 Let's talk about our sponsors. Confidant, most of us have already had your food. And they're sponsored by Quantcast. Quantcast is a... Thank you, Quantcast! Thank you, Quantcast, for sponsoring something that's not pizza, something that's healthy. Yeah, so Quantcast is, if you don't know, it's a big data company that happens to be in an advertising space. They offer products like a free audience measurement tool which gives website owners of their traffic and audience demographic data. And they also offer this product that does real-time programmatic advertising on the internet. So I'll just give you an idea, like the peak transaction per second. They're handling, currently is at two million transaction per second. How do I know that? Because I work for them. I just checked the data just today. So that's the number that we're handling at the moment. So visit Quantcast.com if you want to learn more about the product or Quantcast.com slash jobs if you're interested in working with Quantcast. Next. Thank you, JSConf Asia. And now, we'll talk about... What do you think? Well, okay, I'm largely unnecessary to talk much about it. It seems everybody's familiar with it already. Next January, we're gonna have three days of hopefully pretty awesome event. Two days at the Capital Theater and one day at the Shangri-La Rasa in Sentosa with 20 workshops. So every attendee will get to choose out of 20 workshops too to attend. And it's gonna range from CSS front-end over remote performance, over IoT, VR, AR, WebGL. It's gonna be a lot. So there should be something for everybody. And we have so many because we have so many people. It's gonna be expected about 400 to 500 attendees. And be sure there are gonna be bonfires in the evening because once we're on the beach already, we throw some cocktails and it's gonna be really nice. And then the last day, we are back at the Capital Theater for some look-back talks and audience talks. So if you're not being a speaker at the event, you can get still five minutes talk time on our main stage and talk to the audience whatever you wanna share about. It's called our lightning talk segment. And then we're gonna go into the keynote talks and end the day in a big after party. So that's the conference. The tickets are there. There's Singapore JS as a discount code for 20% off. Ticket prices increase monthly. So make sure if you are willing to get there, buy or we'll save you a bunch. All right, so and quickly, Coalition 8, Xinyi and her team have prepared this for us so that we have a nice venue for tonight and can run this workshop in privacy. Yeah, we can darken the windows and stuff, high-tech stuff here. And the view right here. And the great view too. So much appreciated there. If you're looking for co-working, talk to them as well. Thank you. Back to you. Agenda for today is already published on the website. We're at seven o'clock slightly late and then we're gonna start the panel after the introduction. And then we're gonna have a break, just mingle and chat. And then I will be giving out like pens and paper and then you can start like noting down your ideas or topics for the talk that you have in mind. If there is any, if not and talk to people, maybe ask them like, what are you interested in learning the next tech conference? So that's just an opportunity for you to do that. And then afterwards Thomas is gonna come up and show you some of the sample proposals that he's received as a conference organizer. And then we're gonna go into proposal writing. And in the end, we will have like round table discussion. I guess we can just like, we have around 30 people. So we'll bring into like three groups. And then each group will have one to two mentors. And then, you know, then we can just like, every one of us can just work on our own proposals. And then in the end, if you manage to finish something, because the proposal can be very short, you will see the samples later. And then if you finish something and you want to present and get some feedback, you're welcome to stand here, just read it out loud and see what people have to say. I got the slot free at the conference. If there's somebody proposing something really cool today, I'm happy to give that. Nice. There we go. Very generous. All right, let's go into introductions. So this is my time. Welcome again. Good job in making it here today. So this workshop is inspired by this thing called Global Diversity CFP Day. It's a mouseful. It's happening sometime in the future in February next year. But I'll talk more about that later. So, but the goal of this workshop and the other one is one of the same, which is to get you to become speakers on tech conferences. So, I'm your host. My name's Lu Wei. You can call me Wei if you want. I'm an engineer with Kwan-Kat. You already know that. So I'm gonna start us off with a story. Story goes back five years when I was at my first job. It was a pivotal lab, Singapore. Now it's known as pivotal. So it was my very first job, fresh out of college. And then it's half a year into this job, I was just like working at my desk. And this managing director of Singapore office, Carl Carl-Martin, he walked towards me. He's like, would you like to give a talk at Redout RubyConf? I'm like, talking to me? Really? Imagine someone who's worked for six months and then your boss asks you to give a talk. I'm like, I don't know. And then Carl's like, oh, think about it. And then just brainstorm ideas. And then next week we'll talk about it. We'll look through what topics you have in mind. Next week, during R01, I was like, I presented my, I think, in total three ideas. I thought really hard about them and then I only came up with three. And then he went through every one of them with me. And then he said, he helped me pick one mostly by asking me questions like, what are you gonna talk about in this one? Which one do you prefer and all that? So then in the end, we picked one which is on pair programming. After we picked one, then he's like, all right, now go home and write outlines for the talk. I'm like, okay, on home next week we work together on the outline. He helped me improve it. The week after we worked on the slides and he asked my colleague Tommy to help me gather pictures. We even took some pictures for my talk. And then just like that, after weeks and weeks of work, I eventually became a speaker at Red Out RubyConf which was then organized, used to organize. So yeah, so Red Out RubyConf is like the Ruby conference in Singapore. And then from there on, that was like my first conference talk. And then later on, I gave talks on RubyConf Taiwan, RubyConf China, JSConf Asia, and also Camp JS in Australia, Bitcoin conference in Beijing. And just like, I even give a guest lecture in SMU to graduate students. So yeah, so I've come a long way. And then the day that Peter Atkin, he approached me about this global diversity CFP day, and the idea of giving a workshop to help potential speakers. I thought back to the five years ago when my manager literally made me a speaker. So becoming a first time conference speaker is really hard work. And I know that, and nobody should be doing that alone. So that's why we're all here today. We wanna give you all the help that you need, and then we all wanna help each other because I'm still nervous just standing right in front of you and talking about this. So we all have room for improvement. So this is what we're gonna do here, all right? Without further ado, let's invite our panelists up here. And then we're gonna discuss. All right, where are my questions? All right, so first thing first, let's do a roundup introduction. I've always started with ladies. You can also question like who are you, what do you do, and then you'll order your past speaking experiences. Okay, my name is Huijing. I run Talk CSS, if you've ever showed up. I... I have cookies. Sometimes. I kind of work for this company called WeSmoot Labs, and I'm just, I do front-end stuff, basically. Yeah, I strong-arm people to be speakers at my meet-up because nobody wants to speak. Next. My name is Chen Mai. I run a couple of meet-ups in Singapore, namely Hackware and Papers We Left, which we're just polite to speak at. I've spoken at a few conferences. Mostly did workshops. I think I did a lot more workshops than I did conferences. But I've spoken at a webinar conference. So I do mostly audio stuff. That's sort of really my passion. But I'm generally involved in random geeky stuff, geek camp, and whatnot, you know, in there. My name is Winston. I used to run the Ruby Meetup in Singapore and read out RubyConf for four years. So I think I also started speaking at conferences at the same rate.rubyconf. That was the year that I wasn't the organizer. Yeah. And I still remember ways of pair programming talk. So after that, you know, I've been speaking at other conferences as well in Taiwan, in Japan, and even at the meet-ups. Like, I'll always be the filler if no one... He's giving me a talk. Like, hey, anyone's talking, okay, no, okay, we'll have a talk and things like that. But I've got things that are getting better for the Ruby Meetups right now. We no longer have to do filler talks. Yeah. So that's what I do. Hi, guys. My name is Gabe Hollamby. I manage two software development teams of the company called Spire. We make satellites, and we do interesting things with data we collect in space. I've been a software engineer for about, I don't know, 15, 16 years. And I have spoken at a few conferences. In fact, the red dot RubyConf, that way in Winston spoke at the first one, was I believe I think it was my first official conference. Also, it was a really magical year. It might be a theme going on here. Was it also the first red dot RubyConf? No, second one. But I think it really was a magical year, and a lot of really great people met. I met a lot of great people that year, and that kind of brought me to Singapore a year later. I've also spoken at a few other conferences, including JSConf Asia here in Singapore, and also JSConf in Scotland, ScotlandJS. Diversity in the tech community is something that's important to me that I'm passionate about. So I really think that, I've said this before on another panel, but maybe this is like my mantra, but the last thing we need is like a lot of more white guys speaking about shit at tech conferences. So that's, you know, whatever we can do to get more voices into the room, the better, and our community is much better for it. So I want to encourage everybody here, even if you're a white guy, but especially if you're not, to really go the distance, get a little bit uncomfortable. That's how growth happens, and we're here to support you in that. And one thing is that, on that point, because I've been running the RubyConf for four years, right? Whenever we do CFPs, actually the number of submissions from people who are here in Singapore is quite disappointing, right? So it's very difficult to... I mean, we want to encourage local speakers as well. I'll get into that later too. Exactly. So that's why I think this is a great forum to encourage people to actually submit talks and be a speaker, be a local speaker. Yeah, precisely. And also speaking of Red Out RubyConf, that year being a magic year, that's also where I met my husband. Yeah, so that's another plus point to becoming a speaker, you know? So, alright. So I shared my experience about becoming a first-time speaker. So next up, I would love you all to share your experience of becoming a speaker at Tech Home Services. The first time. The very first time. Okay, I'll go. I think everybody else probably has more noble intentions than I did. The only reason that I think I started speaking is because I, as a Southeast Asian person, am too cheap to pay for confidence. It's on the record. I don't think you're the only one. I don't think you're the only one. I take one look at the price and I'm like, oh no. Oh no. So at first I was like, can I volunteer? I can carry heavy or cash, right? So I volunteered for some agile conference before that was great. Then you just stand in the back and then you listen to talks for free. But the actual speaking-speaking stuff was actually again, too cheap to pay for a conference ticket. Got to know Thomas and Thomas needed a host for CSSCon 2015. I was like, I'll do it. I was like, yeah, sure. So I did that, which was great because you get first-row seats. I think you have talked to everyone. Yeah, and I don't know. For me, hosting is much less stressful than speaking because, number one, nobody remembers the host. Nobody cares who you are. Number two, you get access to all the speakers. So all you do is you just go out with them like, so I'm the host for the conference. How do I pronounce your name? And that's it. Then you get to pick everybody's brain. So that was fun. Then I actually did a proper talk the next year, CSSCon. But after that, I think more I submit the one proposal that I got accepted was for a conference in Russia but my first full-length talk because the one I gave at CSSCon was 15 minutes. Full-length talk was actually this year at WebCon in Hong Kong and this was not a CFP the organizer actually reached out to me. It might be, I think, just connections from maybe, I don't know, Thomas and friends or whatever. It's just out of the blue she's like, sure, why not? We'll pay for the flight and I'm there! So that was actually the first full-length 40-minute talk that I gave in Hong Kong. It was quite fun. Sadly it wasn't scripted. Yes. I'll give another version of it at next year's JSConf. So that's the first. Of course JSConf is next year it's in January. It's tricky. Your turn. Very similar, like I was saying I don't think the cheap thing is very common. Great Mike Ching does everywhere. I used to help out with a lot of AV stuff. That was my way into conferences so I helped out Thomas with a lot of the AV stuff in the first couple of JSConfs. I was the previous AV guy. And the reason, Mike's so much better than me so he's still there and he's doing so much better job than me. I got kicked out. I did that for Geekcamp I did that for a bunch of conferences. That's how I got into the whole thing and then it was always stuff with the body or why don't you talk about this or you know it's very similar I think that the whole cheap thing comes in very important but I think what's another thing that I want to share is a lot earlier when I was in school or in university I was very very nervous as a speaker and I was very, I would be the kid who if he just like oh you know why don't you tell me what happened to you yesterday or what you do on the weekend and it took me a lot of time to get over it to be able to be comfortable to come sort of sit here so it was a long journey and it took me a while to even if I was comfortable doing AV and what not for conferences to be up here and speak and you know tell people my ideas and what I was doing or some cool stuff I was working on so it was quite a while before I think my first talk was probably at a Geekcamp that I did about it was probably about you. So why did you choose Geekcamp? Because it was it was very accessible I guess that's the thing it wasn't much pressure on things it was you know a bunch of friends that was doing things I think the timing was also right in the stuff that I wanted to do and how I had prepared with and in the time for the CFP for the conference and I was doing, I think I was also doing an academic conference around the same time so it was very similar content and I did one more more for people like public consumption one for more that can be consumption at the same time. Cool, cool. I guess what you two have in common it kind of like slowly worked your way into the conference like at first you were really a speaker. I think it's good because once you know the community you know the people around it you feel a lot less like scared about going up because you know the most a lot of the people you're kind of comfortable. And also you know how the old landscape works like you know where they come people, speakers, emcees whatever so it helps a lot. So for me I mean at that time I was already speaking at you know at the Ruby Meetups so then the first Red Dot RubyConf came about I was really inspired by all the speakers they were like wow so nice you know being on stage with Max the creator of Ruby and so next year you know the following year Red Dot RubyConf was going to be organized again and I'm like wow the bar is going to get higher and higher I better be a speaker now it's not I might never be a speaker anymore because the bar is just going to go up standards are going to go up so I'm like okay I better do it this year so I just forced myself to come up with a topic that hopefully is interesting enough and try and go for it that's my story My story is a little bit similar to Winston's and what Chi-mei was saying about kind of getting comfortable with the community first so I used to live in New York and I don't think I ever spoke at any of the tech like programming meetups I used to go to in New York but then I moved to Sydney, Australia and I said okay I'm going to the Ruby meetup and I said the first meetup I'm going to I'm going to offer to give a talk just as a way to force myself to I guess get to know people at the meetup more and not just be like some guy in the corner with a beer who doesn't know anybody I was like no I'm just going to give a talk that way I'll meet people and I did and you know so at that point even people came up to me afterwards and gave I was really impressed how it was your first time at the meetup you know you just moved to Sydney and you said I'm giving a talk that made me stick out so it was a great way for me to inject myself into a community and sort of make friends when I didn't know anyone and it also kind of gave me the confidence to continue staying as part of that community and Ruby community in Australia is amazing so over the years I went to a bunch of they call them Rails camps basically just a bunch of programmers that get together at summer camps without internet with your laptops and sometimes you're working sometimes you're playing games or just you know being social and it's amazing and so I gave like little kind of unconference sort of talks like panel discussions like this about different things I was passionate about and then I don't remember how I decided to submit a conference proposal to Red Dot Ruby but somehow I did I had earned enough I guess confidence by that point to think that was a good idea and I think also I was maybe lured by the siren song of a trip to Singapore so that I mean that certainly helped Did your company pay for it? I don't remember but I honestly don't remember if my company paid for it or not but it got me to Singapore and that was amazing too right so like I can say my speaking at that conference is what again I met so many amazing people at that conference and then ended up becoming the beginnings of my social network and what pulled me to Singapore a year later was I was looking for a new job and I remember thinking oh I met all those really cool people in Singapore let me reach out to them and so I actually was away I messaged way and on Twitter I was like hey you guys looking for anyone for programmers because you guys were really impressive and I really liked meeting all of you so another reason like you never know about where it's going to bring you in terms of you start you just inject yourself into a community of really great people so you should do it and the visibility that it provides by being a speaker versus just the attendees is totally different yeah yeah but Gabe brought up a very interesting point which is you know I'm really impressed you you showed up at the meetup like first time just give us give a talk I mean like weren't you afraid like because to me it's always like that fear is the worst for even getting started to write the proposal I'm like what if I'm not good enough what if my topic is just like shitty and nobody cares about it you know all that fear yeah like were you afraid this is not just a question for you it's like for the entire panel like how do you get over that fear so I was I was afraid in a sense especially because the thing I was talking about had nothing to do with Ruby but it was at a Ruby meetup so it was like tangentially ready because it was like this little web hacky thing I built it was a color picker back before you could use the web inspector in your dev tools to say I want to make this CSS rule have this color and you could click on it and like to drag color pick around I made a little JavaScript bookmark that would do that for you and I thought that was the bees knees and so I was just like well I made this tool I'll just show it to these people who maybe do some web stuff and maybe they'll think it's cool so I was nervous because I wasn't even sure the content was going to be super relevant to them but I you know I was like forget it whatever like they don't it's going to be a quick talk I'm not going to waste too much of the time if they didn't like it anyway but again also it was like sure I was afraid but I was less afraid of that than of like I guess what I want to say is I'm not an extrovert I'm you know being around a room full of people at the end of the day really does suck it out of me and I knew that if I was going to a meetup where I didn't know anyone my natural inclination would have been to be the guy with the beer in the corner maybe talking to somebody else maybe so it was a way of sort of short circuiting that part of my personality I know will do the opposite because that's what's going to get you talking to people so that you got to push your fear down and recognize that there are other ways to distract yourself yeah well I think sometimes yeah I mean I do feel the imposter syndrome but I guess what helps is just try to talk about things that you know you definitely know about alright things that you have built sharing your experience so if it comes you know from the bottom of your heart and from experience that you have done it before you're not just winging it through two nights of reading some tutorials somewhere I believe that you'll be fine and especially although you know I guess a lot of us are introverts but once you talk about technical stuff you know I'm sure you'll be able to blabber a lot more like even in interviews right I mean when I speak to candidates you do interviews you know candidates might be a little bit jittery but you start asking technical questions you can talk when they start to talk about things that they know about the script framework will be like that's it cannot stop one of the things that I always go back to and talk about getting nervous is I was involved a long time ago when I was in school in this group called Toastmaster they do a lot of public speaking training somebody there told me that this phrase is even the best speaker even the most prolific speakers in the world have butterflies in their stomach the difference between you and them is they just have enough practice and they know how to make them fly information the way they taught us was you should always I'm nervous right now I can't say it I mean I don't know about you guys but it's just after if you practice enough you know how to use that and use it to push your top forward to push your points forward to push your ideas forward rather than to sort of make it like make you collapse and not want to talk anymore it's something that comes with practice it's something that comes with the with a lot of you know trying out things there's another practice in front of people can you practice in front of a mirror but a lot of there's something that you don't have to be afraid of being nervous it's something that's very normal and everybody experiences all the time they're on stage so just embrace it and go forward with the thing that's something that I learned at Toastmasters and have really helped me a lot my background is I'm an athlete so I think what's slightly different is that for me you learn to ignore the audience I know it's not that it's a bit different if you're public speaking because like you are speaking to an audience but you learn not to let the audience affect you because when you are playing because I play basketball right when you're playing in the match you cannot let whatever the crowd is doing affect the task at hand whatever you're trying to do and when you're trying to give a talk your task at hand is to deliver the talk the best you can so I guess G-Mage right in that you no matter how much you practice just before you go on stage you'll be like once you start and I think this also comes back to my being an athlete is that at the end of the day you must have faith that the preparation you have done will deliver so this is in Chinese there's if you translate it to English it's 10 years work off stage for 10 minutes on stage right so as an athlete it's the same thing you train the whole year round and you play maybe like a two-week tournament 365 days for 14 days so you have to have faith in that 365 days so that's why for me when I do give a conference talk not a meet-up talk I guess I'm a bit more casual but for conference talk I feel that people are paying good money to come and see you talk you have to be very prepared like you have to be so prepared that even if you're nervous just before you go on stage the moment you start talking it's almost like muscle memory because you rehearsed it so many times that you can probably mumble it in your sleep that's why that's what I do as well because for me I think and actually I wrote a bit about this before I feel that as a speaker from Southeast Asia we don't see a lot of us in international conferences partly also because we live so far away I got rejected because I live too far away and they just realised oh she's like really far away and so we can't afford to fly you here sorry so that's that so when we do get a chance to stand on an international stage I think it's a harsh reality but you not only represent you you're not a white guy white guys can represent white guys can represent themselves individually but you as a Southeast Asian you are representing the entire group the entire group of us because people don't so much pressure it's not so much pressure but a responsibility it's not to overwhelm you but to keep at the back of your mind that you are representing more than yourself simply because you are a minority that's just the the harsh fact of life so it just goes back to just be so assured in your preparation that once you stand on stage I think after the first second slide and you get into it you'll just go away and I guess we can always start practising in local meetups because then that's what we do I think it's a great opportunity because I think the best thing about doing it in meetups is the audience and everybody around is so nice and they're always there to help you out even if you mess up, if you forget something if your demo doesn't work they're not going to hold it against you I think it's a perfect place to practice can I add something about talk prep too one of the people I look up to as a conference speaker and as a programmer she's written some great books she's given amazing conference talks I want to be Sandy when I grow up she is very vocal about the fact and she gives great talks she says I practice Sandy I'm sorry if I'm paraphrasing she says something like I practice 40 times before I give a talk and it shows but that is possible even somebody who I think is one of the best conference speakers I've seen she still practices every one of her talks a lot and she only gives like one talk a year she works on her talk all year you need to do that for your first talk but it's possible and even the best at what they do spend a lot of time preparing they can't just go on stage and wing it practice practice we're already getting into giving talks but before that the first thing to do is to actually write a proposal they call it CFP we write this proposal and send it to conference organizers like Thomas and Winston and they will look through it like yes, no, yes, no it's not only us right democratic totally more complicated so now I would like to pick your brains because some of you have written CFP some of you have seen a lot of CFP so what makes a good one what makes a bad one do you have any tips on how to write a good one Winston go first I think if you if you are able to quote a lot of your experience I think that's what a lot of people would love to hear at conferences versus if what you're talking about is something that people can google and find out in like 5 minutes so a lot of people are going to conferences to hear about experiences or even new R&D that you have done that people have never seen before that people are interested to know about new practices how you apply them new processes etc I think these are the things that would really stand out and so of course you should be writing a lot more descriptive text about what your talk is actually about and how you would benefit the audience who is going to be listening if you could if you already had samples of yourself speaking on youtube I think that would be a plus as well so it would be good for people to gauge whether you're an engaging speaker or whether you put people to sleep but at the same time I actually give a lot of priority to first time speakers so I feel that everyone is the first time everyone starts off being an experienced speaker etc so I always give benefit of doubt as well so long as I can see that in your CFP there's really a point that you're trying to drive across that would bring value to the audience then I think that would be a worthwhile thing to listen to so many good points there like pick topic that you're familiar with you have experience with mention that you're a first time speaker in a CFP links to your class conference talks and you have spoken before or even meetups some meetups are recorded by Michael meetups in Singapore you're covered we want to shout out engineers SG for giving all potential speakers good videos to some we just discuss just go to meetups, keep giving talks and pick the video that you think is the best and send it to the conference papers we love also need speakers a suggestion would be listen to your own talk on engineers at SG or if Mike Cheng can't make it for some time for whatever reason record your own video and go look at your own talk because that will also give you an idea of how good you are whether you're putting people to sleep you will listen to yourself and you're like this is not working then you can improve on your speech and you can know where you're going off or where you can improve so I think that's a very good tip to hear your own voice but you get used to it you have to be mentally prepared when you watch your own soft talk and you just be like, is that me? is that my voice? oh my god getting used to your own voice it takes a long time for you to get comfortable listening to your own voice and actually you are the most judgmental person I feel like in an entire room if you are among the audience watching your own talk don't be too harsh on yourself I think that what goes through my head a lot when I'm thinking about if I want to submit a talk at a conference is oh, but you know I could just write a blog post about this or somebody else already wrote a blog post about this so what am I adding to the conversation what am I adding to the community everything I could possibly want to say about this it was already said so much better by this blog post right here okay, I think both perspectives are equally valid I think you could say, okay fine but everyone in this room has a voice a unique voice that nobody else has and there are some things that you are passionate about that if you speak about it it will draw my interest so much more than any blog post could because your personality is injected to it because as humans we are much more like receptive to information given face to face than we are reading some text on a screen it's just a fact so don't say yourself short and say oh it was already written better than I could ever say it you could say something about it in a way that is going to reach people in a different way in some ways even in a better way than was written on a post a lot of times storytelling your storytelling techniques as well so like some people do their slides very differently from how other people may do it even though the topic is similar and your delivery might just outclass the other person and I think another thing too like if you are nervous and you think maybe I am not good enough I am an authority this is sketch 22 how do you become a conference speaker where you are supposed to be an authority but you haven't done it yet so you can't be I think the I don't want to say self-deprecating style but like a style where like I like to say I don't know a lot about what I am talking about here where I will say you don't sell yourself short but you can admit I think I can connect to a room where I say I didn't used to understand this a long time ago I had no idea about any of the stuff I am about to talk to you about and I slowly learned it and let me share with you what I learned whatever that connects as humans too so you don't have to be an expert you don't have to feel like an expert there are people in the room that are just below where you are now in what you have learned and that is the best time for them to hear what you have to say because if I give a talk about some programming stuff that I can do that and only people with a certain amount of programming experience are going to grow up all that whereas if you talk about something technical that is relatively recently learned for you people who aren't there yet are really going to pick up on your message I want to add to that the things I unconsciously look for in conference talks and it took me quite some time to look over his authenticity is that person him or herself in what is being proposed and is it a bit daring does it come through that this is a step in one way or the other this slightly nervousness that people have before going on stage is an absolute good thing if it is not there you come over a slightly douchey sometimes as well and you can still see it although somebody can comfortably walk on stage you still get this feeling if there is a certain humility that is lacking this part needs to be there actually if you are looking a little nervous on stage the audience starts rooting for you they are like ok somebody is really trying something because they are not they are sitting in the audience in the dark somebody is trying something here if it goes through they are going to be even more excited for you that it all worked out so it is almost something that you want to look for but somebody is really not quite that comfortable yet and to add to that actually I heard everybody in the audience most people they show up with a good intention they want you to succeed they actually want to hear what you have to say so let them that is kind of like assuming the best intention of the audience as well also you asked for other specific tips and I thought about a person I am pulling it up here there is another woman in our community named Sarah May she is pretty vocal she has a lot of great tips about conference speaking and she wrote a tweet that I thought was really good and it says better talk proposals than three easy steps one put a verb in your title two don't mention yourself two A never say I and three don't use passive voice there is some concrete specific things for keeping in mind when you are writing the verb in text with your proposal now we are at the actual technicality of writing a proposal do you have any specific advice on how to even find a topic because I feel like in our daily work we are being asked to move this page and then we will go to the right by five pixels or write another terraform script to spin up this service it seems mundane how do I find interesting topic out of all these routine work that I do every day well I think writing block you have to start writing before you can start speaking because writing helps you sort of organize your thoughts which makes the transition into speaking much easier secret the reason why I started writing was because in my first job I knew I was probably going to leave the job and I was like I can't take the code away from me but this is my code so I just sort of wrote it as documentation for myself like how to do X and then that's how I because I know that I would want to know I won't be able to remember if I never wrote it down and I can't clone the code because it's not like not mine but after you start writing and you start realizing that even though the tasks that we do daily are mundane there will be some for example there are certain things that took you very long to fix those moments that can actually expand into a blog post you can just write about the process of which you solve this particular problem and things like that and then as you continue to write you realize there are certain topics that you really like and that's where the ideas will start coming in so for inspiration for speaking topics I feel start if you've never written a blog post before it doesn't have to be an essay it could be just a paragraph of how you fix something or you read an article it's interesting just short paragraphs eventually as you get used to writing it will expand itself and that's where you will start to get maybe this is something that could be expanded into a talk or something like that I think being authentic is what Thomas brought up if you're really something like what he said if you really like the topic if you're passionate about it thinking about it a lot reading people's posts I think that's a good topic to start off I think the other way to approach this is something Tim Oxley always talks about which is if you want to learn something that's a great topic to propose at a local meetup or whatever because then you will force yourself to go really deep into it and learn so that's the other way or something that you want to get yourself entrenched in so to me it was something web audio was something that was a new thing when I first started to get into the web community and I wanted to get into it so by doing talks at meetups or by doing talks or proposing papers at the academic conference that I went to I sort of forced myself to look at what I've been doing in web audio, what I've been trying to learn and see what I can actually extract from my experiences and see if I can make a talk out of it so it's another approach you could do as well if you're wanting a new topic if you don't know yet much about to propose for a conference or a meetup that's a good start but then I get like a million proposals about like I'm going to do a budget talk make it contextual to yourself that's right why you want to do it but where you want to take it what do you want to cross reference it in which context, which technologies people you want to connect to add something subjective to it and then you have a story and that's something exciting stories are very important I don't want the 180s education about like oh I'm doing Roojay for 7 years and I'm like I think your experience is very important what are the challenges you face how do you overcome them and what do you find good about it after all this hard work that you have done so far I think it's very important to bring it back to your personal experience because that's what people want to listen to that's why when people are working in companies like Google Facebook or whatever they say oh I'm going to talk about scalability then people go wow yeah I want to listen to it because I'm sure you have the skill I think so it's contextual so hopefully you know you can bring some of it across I think in terms of how do you come up with topics even in mundane tasks I feel that if you take a step back and look at it at every corner there's some story to be told and you can definitely craft something out of it it can be a 5 minute lightning talk as well maybe it's not a 30 minute thing but I'm sure you can inject some human to talk about why is it so funnily that this is so mundane what can you get out of this mundane experience I've seen folks giving talks about data migrations his job is basically doing data because his company bought a lot of other companies and he just have to do a lot of data migrations from company A to company B it's a mundane job he started to talk about his experience his challenges doing all these and injecting human into it so it became like a 5 minute talk that you could talk about and share with the audience about what he's doing that reminds me of a talk that assistant Chris give on JSConf Asia just complaining about web forms that was like I was saying this guy just complaining about his whole talk he was hilarious he probably learned something like how not to build forms so I still remember that talk how many talks can I remember from JSConf Asia like that year that's one of the few talks that I can remember so something that we haven't touched on on the panel yet that I think is important I think every tech conference needs some soft talks that aren't hardcore technical talks it can be things about emotional health in the industry I think that's a topic that all of us could always listen to and benefit from it could be a topic about your own experiences it could be quite uncomfortable but you can share experiences you've had that were not great and let the room know how we can all make the community better for you and people like you based on what's worked and what's not worked in your own experiences in the tech community it could be about positive that again doesn't have a direct thing to do with tech but like physical health too you could say we all sit at desks all day it sucks, we're dying, here's the research to prove it maybe that's not true but maybe it is there can be things that you are passionate about and that the room will totally connect with that are not code slides on the screen and it's damn refreshing to have talks like that at a conference too so don't limit what your talks have to be only about and you propose these authenticity and humility become even more important even more important my first talk was on pair programming it's nothing really to do with hard technical stuff and then that really takes a lot of the pressure off as well because what can I say that is wrong it's my personal experience you can't say that is not right so I think that's a very good start for just speaking on tech conferences there was a non-tech topic it's a good way to get in cool so actually we're running out of time but so far we only covered the proposal part and we barely touched the speaking part so the next question is do you have any tips and tricks on giving delivering a good talk how do you engage your audience do you need to prepare for your frequenting do you need to prepare for Q&A session and all that stuff the thing that helps me the most and even right now what helps me is there's always going to be at least one person in the room who you can look at and know that that person is going to make eye contact with you and nod along with you and just find those people in the room because you can connect to them and whenever you're nervous you can find them and they'll pull you back and make you feel secure so like that is a super tangible tip that you can always use the other one is every conference if you can find her she's an awesome audience I just need to spot her in the audience and I'm happy and I just need to look at her she makes the wife the other concrete tip I want to give you stage fright or whatever you want to call it my mom used to be an actress and she gave me this tip many years ago when you're standing on stage you're almost always standing right there's something you can do that will just help you focus that nobody else can see and what I'm doing right now is I'm pushing my big toe into the floor that just gives you something kind of like concrete to think about to do and say you want to fidget or whatever it's a fidgeting thing that you can do that nobody can see I don't know how it works but it does give you the brain something to focus on that's not being nervous so push your big toe into the floor I think it's important to find your own delivery presentation style I think it's good for you to look at a lot of videos of how other speakers are doing it because I think even the way you craft your slides would impact how you do your delivery as well some speakers like to have a lot more text on the slides and read or not read of it but still have a lot of text some speakers like to have just one word on the slide itself and level a lot of stuff about it some speakers like to have just picture and nothing else that's totally unrelated maybe so you need to find your delivery style I think firstly then craft your slides then after that prepare on how you'll be delivering that slide that you have prepared I think it's important to find what you prefer to do so there are a lot of speakers there's a lot of conference talks out there now go watch them and see who you connect with better which style you prefer and just keep on watching that specific speaker doing a bunch of other talks and see how they do their slides how they give their delivery and for a start just copy them so one of the things that I personally do is I write out my talks I physically write out my talks it's really painstaking and really annoying initially but once you get used to it so it does two important things one is it helps you know how long your talk is going to be I don't know about you guys but every time I start doing a talk I always overflow the time limit because I'm going to talk about this these three things you actually practice it and you're like oh this is like double the time writing it out really helps because it helps you to organize bits and you can say okay I want to remove I want to reduce five minutes okay this bit I'm going to remove it also helps you memorize your talk or at least memorize the flow of your talk having written it down something about writing that really helps you the Korean guy that couldn't speak English he came with this talk written down translated from Korean to English together with some friends he worked on this for hours and he decided a 30 minute talk it's on YouTube you can check it out fully in English and in the end he was like I'm sorry I can't take any questions because I actually was really English that guy was crazy so it works for me it may not work for everyone but it totally works for me it makes me way more comfortable with my talk than before and the other thing about pushing your toes in your feet I think breathing is super important breathing deeply before you get on the stage helps you deal with a lot of the butterflies in your stomach much better these two recent tips I do the same as Jinme because I will always ask how much time I have and the way I prepare my slides is that I'm actually it's the same as if I write my blog post so if anybody has ever read your blog post you realise that I write exactly the same way as I talk so in a sense the way I do my slides is like I'm giving the talk in my brain and then I'll just do the slides to fit what I'm trying to say so certainly I'll be spending two hours trying to find a picture of Beyonce that sort of thing not many of those it takes a while to find them but I do write it out and I actually like sometimes when I get stuck what I do is I will just go through the entire instead of I do it differently from other people so I don't finish it before I polish I polish it as I write because sometimes I get stuck I can't continue I'll just go to the top and just polish it so I actually literally just give the talk because when you give the talk out loud then you realise it doesn't flow and I thought it would have so usually that's what I do for conference talks I have everything out almost word for word so the thing about this is that you don't want to be reading off the script but if you can do it without people knowing that you're reading off the script that's great but I think it's important to practice with the slides when you transit slides you don't suddenly no awkward pause so you can only do that if you actually speak the talk out you don't have to speak in front of a person you just need to hear your own voice you hear yourself saying it and then you'll know that whether it flows or not you should try to practice as much as you can with the exact same slides you're going to be using and if you're doing any demos or props make sure it's exactly the same kind of environment, networking etc everything as you're going to do it because then you'll figure out all the issues that you may end up having and really it's important to build your confidence with the same props if you're using a clicker try to use the same clicker because it's really helpful to have all the stuff in the right place it's like deployment guys same environment every time same concept don't make slides that exactly have the same stuff that you're talking about it's slides are additional don't just read from it you can do that if it's really important but it's important that you can read of your slides but don't make that the general thing alright thank you all and now we're going to open the floor and then do you have any questions you would like to ask our panelists they might not answer though but I can always ask anything that's different from talking at a meetup apart from the size of the audience it's like I think you'll keep in mind it's easier to get feedback from the group afterwards right I feel like at a conference it's already game day to use the sport analogy but the meetup is like the game practice or like you're doing a pickup game somewhere for example and so I would say at a meetup I'm going to talk and I'll say I'm thinking guys I'm thinking about giving this talk at a conference so could you please afterwards I come up to me let me know your thoughts how can I improve this what made sense what didn't make sense it's very easy to get that at a meetup because we can just talk afterwards so that's one thing that's a very good point just like practice your conference talk on meetups there's one thing there was one of the original JSConf concepts JSConf used to be a pride itself meetups are generally flat floor right so like the people sitting here and the speaker is barely elevated and in the last row you barely see them and every JSConf used to be that way it's just that they have grown to a size where you don't find venues that can actually afford that and so stupidly enough we have to use a stage now so that everybody can see and we can actually do proper things but I think that's one of the main differences is this feels cozy because you're kind of in the same floor and the moment you're on a stage and you're looking at this hall of people of which 90% are unknown or more there's a whole different feeling of being judged that is the thing which is not true this feeling necessarily normally the audience is rooting for the speaker specifically if there's a certain humility in the presence of the speaker even when you just walk on stage but it's just if you actively think about it it becomes like oh my god all these people so that's the main difference really is just this unknown factor the other technical thing about being on stage is lights blind you and it startles you so the first time you go up you'll be startled and you just don't know what to do because it's like you walk in and suddenly you have all these lights and you're like and that could put you on the wrong foot to start and then once you start in the wrong foot you know like you make a mistake and you blame yourself even more actually from that a good thing because for the CSS you couldn't see the audience I can't see any of your judgmental I'm just talking to myself I'm having a grand old time by myself worst case is you most people are just on their laptops anyway the use of mics can be different as well because if you use handheld mic or a label mic so some people might not be when you seek at meetups maybe you don't use mics that often so some people don't and the action of holding a mic actually the one tip would be to go beforehand and try out the mic and make sure you know how it works because some mics are really bad you have to hold them really close or really far and having to do that in the middle of your speech is much more complicated and you get again you get distracted if you can do it at the beginning or before you know how to use it you know where to clip it it's just a rostrum that you have to tune up and down or I don't know what you have to do the good thing is if you have Tim May or if we're hosting you at the conference they're going to do all of that I'll add to that learn to use a microphone it's as simple as spending a few minutes playing with it it's a different experience to speaking with your mouth you must project I've got a microphone guys all the other guys can go some distance to fix that the speaker is not projecting properly I've always holding the microphone somewhere else then no you can also hold it too close and like almost eat the microphone that does not work either some people do that the Madonna mics are the best because you rarely think about it actually not true because if you move a lot they brush against your cheeks and then they wrestle as well once we start talking about audio don't get me started but if anybody wants to play with microphones and try it out before your speech come talk to me I have microphones to lend out for you to play with anyone questions how do you practice for Q&A? very good you actually don't ideally you have prepared for your topic it's a topic that you're really familiar with so you just take the questions as they come and if you do get a question that you can't answer just be honest and you say that's a very good question let me think about it I'll get back to you I'll get back to you later personally 101 most people are almost everybody is fine with it it's also absolutely okay to say no Q&A if it's your first talk and you're just happy to be through it everybody understands that's okay do it in a later stage and you have a bit more experience you know how to handle somebody who makes a stupid comment where that goes into areas where it shouldn't be pointing at all that's what I was going to say is you just remind yourself that there's a good chance I'm sorry this is a problem in conference sometimes there's a good chance that some person is going to get up and they don't even have a damn question they just want to show you that they're smart too they're smarter than you maybe you just have to be emotionally prepared for like that could happen and they're not even asking a question so you can just say figure out how you're going to respond in a situation like that it's very simple to just say that's really interesting thank you I hadn't thought about that before I'd love to talk about this more with you after something like that after your first talk just say fight me for questions afterwards these one-on-one conversations are the best that's true and that's a great way to actually connect with people at the conference too I have wanted to talk to speakers and like you talk about this all this elevated thing it's so easy when you go to a conference as an attendee to look at the speakers as other than you I don't know if these people might need to just come up to them and talk to them so that's a that's just not true I promise every speaker to conference is not there because I just want to talk at you and have that be a one-way street that's just not what conferences are about but if you say if you have questions please I'd love it if you come talk to me afterwards that's a great way to give people to break the social ice and have people in the audience who want to talk to you talk to you it's a beautiful thing of our kind of community conferences that we're primarily talking about because it's not like the typical business conference I don't know if you're in other industries where most of the talks are sales pitches and like so on and so on there this is all a different dynamic this is considering like a tech conference which typically are really quite honest community focused events just to set the context and also a sales pitch in fact is asking for people to talk to them looking for customers it's true but it has it's a very weird effect oh I have a tip about Q&A which is like sometimes I prepare my content and then I realize it's too much I can't fit everything in the talk that I want to talk about so I purposely took out some of the points and I'm like I'll see if they're paying attention if they're paying attention they would ask about that in Q&A and then they can answer it and I'm like I'm glad you asked do you prepare the extra slides at the back of your head I just prepared for this that's another trick you can't even tell someone in the audience to ask for the questions to provide something you couldn't fit it's a bit that's a simpler starting point just to make use of the meetups and present a lead up first Q&A conversation context is a great practice for doing the same thing so a lot of the advice mostly for first time speaker but let's say you are given a talk and you are finding that you are putting people asleep what can you do to improve that's a good question too absolutely I think that's a bit more of the soft side of speaking already so the advice that most of them already said is like you watch videos of other speakers my advice is not just watch tech speakers watch speakers in general who are really good personally I think the best public speaker I can think of is actually Michelle Obama the way it's you can observe how she carries the pace we should watch those things like you watch how people host the Oscars the host not the guys giving out the awards again but the actual host and the way they gesture the way they pace the talks sometimes there will be pauses the pauses sound very natural but they are actually not they are sort of factored in is to keep the pace of the talk and they will vary the cadence of their talk they will vary the tone they will emphasise certain words things like that people are doing veiled public speaking it's not like oh I'm presenting something so I think those talks Michelle Obama did a lot of talks they are 8 years worth of Michelle Obama you can search for Barack Obama does pretty good talks as well and those entertainment host people the way they talk is really different or stand up comedians stand up comedians also do a really good job and there are tricks that you can pick up from there there is a Trevor Noah bit actually he goes about how Barack Obama learned public speaking and it was like another guy who was training him it was Nelson Mandela it was like slower slower deeper voice slower until you eventually arrived at what sounded like Barack Obama because he is so slow he is so slow on breaks it's kind of true I think if you put people to sleep say less make your talk more concise on very few points you want to emphasise and just talk slower don't be afraid to make a one or two second break if you want to really emphasise something and have it stating that might just help to keep people there are a lot of technical speaking tips and tricks that you can look up and there are a lot of resources that you can prepare for this panel looking through all the resources I can share a bit more just a bunch of things you can read up online it's a lot of very technical like cadence and tone if you really want to get into that there is a lot of material out there there's a lot of videos out there you can look at and I think one other thing would be to practice your talk in front of some specific person, that's a great book recommend it to everybody it might be the best guy actually there's a couple of really good TED Talks about talking it's very complete and a bit scary sometimes because it is so complete but it is definitely the guide to go for actually just cutting as a TEDx organiser what we do, I'm not sure about tech conferences but we actually prepare speaker coaches and there are lots of them out there and it really pays to sometimes if you're giving a conference as a community conference a lot of them are happy to help just practice your talking they're not tech people they know how to go through your talking with your script to tell you okay you're getting too technical this is how you can rephrase things and a good speaker coach actually doesn't enforce like a style on you so you copy online because that's the right way to do it and lose your personality and a good speaker coach will help unearth kind of your style with you and then develop into something that is uniquely you that is authentic that's quite important the setup actually is going to repeat itself as well and we can if people are serious about improving their performance or being the first time speaker not only for conferences here but abroad like I'm personally very happy to help with applications or rehearsal or is on and I'm quite sure there are more people that you'll find so I think as a community offering that's something that I would like to maintain and I offer that to conference speakers conference anyway can I have one more quick thing we haven't talked about body language and I think that's really important right so like if you're giving a talk and there's just something about like your body if you look uncomfortable people are going to feel uncomfortable getting attention to you whereas if you say you know broader chest shoulders back stand up straight and straight doesn't come from your back it comes from your sternum just think about keeping your sternum up and that's all you need to do if you have good posture if you have comfortable but confident body language people will connect with you a lot more than if you're just a little sponge you know like what's like this is how I normally am right like I stand on my way to one leg like that's okay but it doesn't it doesn't work as well to conference where you really just want to be a stable presence for the group the general rule is good there are people that really pull it off like I was amazed with Cheong last year for example but yeah always stands awkwardly I will give it on another example I think it's great like a woman named Julia Evans she's brilliant she gives amazing talks that are just like her blog post too and she's a dream to watch because she's the total opposite of what I just said she's like super awkward all the time and I mean this is like a loving way and I think she'll agree like she says it herself but she goes on stage and you can send her discomfort but there's something about the way she does it where she's so herself about it that you connect to that and you're like yeah I feel that way too I love this refreshing personality who can be that uncomfortable dog to be on stage in a way that you just so it can work you need to be fully fully committed I think it's a personal style thing right if you have that personal style if you can draw it out if that works for you and the way you deliver your content you might have to adjust your speech to that but it could work usually three things I see today you don't go too deep in the conferences talk what you want to do is to spread an idea so that people would think about it and even talk to you about it you don't have to go deep down to the technical code level this is the thick line what does it do etc and then the second thing is your tone like don't go down don't always go down I think that puts people to sleep and then the third thing is actually humour I think we should inject humour into the talk and humour can be stand-up comedy humour or it can be self-deprecating humour easiest kind everybody loves cat memes I would go about that figure that out for yourself if you really feel like a funny person maybe not people that force themselves to be funny that's true too but it can be a good tool cool awesome so let's take a break and thank you all the panelists and