from it So the them them common common topics on the at least at the ruby conferences What you learn while working on some site project or also at work? However here you need to be careful because you need to discuss with your employer What exactly you can share what details of your work you can share in the public and what you cannot? Then another common topic is some Usages of ruby that are not very common. So of course Plenty of people use ruby on rails, but few people use ruby for natural language processing, which is interesting topic Then the third one is a bit more technical internals of ruby For example people sometimes speak about how garbage collection works in ruby or how ruby actually passes your program So if you are interested in internals of ruby you can learn something more you can read some books You can read the code and then you can share share whatever you learn with others And then another topic is a bit more high level for example, people speak about domain-driven development or how they How they approach how they adjust event sourcing to their work. So various approaches to development How do I improve the process of building software at my company or in my open source project, etc? Now to get some inspiration and ideas you can check the schedules of the other conferences There's plenty of ruby conferences all around the world And you can just check what people talk about there. So just to give you a few examples Three years ago at red dot ruby conf we had these are just four out of around 20 presentations I think one presentation was about fluendi, which is a software written ruby that is used to collect and and stream data Then Sayani shared Her tips about podcasting with Jekyll, which is not directly related to programming But she used Jekyll which is a software written in ruby another one Brandon from github told talked about What are the struggles and benefits or and how he deals with the with maintaining open source and and then I? Think it was Anil from India talked about the the solid principles in ruby how he uses them and how to how to achieve them then two years ago Laura who lives in Tokyo and works for a German company shared some lessons about how she works as a junior remote developer Now Juanito from Taiwan talked about emoji, which is well you think that it's not really technical But well actually emoji is interesting when it comes down to the utf-8 and how it works internally Then we had a ruby presentation, which is a bit more technical and another one was refinements which is a feature in ruby that was Introduced a few years ago, but he's still not very common and not very well understood And then last year we had another presentations One was about sense and sensibility Not very directly related to ruby another one was about speeding up your front end Which is based on the rails application Then play let's play ruby golf was about writing programs in as little characters as possible And another one was about blogging which was blogging about ruby not necessarily using ruby So these are just these are just some topics as you see some of them are very direct related to ruby some are Related to development and some are just about using technology in some way for for something entirely different So now once again you need to think about what you can teach others because this is the most important reason to speak They the conference is it's not about speakers It's about the attendees attendees go there to to learn something and as a speaker your goal is to make people interested In your presentation and and you want to allow them to learn something to gain something from this conference Now the second step is to prepare the abstract and outline So Title and abstract art are for audience This is something that will be visible on the website and on the conference schedule People will see people will see your name the title of your presentation and a short abstract in case of multi-track Conferences abstract is something that will convince people to go to your presentation over another Read that ruby con is a single track presentation So here you try to convince people to go to your presentation instead of staying outside and drinking coffee Now title and abstract mother little to the reviewers. This is something that is for for the broad audience and There is an outline is something that Proposal reviewers will will reach to the site whether to choose your presentation over over other presentations So abstract should be short. It's I think usually it's around 100 words or even shorter it's its goal is to make audience interested in your talk and It shouldn't reveal the content of your presentation So you should say what I will talk about or what I will teach you But you shouldn't say exactly what what you will say because well, that's the that's the goal of the presentation not the abstract While the outline should be more detailed so In the outline, you should exactly say what you're going to teach people. Let's say that you want to talk about the object-oriented design patterns. So in the abstract, you would say that in my presentation I will share the implementation details of less known design patterns and in the outline You should say I will talk about the bridge adapter and visitor pattern I will say which ones are useful in Ruby which ones are not useful something that will let The reviewers to decide if your presentation will be valuable for for for the audience So this one can be as long as you want Just please don't make it really long because well people will not finish reading it so now here the most important of the of the outline is To convince the reviewers that your presentation will be valuable for the audience So you need to think what will the people get from my talk? What is what is the outcome of my talk when people? When I finish my talk, what should what should people think? Will they learn something new or am I going to? to provoke them to think outside outside of the usual ways or do I want to present them a very I know very specific way to achieve something you need to think what audience will get from your talk Now the third step is to go to CFP.redotrubicom.com You sign there with github and you can add as many proposals as you want You can add them and later you can you can review them. So I always suggest to submit two free proposals Just because before you send before your talks get gets accepted before you actually give a talk on the stage You do not need to prepare everything so you can just think more high level about two three different topics that you find Interesting that you can explore That you have something interesting to say about and just submit more proposals because that gives you more chance And you never know what the reviewers find interesting So if you give them a bit more choice, then there is just higher chance that they will ask you to come and speak about one of the topics That you suggested After a few days you should come back and review your proposal Because you will always find some grammar mistakes or you will find something that okay. Actually. I don't want to say this thing I want to say something else So you should just write it a few days before the deadline and then come back and and review it after a few days I always find it very very helpful And now the first step is the easiest because you just wait Now there are two outcomes of this waiting the first one is that your talk might be accepted In which case you've got a lot of work to do Because you need to work on the very detailed content of your presentation Some people have these very detailed content before But then I know if you work on something very hard and then it doesn't get accepted to any conference It's kind of like wasted effort So so most of the people work on the content when when they're when their presentation is accepted Then you need to prepare the slides you should practice at home Especially if you haven't spoken at the conference before So you should I always recommend recording yourself This is very weird feeling when you record yourself and later watch it I always watch it like this because I just hate seeing myself on the screen, but that helps me a lot Because as you may notice now, I'm moving. I'm swinging like left to right left to right And I had no idea that I was doing that until I recorded myself. I was like, wow, that's weird So I always recommend to record yourself because then you notice for example that you're making a lot of breaks like Etc that you move that maybe you speak too fast Maybe you speak too slow. Maybe you've moved your hands a lot There are a lot of things that speakers do that distracts the audience So then you can then you can see it and the last the last tip is to practice at a local meetup. It really helps This meetup is usually around 50 to 80 people. The conference is around 300 people So you have a chance to speak in front of a smaller audience the audience that you know better as a practice before Before the bigger conference Now if your proposal was rejected the first step is not to cry They are only as many slots I don't know how many they are now like 10 slots or something like this and they will be probably 30 or up to 70 proposals. So Reviewers have to reject most of the proposals That's why you should submit your talk if you find this topic interesting. You should submit it to a few conferences There are a few ruby conferences in India. There is one in Philippines. There are two conferences in Taiwan Since last year there is a conference in Kuala Lumpur So you can just reuse this topic and submit it to a few conferences Even if you get accepted to more than one that's cool because it's always different a bit at least a bit different audience And you can ask organizers or you can ask your colleagues or friends what to improve You can ask organizers. Why was it rejected? Did you find it not interesting or was it simply not as good as as the other ones? Now now it's time for for questions from the audience The question number one is what to do if I'm too shy and this was the question asked in the audience But the person was too shy so I did here So if you're too shy, well Submitting a talk is not equal to talking So you don't need to be you know very extrovert and very confident to to submit a talk and then when it's accepted You kind of have no choice. So that's good So you should you should give it a try Public speaking helps a lot to overcome the shyness Very often people think like oh what happens if I I don't know if I say something wrong at the at the stage or If I confuse something etc. They are always afraid of the audience reaction What helped me was thinking that Nobody comes to the to the conference to boo at the speakers people come there to learn something So actually when you stay on the stage, everyone is interested in what you're going to say and If you if you feel that you really shy you should just start from giving a talk at the at the smaller meetups or You can submit lightning talk lightning talk is a seven minute presentation That is just like you know a shorter version of whatever you'd like to say. It's more. It's more brief It's shorter. So it's always easier easier to give it on the stage and lightning talks are kind of Fast-paced so there are no breaks between them. You just get on the stage. It's your seven minutes You're out of the stage and there is immediately next presentation So even if people are bored with your talk, they they quickly forget about it And that's the that's the second question. So should I give full talk or lightning talk? That depends how you feel if you feel confident that your topic is Broad enough to cover 25 minutes Then give a full talk if you think that you have just a brief idea of what you would like to say and It's a very short. You just want to say hey, I found this library. I find it interesting That's how I use it five minutes and then then you should just then you should just give a lightning talk which is equally interesting and As a lightning talk speaker at red dot ruby conf you also get the free admission to the conference And you're invited to the speakers dinner, which is a wonderful opportunity to talk to other speakers to meet them and to Be conference with them That's it from me. My name is Gregor. I work for Kaligo travel solutions I hope to see all of you in June at red dot ruby conf and And I hope that each of you will at least go to CFP dot red dot ruby coms.com and Consider some media dog. Thank you very much. Any questions? Oh deadline is a 15th of March. Yes midnight UTC time Any more questions no, okay, cool. Thanks