 All right, let's get started then. Welcome to Global Diversity CFP Day. I'm very impressed that you made it this hour on a Saturday morning. So first off, I would like to thank our sponsors. You're at Microsoft. They generously sponsored the venue, and then they've been like a long-time sponsor of various community events, including like Meetups and Singapore JS, if you don't know, for a long time was hosted here in Microsoft. Then in this very room, it was actually when Microsoft first hosted Singapore JS, and then the group outgrew, and then they moved us down to the auditorium, and then Singapore JS moved to PayPal, but now they're back at Microsoft for this month anyway. So thank you, Microsoft. Then later on, we'll have lunch for free, thanks to Python User Group Singapore, Pugs, and Elisha Tan. So Martin is from Python User Group. Do you want to talk about the group? Yeah, okay. I can say a few words. So good morning, everyone. So the Python User Group Singapore is a registered society, and we did that, you know, how long ago? Six, eight years, nine years probably. We did that mainly so that we can organize Python APEC so that we can have a bank account and can collect money from an investor or not from... LAUGHTER Yeah, and basically, the people who run the group is usually a small group of six to eight people or so, and we also organized monthly meetups, so we're able to meetup.com, Singapore Python User Group, actually the next meetup will be at the end of this month. I haven't put it up yet, but I found a venue already. So that's why we organized the meetups. We organized PyKons almost every year, and basically, for now, that's what we're doing. And the next Python is happening? The next Python is happening this year, May 31st, very soon. And the CFPs. We need CFPs. That's why I'm here today. Oh, yeah, I should probably explain what CFP is. It's called for proposal C, because you don't already know. So it's basically something that you write up about a talk you want to give and bust who you are to help the conference organizers to decide, okay, we want to bring you on and add the speaker or not. Is that right? Correct. Cool. And another lunch sponsor is an individual, Elisha Tan. She's a lady who runs Tech Ladies Meetup Group in Singapore. She's awesome. She forked out money from her own pocket to help us bring lunch for everybody. So thank you, Tugs and Elisha. Last sponsor, but not the least, is Engineer Sushi. So this is what happened last night. I was looking for their logo on the internet. And these are all what Google gives me. And this one, I cropped out of their previous recording. So I'm not sure which one is their real logo. But they're all the same. Oh, that's one more. They're all the same. They're awesome. They go around recording tech events happening in Singapore. Thank you, Michael. Michael, you want to say a few words about Engineer Saw SG? We're looking for volunteers. If you would like to help us, we would be glad to train you and teach you how to do this with us. Of course, it will be as complex as what I have now today, but it's close. It's close. So you will learn to operate all these cool equipments and learn their names. Like, you know, I probably just know that's a video camera. Those are mics. But you will learn more about that. So join engineers.sg. They're a great initiative. Yeah, also if you miss any engineering community-related events, just check engineers.sg. And chances are, they have it recorded there. Cool. Most importantly, thank you all. And then we'll come again. So the goal of today's workshop is straightforward. If you've never been a conference speaker before, we're going to make you one today. And if you have spoken at any conferences before, and today you're just going to work on your next conference proposal and stand on the stage again sometime. I'm your host. I'm Lou Wei. I thought you had a question. I've been an engineer for six years. I worked in, like, a web consultancy company. And then I built a cryptocurrency wallet. And then most recently, I was with Quantcast, which was an online advertising company for the last three years. So let me start you off with a story. My first job was at Pivotal Labs, Singapore. So six months into my first job out of college, my manager worked up to me and then said, do you want to give a talk at red.rubyconf? I was like, me? Really? What am I even going to talk about in front of 250 professionals? Remember, I was like a fresh grad. Only worked for six months. And my manager was like, don't worry about it. I'll help you. So he did. He helped me with brainstorming a talk topic while we went through a couple. And then he helped me settle down one. He even helped me take photos that I end up using in my slides. So just like that, I became a conference speaker at red.rubyconf 2012. And that was six years ago. Since then, I spoke at RubyConf Taiwan, RubyConf China, JSConf Asia, CampJS in Australia, Bitcoin conference in Beijing. And also, I was even invited as a guest lecturer in SMU. So all of this started with my manager approached me and asked me to become a conference speaker. So when Global Diversity CFE Day organizer Peter Atkin approached me with the idea of this workshop, I thought back to how my manager made me a conference speaker and how scary it was. It was hard to make up your mind to become a conference speaker and also put in all this work to make it happen. And nobody should really do it alone. So that's why we're all here. We're going to help each other. We're going to make this happen. So we have an excellent panel of past conference speakers and conference organizers today with us. And they're going to share with us their experiences as well as their advices in how to become a conference speaker. All right, welcome, Sayani, Ginny, Roland, and Martin. All right. Hey, sit in the middle. All right, I'll take the other seat then. It's definitely the cable here. Yeah. Every time I walk past it. Maybe that's the thing. Let's get this to you. All right, how about we start with introductions of who you are, which conferences you've spoken at, and then what kind of conference or meet-ups you organize here in Singapore? Hi, I'm Roland. My day job is as Chief Privacy Officer for an LX company. I work in Privacy Data Prediction and InfoSec. Outside of that, I'm a founding member of Hacker Space, an organizer of Force Asia, and various other many other tech community pieces. I don't remember when I first spoke at a conference. It's been too long. Yeah, and it's sort of public speaking has been part of what we've done since a fairly young age, including radio station stuff when I was about 15. So it was not ever that... It was never an obvious problem. It was more like, OK, I've got to write a proposal and just once we'll see a pee. Let's look at some other ones and see what they look like. Yeah, I was going to speak up. It was very quiet up there. Ah, a valid point, despite all the amazing noise. So, concretely, Linux from Australia and Force Asia, I specifically were all speaking out that are relevant to this, and of course, an organizer of Force Asia. Oh, wow. OK, hi, my name is Marcin. I came to Singapore eight years ago and I visited PyCon APEC. That was the PyCon APEC. And my mind was blown. It was my first conference ever. I mean, PyCon is really small in Singapore. It's 200 to 300 people, but for me, it was still really motivating and inspiring event. And I decided, OK, next year, I want to give a talk. So next year, I submitted a CFP and I luckily got selected and I gave my first talk. So that's how I got in. That was my first talking experience. And then after that, I decided, that giving a talk was a cool thing. Next year, I'm going to organize the whole conference. And I've been doing that ever since. So, yeah, helping hands are always needed. So if you really want to do this, you can do it immediately. There's always a shortage of conference organizers and help us. It's very easy to get into this. Personally, I run a web agency here in Singapore called the Lab Studio. So I build websites with Python and Django. Hence, I organize PyCon because I use Python every single day of my life since nine years now. More JavaScript these days because of ReactJS and stuff. Yeah, so that's what I do as my full-time job. So you skipped the part. Did the conference actually bring you to Singapore? You moved here because you were trying to talk? No, I came to Singapore and fell in love. And then I kind of had to settle here. You just love. Yeah, it was love. Meetups, as I said earlier, I organize the Python user group meetups every month. And I have also started a meetup called Singapore Django Nubs because I use Django very much. But that meetup, usually, I'm the only one who suggests talks. And if I don't have time to come up with new slides, then there will be no meetup for a long period. So we basically only have, like, two meetups per year currently. So if there are any Django developers in the room and you want to give a talk, just walk up to me. And it's definitely a good first experience. Give a talk at a meetup first and then give a talk at a conference. It's a nice testing ground. Hi, I'm Saini. I work in Embedded Linux on IoT gateways that connects to energy infrastructure at day job. I dabbled a lot with web technologies. That was not how I started my career 10 years ago. I came from electrical engineering. So that was like a career change. But I love the point that Roland made. Public speaking has been a big part of my, or rather a part of my life ever since I was young, whether my mom trained me in recitation competitions when you're four or five years old and or as a prefect, you know, when you have to like go and emcee on the stage. But then when I came into the web dev and the open source world, the tech conference was still slightly different. I mean, I was glad that I had the public speaking experience. And then of course, for a while, I was part of Toastmasters. So I think one thing I would love to share with all of you is how public speaking as a general life skill can be very useful for any individual, plus if you are a developer or a designer, tech person, bring tech conferences into your daily life. So I've been part of, after coming into the tech community, I've been part of many conferences. I've spoken in Europe, tech conferences or even in local conferences and emcees as well as event organizers. So yeah, I'm happy to share and say that I think public speaking is a great life skill. So whether it's one single card. Can I get rid of this mic? Is that easier? I'm sorry. No, that's fine. Okay. I'm sorry. Is it one of these two there? We are not using this game. We're not muted? Yeah, I don't know what's going on. So is it the two mics next to the desk now? Is it the one there? Yeah, is this the bottle one? Can I just get rid of this one? Yeah, maybe you can try that. Okay. On. See, this is why you need training for this stuff. Engineers.sg. Okay, that's not the on button. It's not there, it's not there. Oh, okay, it's not this one. All right. It seems to have gone, yes. It's gone, okay. Yeah, so make public speaking a life skill part of your life and speak at conferences, speak at meetups, speak as emcees, many opportunities, yeah. Cool. Thank you, Sae-Annie. Okay. Hi, everyone, I'm Ginny. In my day job, I work at Carousel, an engineering manager there. And my first speaking experience was 10 years ago. Long time. So I first spoke at force.my10yearsago, that was back in 2008. And how I got involved was one of the organizers actually approached me and said that, hey, you know, we want to look for more diverse people to talk on diverse topics. And at the time, they wanted to talk about Mac OS from, open source from a Mac OS perspective and back then, the Mac community was very small. It's very few people and I happened to be one of them and that was how I got invited and that was how I got started. In between 2008 to last year, I didn't do any conference talks, but I did quite a number of meetup talks. And last year, I decided to basically share a story, a very personal story about what happened to me the year before that and how accessibility, which has increasingly become a very pet topic for me, is important. And it was actually Sayani who actually helped me to get back into the speaking circuit last year. So, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I think I also have Sayani to thank for just one year. My name suddenly just came to like Thomas the GS Conferrages organises radar. Somehow someone nominated me to speak at that conference. So, you also apparently to speak at a conference, you also need a friend like Sayani. Yeah, secretly. She just like puts you out there. She's like, you go now, give a talk. So, hopefully we can help one another do that. Yeah, do that. So, if you get invited to speak, maybe it's Sayani. I have a reputation for that. The secret's out. So, great. So then, we all share like how we kind of got it started on our first conference talk. But then, like for me, it's always the fear. Like even today, when I was just standing on like, oh my God, am I really doing this, right? So like, this fear of, am I good enough? Like, how do you, you know, get over that and invite? I have much useful advice on that front. I've always been fairly outspoken. So, that's never a strong inhibitor. One thing that, in fact, Tim put it out. Sometimes I need to remember to keep my voice loud. And so, for that, if that's your concern, then I have a conflict tip, which is go and do it in a car park. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And find a field or a car park. And just to do your talk with that audience, screaming at the top of your lungs. Take this show. It gets much easier to do it, to sort of come back down to a conversational tone, but not mumbling in front of an audience. But yeah, that other half of the question, kind of. Well, still that, you know, like just kind of giving the talk out loud somewhere, right? And then just, it's a good start. Just somehow knowing there's nobody there listening or potentially someone hiding in that car. But, you know, I guess that's a good start. Fear. I guess it comes down to preparation. If you're prepared, you have nothing to fear. So when I give a talk, I train the talk two times at home. So yeah. And my talks are usually very hands-on. I have maybe, maybe I'm crazy. It's quite a risk because when you type, when you code live, everything can break, right? So, but I kind of like to show codes. And so I train the whole thing, right? Every slide just has a few words. So I need to speak on my own. I cannot read from the slide. And I prepare all the codes. Usually I can copy and paste the code from the slide into the terminal. And I try that two times. If it works two times in a row, then there's no bugs in the code. And I know that I can repeat this on the live audience. Live coding is hard. Yeah, it's hard, but it's, I think it's the most fun. But there are six speakers. The fear right at the event, you need training, I guess. Do it more, huh? I think I've given maybe 20 talks or so in my life and I still get my heartbeat goes up right before and I have to sit down and go to the toilet and then I have to drink and then breeze a little bit. But once you start talking, usually the fear disappears and you start focusing on the slides and the code and you don't even look at the people anymore. And then, I mean, if you're prepared and you know that what you're showing is somehow useful, you'll get through it easily. But the fear, I mean, maybe it's part of the fun. It's some adrenaline that gets released into your body and it's a kick that you can get and you just have to get used to it by doing it over and over again. There's no way to really shut it off. How many of you are fearful of public speaking? Put up your hands. It was like, you know, top list, 10 top lists of fears or something like that. Like public speaking was the first one. Yeah, your nightmares always used like in front of a group of people. Yeah, right? So it is normal. It is fear of public speaking is normal, but I would really emphasize what Martin said. Preparation and training. There is no substitute for it. That's what I would say that if you're here to submit for one particular conference, that's great. But make public speaking as part of your life whether it's like exercise, eating healthy, it's part of your life. The other thing I would say that in terms of training, pick smaller audiences like meetup groups. I think Singapore has such an amazing developer community with such friendly people like, you know, Roland Martin, who have organized meetups and conferences, a hacker spaces, go and speak there. That's a great training ground and get feedback from the audience. Join Toastmasters. Simple things such as pause fillers, you know, like notice how many of us even are sitting here and we say the word or you know. So I just said once, just last sentence. Toastmasters will help you pick up all these things. And lastly, I think it's the advice that I started giving recently last year is this, like when you are out there, there's a psychological bias called spotlight effect. You think that the whole world is looking at you and if there's one mistake, you know, they're gonna pin you down. Really, the world does not care that much. There are probably like 20 speakers in that conference. You made that one mistake, nobody cares. I know you will not think that way, but I've started telling people this, that make your topic much bigger than who you are. Let's say you created a website for say accessibility for eyes for blind people, like something that Gini did. The topic of blind people must be shared so much and this is so bigger than who I am or what I am that it should propel you to share that topic much bigger than your fear. So make that topic much bigger than who you are. Even though you're fearing, you're crushing, you're like, no, the world needs to hear this because there are people out there that will benefit. So make it bigger than you practice, make it bigger than you and make it part of your lifestyle. That's where the point, yeah. Yeah, I know I concur with pretty much what everyone has said. I think preparation is key. So when I was preparing for my talk, I basically, first I drafted, I did my slides and then I drafted what I'm actually going to say. And this is one thing that's really nice and you should actually put it as one of your arsenal. Most modern presentation software actually has presented slides, presented notes and presented mode when you actually present it on stage. So I actually wrote out my entire speech in the presenter notes for every slide just in case I get so nervous that I forget what I'm supposed to say. I have something to fall back. That doesn't look like I'm just reading from the screen, right? Oops, I think I missed the screen. You're your hand signals. Again? I might just be my computer. Yeah, I'll be coming. Yeah, continue. I'm sorry. And the thing is, like what Siany said also, you know, have somebody to practice with. In fact, I practiced with Siany. And I also concur with what she said, you know, make the talk bigger than what you are. In my case, my talk was actually about accessibility, like what she mentioned. And to me, as much as I was nervous, to me I felt like getting this message out was more important than how nervous I felt. So yeah, a lot of preparation and resented notes. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point. Preparation definitely, just like a lot of the nervousness comes from, oh, I'm not well prepared enough. And then having knowing that, okay, I've done all that I could, which is never, never enough. I guess the other thing also is, nervousness, there's two parts to nervousness for when you're giving a talk. One is when you're giving the talk itself. The second part is during the Q&A. Oh yeah, we're gonna get to Q&A later on. Because at start was like the very first stage of becoming a speaker. Cool. Oh yeah, and the content of the talk. Yes, like it's bigger than who we are, but it doesn't always have to be something as noble as accessibility. Like there's no topic that's too small. You can talk about standards, semicolons, which happened in the last Q&A. It's a long-world project because there are other beginners out there. Exactly. So there's always somebody out there that will need your topic. Exactly, so then you might think that's another thing that's like, you might think, oh, I'm a beginner myself. Who am I to give a talk, right? But the thing is that's what people can relate to. And that's what my manager told me. It's like, yes, you're new in this thing, but then there are many other people who are just like you, who want to hear from someone who just got started and then hear about their experience and all that. So it's valuable. Whatever you have to say, it's something that someone in this crowd is going to benefit from. You have to believe that. That is true. And that took me so long to learn that as well. Cool, so now let's talk about CFPs. Sounds like all of you have written CFPs. Written proposals. Proposals, all right. Yes, so I was, because my part of the question is like, if you've never written a CFP, how do you get out of it? Because that would be great if you don't have to write a CFP since we've all written CFPs. So do you have any advice on what makes a good CFP? Have you ever been rejected? And then what did you learn from that rejection? Can I take the second one, the one that you did not write a CFP? I did a few times, but maybe I'll go. Sure, go ahead. Okay, so this is the point of view where you do not give a CFP. So I will say my first international conference where I was invited to speak was never through a CFP. In fact, both the international conferences, I'm just way too lazy. But this is where I say that it's not just about one conference because I was doing a screencast before, which is in a way like public speaking, I used to share and do a video. A lot of viewers saw me sharing technical topics. And I also used to write technical topics. And I used to emcee in tech conferences. So there are other ways to get invited as a speaker either through your demos or other public speaking areas other than the traditional ways. So I don't know, like keep doing your... They really had to find, right? I mean, unless you are in fact a conference organizer. Yes, I guess, yeah. But I guess for me it was just a screencast that I used to do like religiously every week. And that's where people heard me speak and they were like, okay, I want you in a conference. So that's another way of... Yeah, I think I've heard from our last run of this workshop, right? I think with Huijing who mentioned that you have to like write. And she keeps a technical blog. So the people will get your name out there so that you'll get invited into conferences. That's definitely one way. Yeah, anything else? I think, well, after a run of conference there's a pretty extreme way to avoid writing proposals. I especially did it at, in my case, Fossager's scale. What makes a good proposal, however? So I am involved in... I'm not involved in the writing the CFP proposal but I'm involved in assessing the proposals that come back. And so there's really two things that I look for when I'm assessing a proposal. One is, what is this speaker proposing to speak about? This sounds like a self-evidently stupid question but a solid 10, 20% of proposals that we receive, it is not at all clear what the speaker is proposing to speak about. They're speaking about who they are. They're speaking about a project that they know some people who weren't on but haven't actually said what they're talking about. Just like, well, okay, that's a bit hard. And then the other is who the speaker is to be speaking about that topic. And I don't mean to get into sort of political correctness and sort of keeping it in the lane type stuff but more if you're gonna talk about a particular, let's say Fossager's scale, a particular open source project and you're not gonna tell the conference organizers in your proposal what your involvement in that project is. And in my case, where I was charging around in mountainous areas in Australia with limited connectivity and no mains power so running off battery when I had an hour to look at it, I was not in a position to do the background research. So I went through 20 or 30 proposals and at least five of them. I had, my feedback was, I can't work out who this person is and I haven't got the hour just because of the timeline issues to work out who this person is. So in most occasions where a conference organizer issues a CFP, they will ask you two things. One, what are you talking about? And two, who are you? You're Bio. And in that second piece, it is really important to help the organizers understand the connection between what you're talking about and who you are. If it's just, if this is interesting thing that you find interesting and you'd like to talk about that you have no particular contribution to that thing, then the conference organizer has a pile of proposals like, well, probably not. So those two things, this is to take us backwards. Work out what you're gonna talk about and whether it's as large as solving a problem for an entire class of people with a visual or auditory or other problem or whether it's a better cut at Hello World in Language X, which turns out not to be as obvious as it sounds. Understand what you're going to say to your audience. Communicate that clearly. In both you talk topic and in more detail in the abstract. And communicate who you are to be talking about that. That's not just to oppress the organizers. That's also the organizers are looking at it from the audience and point of view of the audience. It says, well, why will the audience enjoy this? And in Fosage's case, because we have anything up to 12 tracks, why will the audience choose to be in this room instead of the other adjacent rooms? That doesn't apply to all conferences, but it applies to July conferences. That's some interesting points. And actually, we do it a little bit different with PyCon, so I can show a different perspective on this now. So what you say, describe what you're talking about, obviously is the most important thing. We get a lot of proposals, which is something like, I don't know, because of the emergence of AI, it has shown that this and that is important and I want to speak about it. And I'm like, yeah, but are you going to use Python? This is a Python conference. I'm not right. If you don't even tell me what kind of Python software you are going to show us, I can't use you for a Python conference unless it's some kind of community talk or diversity talk or something like that. Lots of people leave it out. They don't tell us what packages are they using. Are they showing any code? This is important, so that as a subconference organizer, I can envision how is this talk going to work? Is it even possible to convey this much knowledge in 30 minutes only? Does this speaker maybe underestimate the time constraint or overestimate his own speaking abilities? So the topic should be relatively small, easy to understand, both for beginners and more advanced audiences. When you have a speaker, that is like some, I don't know, a rocket scientist who maybe is not a very good speaker but hyper intelligent. Maybe the topic is really, really interesting, but 90% of the people in the room will not understand anything that he says and will not enjoy the talk in the end, right? So for a conference, I mean, you go there for eight hours, you listen to one talk to the next talk to the next talk and you will fall asleep seriously. So you need somehow engaging speakers who are able to break down complex topics into simple terms, right? And demonstrate a little bit to keep people motivated. If you just have slides with hundreds of words on it and lots of facts and mathematical formulas, people will fall asleep. You need to show them something, right? So I like, this is what I like to see. Is there some practical use in the talk somehow? Is there at least a few lines of code, at least a little demo, five minutes at the end of the talk or something like that? So the next point, that who you are, of course for keynote speakers is important. The keynote speaker drives traffic to the conference, drives sponsors and everything. What are the keynote speakers? Oh, so the keynote speakers are usually people that we even pay for flight and accommodation. We fly them in from the US so they're like celebrities in the community which should encourage people to buy a conference ticket because, wow, I have a chance to talk to this person in real life. And I mean, that's also one of the great reasons why you should go to conferences. You can make really good connections and it's really, really inspiring and motivating for your career. Then because after the conference, you're suddenly friends with Daniel Greenfield on Twitter and you know, when you have a question, he remembers you from the conference and he will answer your questions when you have some jingle questions and so on and he propels your career forward. So it's important. It's really good to meet these people. But what I wanted to say is for this conference, for Picon APEC and May, we are actually doing the proposals anonymous so we don't know who the person is. So let me, sorry, please let me clarify. I didn't quite mean what is your prestigious status. Right, okay, yeah, I guess that. What I mean is, what is your, it doesn't matter if you're a junior developer who does nothing but clear low level UI bugs on this project and you've been doing that for three years, that's really important information. If you haven't given me anything at all about your connection with the thing you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Now, if I've got the hour, I'll do the research that happens and frequently. That was what I meant. I didn't mean names and. Yeah, okay, we should clear that up, right? So that the who you are part, you should put in prior speaking experiences when you can show that you've spoken in another conference, the conference organizers are awesome. This is one of the potential good ones that we shouldn't buy. If you have never spoken before, but you really want to, you should also mention that I have never spoken, but I'm willing to train. Maybe I will go to some meetups before the conference. Maybe you can help me out. You can write this into the CFP. You can say, I have no experience, but I think my talk is really good. Please help me out. I will personally give you a slot where maybe we will have five more months until the conference. I will invite you to be a speaker at one of our Python user group meetups and then you can train one smaller topic in front of a smaller audience first, right? Yeah, I think this is the thing, like conference organizers also don't want to see the same lineup of speakers like every year, right? So then they kind of like having first-time speakers. Yes, they might screw up, but they also, they're also very keen and then they prepare and then you can see them nervous and then people down there, they know, okay, so this conference is open to accepting more speakers. And so they will give you some leeway. So I guess, long story short, definitely describe exactly what you're gonna talk about in the talk and if you have prior speaking experiences or anything like that, put that into the who you are part. Also, if you are maintain of open source repositories or something like that, this is always something that organizers like to see. What about like links to past conference talk recordings? Is that, would you actually be following those links? Sure, we would, but then it totally defeats the purpose of having an anonymous CFP process, but we won't have to literally click at it, of course. There's usually, as long as you've hit first, sorry, I know two other panelists here. As long as you've hit first, the things that organizers are definitely going to need in order to make any sense of your proposal at all, there's usually no problem with considering information that's relevant. In some cases, and certainly, I think Fossage Digital does this, we have a, is there anything else you wanna tell us? Because the first three things go on the program. Is there anything else you wanna tell us? That's in public place for that sort of supplemental information. Maybe we look at it, maybe we don't. Maybe it's in 600 proposals, we look at the supplemental information for 20. And so, okay, 90% fights inside doesn't matter. But for those line cases, maybe it helps us. So it's okay, particularly if you're invited to provide supplemental information, it's certainly within reason to provide it, but help the person receiving a proposal by prioritizing those ideas. Call up. Okay, so, first one was crafting the proposal, right? So when crafting the proposal, in my case, the topic that I had, that I spoke throughout the whole of last year was actually a very niche topic, which was actually accessibility. And so basically, and I actually had a personal story to tell as well, because I'm actually essentially blind in one eye. And there was a time a couple years back when I actually had an injury on my seeing eye, so I actually became blind for an entire weekend. So I thought that, hey, I want to get this story out because during the time when I was actually blind, you know, trying to use any website or mobile apps at all was just horrendous, right? It was just horrendous. I had voice over, but it was essentially useless because it was telling me that there's this button and you're like, what is a button this? What does a button do? It just says button, button, button, button, what? So I had a very strong incentive to actually say something and you know, tell people why this is important from a very personal perspective. So in the CFP, I basically said, you know, I'm going to share a story about what happened to me this one weekend. And here are some of the tips that you can make your website or mobile app more accessible to users who are actually visually impaired. And in the why I should talk about it, basically I said, you know, I basically just, you know, gave a little bit of a history of some of my involvement. So prior to this talk, I've also been involved actually quite a fair bit over the last few years with some blind association. I've given some talks on accessibility and assistive technologies to the Malaysian Association of the Blind. I've done some meetup talks about accessibility. So I just put a history of all of these things there. And then I just said that, and by the way, I'm also kind of essentially blinding one eye. And this is why getting this topic out is very important to me because even with correction, my good eye does not actually have 20-20 vision either. So 10, 20 years down the road, I may actually be blind and it's kind of scary, it's kind of a bit of a scary prospect. So, you know, just put all of these things, all of this information that helps the conference organizer to know why speaking about this topic is so important to you and why it's so important to get this topic out there. Maybe I'll just add one more sentence. All the three of them mentioned something about who you are and Jeannie mentioned a personal story. Whether or not you're doing a conference talk for the first time and you're fearful and you're nervousness, authenticity and sincerity of what you are talking about will never be missed by the audience. And that's the utmost thing that any audience will appreciate more than the content and the delivery is authenticity and who you are. So stick to yourself, whether you're a beginner or expert, be who you are. That's very good advice. That's very good advice. And then going back to what we talked about, just how do we even get out of writing CFP? CFP is great and then this is what we're doing, right? As another thing is that the conferences are looking for sponsors, companies sponsor conferences. And then normally sometimes as part of the sponsorship package, the companies are invited to send some speakers and then that's their chance to put up your hands, to be like, I want to speak at this conference. Why, even then, organizers want probably some idea of what the speakers are going to talk about. Even if a sponsor has essentially purchased a time slot, they're still doing things like, okay, so there'll be a panel afterwards. Who are they sending? What's their expertise? What's their agenda? As organizers, we need to know that stuff. So it's, you're not entering into a competitive process at that point, but certainly organizers still want some idea. Right, it depends on the organizer, of course. No, I think the organizers that I've met in Singapore, we are very careful of speaking to the sponsors and making sure that the sponsored speaker they send is also relevant and that has worked out most of the time. I think that conversation is still important, like what Roland said. Yeah, so chances are, you won't get out of writing CFP even if your company's sponsoring. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, so there we go. All right, so then any more, just kind of like, how do you break into this conference speaking thing? Because sometimes it might be like intimidating, right? Because these keynote speakers are the celebrities and then all these people seem to know what they're talking about. And then first time seems to be always difficult and you mentioned that meetups are a good place to start. Let engineers.sg record your meetup and that becomes part of your, I think it's very important in the day of information, social media, that you are able to create your content and you can do it so easily. If nobody's willing to publish your technical articles, publish it yourself on your blog, put that link up. Publish 10, 20 times. Say that I've written 20 times on my blog, see samples, that's what I did actually. I approached like nettots and said, these are 20 articles I wrote it myself. I'm a first time writer, but these are 20 articles I've written. For the conference speaking as well. These are the 40 episodes I've done on screen casting. Judge me, here I am. So I think create content for yourself, put it out there. There's no audience, it's a great practice for you to do it. Anything else? So, okay, go ahead. I think if you're trying to break into conference speaking and you are first time, you're not sure maybe you feel that your topic is a bit of a beginner topic, which is fine actually because I think all conferences, they look for diverse topics. Because if you've got all expert level topics, I think it's going to fly over everybody's head anyway and nobody will come back the next year. One good way actually is to, maybe if you're a first time, try to target the lightning talks first. You know, those starting talks, they are generally five to 10 minutes. They are quick, easy to get over with, easy to, and you don't have to think as hard. It's like, oh my God, how am I going to fill up content for 30 minutes? You know? And once you do one lightning talk, you do another and then you realize that, hey, you know, it's not that bad. And maybe I can try to level up to 20 minutes. And the second thing that I want to also bring up is, even for those who are so-called expert presenters, they ask any of them and they will very easily tell you that they get nervous every time as well. I was sitting in Red Dot Rubicon last year waiting for my turn to talk. And I was actually sitting next to Aaron Patterson who is actually one of the talk rails cometers and he asked me, are you next? I said, yeah. And then after that he said, are you nervous? Yeah. And I asked him back, what about you? He said, I am so nervous, I'm not prepared. And he was a keynote speaker. So don't feel bad about being nervous because it happens to everybody. Yeah, yeah, and then being nervous is not necessarily a bad thing because first time I was a conference speaker, I was nervous. And then so is that man sitting in the corner. He was nervous too. And then so I snuck into the bar next to the conference room to get a drink and met that guy and he's my husband now, so. So being nervous is not that bad of a thing. You know? Sorry, was there a conference room? I think, sorry. Cool, cool, all right. Maybe we can also get into the conference speaking thing. You can volunteer for a conference, right? And you can, for example, say I could be the emcee. So I need an emcee for PyCon many times. She's actually the best emcee in the world, so. But you don't have to bring your own talk. You only have to learn the names of the people, which for me is an impossibility. But if you can remember a name, you can read off a paper. So next talk is by so-and-so. He's, I don't know, the head of engineering at Carousel and he's got to speak about this and that and give them a round of applause, boom, done. And then you do this 20 times during the conference and suddenly you realize, okay, taking a microphone and sending in front of 500 people is actually possible, right? And then maybe next year you're no longer the emcee but you will be one of the speakers, right? So you can put yourself on the stage without really having to give a talk so that could be one small thing. And of course, like we said many times already, go to the meetups, there's a meetup every day. Monday to Friday, there's a meetup, maybe not Friday, but there's a meetup, people go there because there's free pizza, right? And they always need speakers, always, always. We are super desperate for getting speakers. I have to back people on my knees on Facebook. Every month, please give me a talk. I need two speakers, right? And I need to talk at meetups, I'm sorry, great. Anything will be accepted in five minutes. We had to talk about how to install PIP-Enf, which is a software like NPM or RubyGems to install packages. And usually people use PIP-Enf in Python and now there's PIP-Enf, something, some other way to do it, very simple talk. But everybody in the audience was like, oh, awesome, I heard about this. But I haven't had the time to try it out. And it's really, that's mostly the case for all the tech topics. People kind of know about it but they don't have the time to try it and they think, oh, this will cost me five hours of my life and maybe it's not worth it. Then you go to the meetup, somebody shows you, you know, 20 minutes, you can get this done and this is how you do it. And then you get inspired and then you really make this part of your tool change. So these kind of easy, small topics where you demonstrate a nice tool and then approach in an accessible way gets you into speaking very, very easily. Yeah. Yeah. I'll briefly plug because of the sheer scale of FOSSASIA, usually large number of MCs or moderators we call them. If you would like to do that, we are looking for volunteers right now for FOSSASIA in the match, come talk to me. And if you're an MC on any conference, you can put it as part of your speaker bio, right? Yeah. They just feel like I was an MC on this conference. You know, that's like a chance to practice and something that you can add to your profile is like, why isn't everybody doing this? Can I add on something? Go ahead. Maybe as an analogy to athletes, let's say who is the fastest 100 meter Usain Bolt, right? Do you think every day he's just practicing 100 meters? He's not, right? He's sprinting, he's doing weight lifting. He's doing a variety of athletic, physical practice. Same for public speaking. If you want to become a conference speaker, don't just train for conference speaking. Train MC for impromptuness, train for meetup, train for lightning speaker, train for moderator for panels like this. Sometimes we need train for different ideas and avenues for public speaking. And then when you are on your 100 meter race, you will perform. And I think another way to actually get started in a very controlled environment to do public speaking actually is to look within your company itself, you know, within your organization and say like, hey, you know, guys, I want to share this topic over lunch. I'm going to, I want to do a brown bag session. So book a room, book a space, send an invite to your colleagues, tell them, hey, you know, bring back lunch. I'm going to share about this topic. You'll be surprised at the amount of people who will actually sign up to bring back lunch to listen to you talk over lunch. Yeah, that's a very good point. So yeah, I remember back in like my days in Pivotal, we had the wrong like tech talk Tuesdays. And then I brought the same tradition to my previous company, Quantcast as well. So just every Tuesday we're going to have a tech talk and you can ask the company to sponsor lunch even or bring your own lunch. As a company, I think I find just like companies normally they encourage such like little gathering because they want employees to share what they learn, what they want to learn. And then even if it's a topic that you have no idea about, this is Tim's favorite, it's like even if you don't know about this topic, don't worry about it. Sign up for it. Just give a talk to you a month from now. Yes. And that's what forces you to learn about that topic. And then, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So and then you're just presenting in front of your colleagues, right? They already know. They already saw your shitty code in your commitment. It's like, what's there to hide, you know? This is all I've learned and they criticize me. And then I think that that is a healthy environment to create in your company as well. And then I think it's another thing. Sign up to organize like a tech talk Tuesdays or just round back. Because really, when you're the organizer, you can choose to give a talk or not. And then most important thing, you get to hassle people. Go and ask them to give a talk. Or you know, worst case, if you just have like a bunch of conference talk recordings that you want to watch and you can't find time, you always pick the recordings and play it if nobody's speaking at the tech talk. That's right. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That was a good point, yeah. Cool. Any questions from the audience so far? Yes? I think it's always a challenge to pitch your talk, right? It can't be too technical and it can't be too simple either. And a lot of times, pitching your talk comes down to on the day, you find out that your audience are completely winners and then you pitch the talk, that's really technical and I was wondering if you've made any experiences. Yes. Last year at FOSAsia, I had, in resuming organza, I do submit talks through the same process that it reals does, through the same form that it reals does. And so I'd submitted one on performing phase-preserving Doppler shift correction when receiving satellite downlink communication using the FPGA built into Naveena. That was the actual, that was almost... Can anybody repeat what he did? I know some of those words. Does anyone understand more than half of those words? This was very much pitched at the rate, this was pitched at the hardware track where there are people, at least for whom RF and FPGAs and a lot of stuff are part of their lingo, but because of reasonably high-profile speaker, shortly before and not long before, it might have been a week before, Mario, one of the principles of the FOSAsia organisation comes to me and says, we want to put you on the keynote track. Are you kidding? Half the words in the title won't make sense to most people, let alone the content of the talk. And so, yes, it was necessary to very quickly, and it might not even be in two weeks, I recall having you do this in an enormous hurry, to regear the talk so that, fortunately, it was also halved in length, so that was actually, it helped, to simply discard most of the heavy-duty tech stuff and describe in broad terms what the pieces were, why the project was interesting and what the point was. And so, for that one, unfortunately, I had at least some days' notice, it wasn't an on-the-day thing, but it's, as a general rule, if you've got a talk prepared, there are times when it's necessary to, for reasons of complexity, or even just time, to just skip bits. So yeah, that's too hard. And if you end up finishing a few minutes early, take more questions. I think it will be also quite helpful if you plan or intend to speak at a particular conference and you don't know how the audience is going to be, like it will be good if you can at least attend that conference as a, and attendee at least once first. So you have an idea on the kind of audience that that conference is targeting. Unless you're actually going to speak at particular meet-up groups or niche conferences where there is a very specific kind of audience being targeted, then you can actually gear your talk towards it. But otherwise, you know, just at least attend once as a attendee first. I think what you brought about the topic of audience is one of the most important things. I don't think we address it enough, so thank you for bringing it out. I have actually emailed organizers before to ask about the audience, like what sort of organizing? Because if it's an international conference, I will not be able to attend it unlike local ones. I will never have a chance to attend it. Keynotes because yeah, probably you have to like make it a bit more broader, but talk to the organizer and like what, I've done this especially for workshops. Like I go there and like, are they technical or non-technical? How many of them are there? Is there a Q&A session? And this is where I say, impromptu public speaking skills are also important, like gauge it. And sometimes I do ask live audience questions. So how many of you are here know about this? And that's okay, so that's why I say impromptu. Do your research about the audience. Thank you for bringing it up. Yeah, one thing you could definitely do is in your proposal, write down this is advanced. And you should write down what are the prerequisites. Somebody ask yeah. In the proposal you should tell the organizers, these are the prerequisites if someone, because they will put this talk abstract on their website. And the whole audience will know in advance what they are getting into. And if the abstract already says advanced topic, you need to know this and this and this and this, otherwise you will be lost. And if there's still a beginner in your audience, this is his own fault, right? It's not your problem. And then you can design the slides in such a way where you talk about very advanced topics and you can give links to how, where can you learn more about this in case you are not that advanced yet and you accidentally ended up in my talk. So, but I think most of the talk will be recorded. So if you speak to a seemingly advanced audience, but the audience is in fact not advanced, the real advanced audience will eventually find your talk on YouTube. So you will eventually reach your desired audience anyways, right? So don't worry about pissing off 50 people in a room on that day. But I mean, if you put it into your proposal, this is an advanced topic, hopefully you will have the right people in the audience, right? So this is how I would do it. I would just make it very clear and tell people this is what you're getting into. Yeah, I guess that would work very well for like multi-track conferences where people get to take all of this track or that track and it will help your audience as well. That's a good point. Yes? Can you plan your talk? If it is advanced, can you actually listen to it and include some introductory stuff so that when you actually go to that conference on that day and you see that there are enough audience who are at different levels of experience, you can actually be prepared for actually the end. Some of the talks that I've seen from really wonderful speakers and language creators, every time they come out, they actually say some of the simple things are basic or none of the stuff to get everybody on the same page and then, yeah. Is it? Don't come out of how you structure your talk. So I habitually avoid using text on my slides. My slides are mostly photographs and screenshots sometimes. And okay, if I'm short of ideas or time, maybe a couple of block points. Usually I'm presenting from sort of high level down to detail anyway. And so there's a little bit of room, not so much in the preparation of the talk, but just the way I happen to structure my talks means if I realize I'm in a room where it isn't what I thought it was, I'm then able to spend more time with the introductory material and go a bit light on the more detailed slides. So certainly if you're structuring that way, sort of overview to more detail, then depending on your audience, you spend more time at the front or back of that process. Sure. Usually for me, what I do is, like Roland, I actually keep my slides very high level broad. I don't go in too much details. And because I actually write in the presenter notes what I'm actually going to say and deliver. So most of the time, unless you're a keynote speaker, you're very likely not going to be the first person at the first hour delivering the talk. So you actually have time during the conference itself to actually observe the audience, observe the questions and answers, observe other conference speakers. And by midday, you will have a pretty fairly good idea on how the audience is like. And you can actually edit how you're going to deliver what you're going to say on the fly. So actually having that presenter notes does have additional benefits. Yeah. Well, I would say that's pretty advanced. I was not there to touch my prepared topic during the conference. I mean, I did that once I came unprepared and I basically had to do the last five slides of my talk. During the conference, it's really stressful. You don't really. I don't think it's possible. I only change what I'm going to say. I think this is where I say it's individual preference. You will find your own style if you do it 20 times. And that's what practice is enough. No matter what we say. What you suggested, start with giving the basics first and then make it more and more complicated. During the talk, it's OK. Then you lose the audience at the end of the talk. So that's fine. I mean, I've been, I know nothing about machine learning and big data and these kind of things, but everybody talks about it during my meetups. And I'm just sitting there and I'm like, OK, I heard these vocabularies in the last few meetups before and you still get something out of it. You feel like, OK, the first three slides, I got that because I've seen that before. I learned a little bit, but no, I'm lost. OK, so be it. But if you have a nice progression, so people will understand, OK, I have to learn this first, then I have to understand this, and oh, here I got lost. So this is what I need to look into next. I can go and Google for it after the meetup, after the talk. So don't put the most complicated slide first, obviously. Make it a slow progression. So you still have to advance stuff that you want to convey in your talk, but you also don't lose the audience right at the beginning. And then I think there's no need to observe the audience and things like that. You stick to your own thing. You just make sure that it's delivered in a good way. You know what you're talking about. Then the content doesn't really matter that much. If the presentation is nice and people can follow your train of thought, then it's fine. Then they can go back to the talk, the recording later, and stop at that slide, Google around, aha, now I understand it, go to the next slide. And then if they really want to learn what you said and they didn't understand it, they will figure it out. One related thought, and sort of long lines of what I've described, it's always, I think it's always, well, it is always easier to drop prepared material than it is to make up new material in life. It's possible, but it's hard. And so my general approach is to have sort of prepared too much stuff, and then just, if this is a skill, because you ought to keep your arm in time, but to drop stuff adaptively as I go through it. And a number of my talks in the last couple of years in Singapore have been about having done that exact thing, where I've just covered the thing in not quite the right plan, and I'm short of time, so I just skipped three, four slides. The other related idea is sometimes you've prepared specialized things that might or might not be of interest, or that you might anticipate coming up during questions, and those you just put after the last slide, and don't show them unless the question comes up. So generally, the other way to be adaptable is to make sure you're prepared too much, and you can drop stuff rather than be shorthanded and like, well, okay, little. Actually, I have one more thing to add. I actually have a short story to tell regarding the audience. There's this conference, it's not get camp. It was a conference, it's like an un-conference thing where- Bar camp. Bar camp, yes. So I thought bar camp was a great idea, because then you go in there, and then there's no agenda prepared. You propose talks, and then just write it on a small card, and then if enough people vote for it, then that talk gets bigger. Great for impromptu speaking skill. Exactly, but what I didn't know was that that talk was not a tech audience. So I went to the conference, I wrote down my talk, it was character encoding, put my name down there. People actually voted for it, and I ended up giving that talk. I was like, great, I'm gonna talk about character encoding. And then people were like, and then halfway through someone was like, I thought you were gonna talk about, writing a fiction, how do you- Character. Characters, no, that's the moment I clicked on my, shit, my audience is not a tech focused audience. So halfway I had to switch gear, and then I'm like, okay, so I pretty much dropped all the technical things, and then just focused on UTFA. Repeat that words as many times as possible. So if there's one thing that this audience is gonna take out from my talk, is UTFA. They're gonna know what UTFA is, the thing that you should use, whenever there's an option, which I think was good for the society. Yeah, it's a pretty extreme one. Well done. The point is, there are times you might mis-evaluate or access your audience, don't panic, just kinda like, that's where I remember this advice from my professor, some of you might know him, it's Ben Leon, he's from a U.S. School of Computing. And then because I asked him for advice when I was invited to be a lecturer in SMU, cause you know, it's different when you deliver a two hour lecture versus a 20 minutes talk, right? I was like, how am I even going to pull this off? He's like, remember, you wanna have one thing that your audience wanna take away. One thing, don't be greedy. And then so I think that's that come down to if you have a very complicated topic, maybe boil it down to one thing, that might help you prepare as well. Yes, plenty of questions. You are saying that, you know, when you use speakers, you have to change about, you know, advanced software and really need care. I mean, I just, from an observation, because you needed to get a general idea, would it be like a good idea when you start, you know, because I noticed when you start, you ask like how many people, and for me, maybe that's a good thing that you can add. I do that. I do that. Another thing is that you can, you know, do that. Yeah, yeah. So that you're more or less engaged at that spot at that time. Yeah. Like, you know, how many people in the audience in the room. And then lastly is that maybe through the course of your talks, you know, because I realized this when I was in university, sometimes some lecturers, what they would do is, I mean, some of the lecturers or something, they'll inject some fun or some funny slides, just get you back on the course. And maybe through giving talks, isn't it a good idea to throw a question to the audience, you know, audience-engaging, rather than just tags and probably they'll wonder all. I have something to add, because I've gone through Toastmasters, and one thing I would say, if you have a chance, join Toastmasters, it's like one, two, three, a program. They say that if you are a beginner, this is pretty advanced technique, actually, throwing audience questions, because you are already nervous and you're trying to throw audience questions. Or the other thing that you said, what's the other thing you said? Inject humor. Inject humor is one of the hardest public speaking ever. Do you agree with me? You crack a joke and nobody laughs at you? Seriously, in Toastmasters, like I wanted to do that humor track, and that's like after like two days. So I would say leave humor after your like 20 talks, like practice the beginner stuff first, yeah. So join Toastmasters. And I have to reverse you on your throwing questions. This guy, this guy's has another part. Sorry, Tim. Just like shout out, there's this small room, everybody can hear everybody. So if you're in a position where you're given your meetup talk, and you have got initial slides out there in the community, and you're maybe in a position to give a talk at the conference, say if your proposal is accepted. And you just have like 40 days or so prepared, and you've got given to balance that as a first time speaker, in addition to the fact that you've got your own work deadlines and deliverables. Have you been in that kind of drunk situation in the time you've heard a chat break? We beat talks. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Absolutely fine. I want to know, you know, balancing both the time you've found ways to prepare better just to give it a time and a feedback. Yes, go ahead. So although my first speaking experience was actually in 2008 at FOSS M.Y., but in between 2008 and last year, that was almost a 10-year gap, and essentially when I got back to speaking to the kid last year, it was kind of like a stump scratch, then you should forget everything already. So what I did was actually, after I submitted the proposal, and then I got accepted, and then I went, oh, shit. And I actually told my manager and said, hey, you know, I submitted this proposal, I got accepted, and I've got this amount of days to prepare, and I might have to take some time out during work, maybe a half an hour, an hour a day to just like prepare, and in the days preceding to the conference itself, I would like to request and take leave for a couple of days, and you know, my manager said, don't take leave. Just stay at home, practice the entire day. This is on company time, and I'll help you to prepare. I'll help you practice. So sometimes, you know, just going up to your manager and saying that, hey, you know, I got accepted to speak at this conference, and you'll be surprised, they'll be very, very supportive. Yep. Yeah, companies love that. Yeah, it's free publicity for them. Yeah, I would say the same. So when you want to achieve work-life balance, do life at work. That's probably not the point. I shouldn't use that word because I don't have anyone. Work-life balance. So teaching stuff is the only way to achieve mastery, in my opinion, and giving a talk is basically teaching, right? So your employer actually has an interest in you teaching stuff at conferences and meetups, right? Once you've prepared these slides, you know all these things, these imports, and whatever, by heart, and you will speed up as a developer, right? I know the entire Django documentation by heart. When I want to import the user model, I know from Django, Contra, Ours models import user. I know this by heart. And when I started out, I had to look it up every single time, Google import user model, that you lose 10 seconds to schooling for that, right? And of course, you are a little bit scared about the questions that you look at. So you dive deeper for the very first time, you try to look under the hood of certain things, just so that you are prepared, you don't even talk about them, just in case. So if your employer does not give you some time to prepare the slides and also to train the talk, you should probably consider changing jobs. That's, seriously. Yeah, really. It's in their best interest. I mean, it takes a lot of time, right? Usually I estimate I want to speak one minute per slide so I can make 30 slides for a 30 minute talk and that's already very risky. Then you have to train perfectly. You cannot even forget one sentence, then you will overshoot the time, right? And making a slide probably takes you between 10 to 20 minutes. So a 30 minute talk will take definitely six hours only to make the slides, plus at least one hour, two times 30 minutes to train it, right? I really sit down at home and I speak to the wall. I speak it out loud. This is the best preparation, my opinion. So you have to estimate for a 30 minute talk 10 hours of preparation, right? So, but you know, the conference is in May, the PyCon conference. If you submit your talk today and you get accepted, you have five months, I mean, 10 hours in five months, you will find some time to prepare it, right? Just don't, and maybe procrastination. Don't procrastinate, right? When you get accepted, do the whole thing right away. Submit the slides to the conference because ask for the feedback and then, boom, you're done, right? And then before the conference, the week before, train the talk two times and then go to the conference and have fun. It's very ideal, I really wish that's true. And normally, five months preparation, four months you're like, grating about it and then one month you're actually doing it. Don't go one month. It's almost a procrastination. I don't know if I'm doing a slide. Yeah, there's my husband who can pull it off. Yes. Not advice. No, I don't do it. I don't know who we are talking about. I did a talk a couple of years ago at the Heritage Festival on Amateur Radio and it was a 60 minute talk. It ran 60 minutes and 40 seconds. Well, I was still editing slides, not even an hour before starting. I just had messed up and had underestimated actually the time because yes, I'm accustomed to the 20 minute thing and to do not two hours, but certainly to go to one hour, just blew my estimates completely and just I had been up most of the night doing stuff and it was still an hour prior putting the last slides. This is what not to do. Yeah, don't do this. What not to do. Don't do this. If you haven't prepared, don't panic. That's, I think the worst thing is, if you haven't prepared, just accept what, this is my fate. This is healthy. You're out how to do this on the fly. But ideally, you're definitely prepared. Well, it's also, there's different parts to preparation. In that example, I was in essence telling about 10 or 12 specific stories in a sequence that sort of constructed a larger history and an argument. So I had been going over those stories, sitting in the train, in the shower, in bed, for weeks prior. So I had my material down cold, which meant that I could walk up with a barely coherent set of slides and hold to it halfway through it, realize out of time, skip a chunk and nonetheless finish 40 seconds over time. So there's different bits to preparation and it's more, I understand what you're trying to do, what pieces matter for you. If you're telling stories and the set up action and outcome sequences, the bit that matters, then those are things you can be rehearsing in a whole lot of slack time for weeks or months prior. And then the actual preparation of collateral slides, you're okay, don't do it the night before. It's not, it is not the most important part of your talk. I guess the main thing is don't procrastinate. Try to start early. You can just start putting the main topics, the main headlines on those slides. So that's like 10 words. You can sit down for 10 minutes, come up with those 10 words. The next week, okay, let's take the first chapter, put down the more detailed slides, right? And then you realize, oh, that's actually a code example that I wanna show that doesn't really work or I don't fully understand it. And then you do some research and if you try to build the slide, you're like, okay, slides will take 10 hours. The conference is next week. I have 10 hours maybe on Wednesday because there's a public holiday. Oh my God, don't do that. There's always this one thing you didn't anticipate and then it will blow up your time estimation. And then you have worked the next day and you still have only half of the slides and then the crunch time problems appears, yeah. Yeah, and then I had the pleasure of emceeing JSConf Asia and I would like to say like there was this great talk by Huijing. I was like, how did she do that? Like I was literally sitting there. It's like, she just spoke without um, um, or anything and she spoke so fluently. It came to her so naturally. She was like a tech speaker. I was like, how did you do that as she was walking off the stage? How did you do that? Yes, Yo. I mean, I've been listening to everyone share their experience and I agree with Sayani. It's really very different for everybody and I'm just going to share the way I do it and I don't know if this works for everybody but at the back of my head, I have this very strong opinion and again, not everybody is going to agree with this is that personally as in, I consider myself a minority speaker because on an international stage, how many speakers have you seen come from Southeast Asia? How many female speakers have you seen come from Southeast Asia? So to me, this is a personal thing. I feel that as a minority speaker, we do not have the benefit of doubt so it is actually very important to me that I present my best self on an international stage. Those of you who know me personally know that I am a monkey. I am not serious. I don't take anything seriously but this is one thing I do take seriously in that I feel that if I screw up, if I do not prepare, if I sleep up, I'm not only ruining it for myself, I'm ruining it for everybody that people associate with oh that it's Southeast Asian woman doesn't know how to speak English properly but I feel that so in terms of preparation, I can honestly say that I don't really get nervous anymore first of all because I have faith in my preparation so I think this also comes from as an athlete background like by the time you go and play in your championship game you have already done that exact same thing a thousand times and to me speaking is it's less stressful than playing in a championship game honestly but again this is my unique experience so there's that level of I would say preparedness there that helps but I honestly before I step onto stage I would have given that top out luck at least 40 times before at least and I do the same as what Ginny does I write because for conference it's a very different from meet up conferences they would there are other people ahead of you and behind you I feel it's a responsibility and a courtesy to the organisers to keep the time and I have the potential to ramble on so I know I will exceed the time so I do write every single word out and time it to that I will get it down plus minus 30 seconds and you did that at JSConf it was like spot on like 50 seconds at that time no light coding? not this time but yeah I think how I did it was that I do a lot of writing you mentioned that people and I'm one of those people who writes almost as close as I possibly can to speaking so to me an article and a top list it's almost no difference like when I do that and I think that helps so if you write a lot I think writing a top comes a bit easier a lot of times I turn my top articles into talks Chris who is my co-organiser talks CS and he does it the other way around he turns his talks into articles so again it's personal preference so again it's just a lot of practice mind your own stuff and I think there is also a lack of I always call it shamelessness I'm pretty much shameless I don't even worry about what other people think of me because I have this this might sound quite quite assolish coming out of my mouth but what other people think about me is their problem and not mine so yeah I'm like I'm a fan of myself it's okay if you're not a fan of me but I like me so I'm gonna talk about what I like and so I guess the nervous everybody is self-conscious at the end of the day because we are it's very human to worry about what other people think of you but I think it's important that you have a bit more faith in yourself than because if you don't believe in yourself you're always gonna believe in you honestly that's just how it is audiences can feel it audiences can feel if you're doubting yourself so at the end of the day I feel that believe in your own property like of course you have to prepare first you cannot know prepare and then believe in your own property sorry but if you have just have a bit more faith in the effort you put in and just let it go at the end of the day nobody's gonna nobody's gonna die if you bomb honestly what's the worst that can happen right it's like oh okay probably having a bad day most people are more forgiving than you expect I feel audiences are like on your side they wanna be there so that helps so long story short put in effort to prepare it matters what you said about writing exactly all the words that you're actually gonna say during the talk it's not everybody yeah it's not everybody but I actually take it one step further I actually put in I actually put where I'm actually supposed to pause as well because sometimes when I'm nervous I have a tendency to talk too fast without any pauses so I would actually in my presenter slides for those who have actually seen any of my presenter slides sorry presenter notes you actually see the exact text that I'm gonna say and then in bold and in red colour pause and then the next sentence and then in bold and red pause it helps actually it helps to remind you to you know pause, take a breath and continue good any more questions before I break yes are you going to cover a little bit about the style of the slides are you going to cover that I guess we covered a little bit I am not in a little bit English we can talk about that yeah I did test you made the main I started in the same conference as every tech conference there will be someone who will put I don't know code on the slides with font size 6 grey on black background what is your favourite colour theme which is totally not rendering on a projector I use images wherever possible and that's one of the reasons it's not the only reason but it's one of them is that I don't have to worry about that choose the image frame intensively and then whatever the presentation technology is the rough edges will get dealt with if I am using text it's I can't quite get down to 7 plus minus 2 words but keep the amount of text on any given slide as small as humanly possible and then make it a power point for as many faults actually does this correctly it will enlarge the text to fill the space depending on how many words you put in so don't keep adding words until it gets down to being 6 points some people some people that's for me a pet peeve as an audience member I detest seeing people live coding like demonstrating dicking about with debuggers that don't work I've done that I've done that I've stopped doing it because having looked at it as an audience member I find that incredibly frustrating but if you absolutely have to do that I think most modern code editors do actually have either a presenter mode or a presenter theme and if you don't have a presenter theme or presenter mode create one okay so I have a few suggestions you can never go wrong with high contrast like you know when I saw Wei put that yellow the projector just need to tweak its color or something and the yellow and white might just appear the same never you cannot go wrong with high contrast there is a text editor theme I think it's one night or something like that that is very presenter friendly just google about it I think white background with code is better than black background with code it's just because of the white contrast thing the contrast thing as big as font as possible you can never go wrong with that of course images adding on to that I have always done life coding so the framework that I use once again it's my personal style is reveal.js alright and I hate switching to text editors because when I do that you know let's say your screen one and screen two I remember Wei in one of the talks is like she went to other screen and then she had to like go to the display preference and then change to mirror and blah blah blah so I hate changing that so what I do because I do reveal.js it is a web browser based slides I can actually embed my JavaScript based even frontend stuff there and it becomes very interactive when I show hardware what I've done thanks to WebRTC which is a browser browser API I actually can put the camera view on the reveal.js thing I have done a lot of things and using shell.js or something I've even displayed my terminal on reveal.js because I do not want to switch to my terminal or my text editor it is a lot of preparation because I'm very particular about all this so it can be done but once again it all depends on what you're presenting because I have hardware to show and then I have like JavaScript interaction I've done all this kind of hacks in terms of live coding is it ok to let's say to avoid the risk to prerecord the demos and then just talk it then talk it over while it's playing in the video but you're not actually live coding it still doing that thing but you already then just explain it actually what I've done is like for every on one of my live hardware demos because I need audience interaction I actually prepare a recording in case it fails I show the recording yeah if you're doing all this I would suggest in particular for videos never ever depend on what you do don't do it it doesn't matter what anyone else tells you your computer is going to have a problem your network is going to have a problem the conference internet is going to have a dead spot at the speaker's location the conference internet is going to be jammed by other users using the thing someone is going to trip over a cable the sites you need are going to be down it's the internet the failure modes are numerous and they are almost all more likely to happen because everything is a custom build it's not the desk environment I have actually brought a 3G cellular router myself that I connect to to show my demo before once again it's a lot of work breaking my own rule internet well I had speakers in Boston and somewhere in Sweden with an audience in Singapore the we had a power failure oh no that won't work then 2 minutes prayer to the start of the session not in the room where I was sitting but in an adjacent building where our network connection was what Murphy's Law out comes the phone I think it happens by the laptop and reconnect so that I can put in front of the audience and the feature speakers was in Boston yeah if the situation absolutely demands it then have backups and ideally have enough broadband can build in your phone to do it because that's usually the one that you use every day it's not a special thing it's available to you now to do it it will work the first time but wherever possible please avoid switch off your wireless and practice make sure it works first of all thank you very much guys it's a lot of really really good good experience and use information I just wanted to touch a bit on the topic of topic selection my I've spoken at a couple of conferences and I always have a really hard time just figuring out how to balance all the things I could talk about with imposter syndrome what am I qualified to talk about what do I have a right to talk about and drilling down on I'm sure there's stuff in there you guys have a really hard time sort of getting to that point right how do you approach that problem I always talk about something that blew my mind just recently something that I use myself and I discovered that I spend hours of time figuring it out and setting it up and configuring it and then I'm like oh wow now it works and it does something good for me and I want to share it with the world so basically the talk that I gave the first talk at Picon APEC six or seven years ago was about VIM as a Python IDE I was like I'm super late to the party I was using Windows first and never heard about the terminal and then VIM and I was like hundreds of millions of users are already using it as their main editor and I'm just a small fish in the ocean who's going to care about my talk but I realized that my VIM config was relatively complex and I added lots of cool shortcuts and whatever to make it feel more like a normal editor so and that made me onboard the VIM world and I was like actually now the way I configured it there's no excuse not to use it it's just as good as any other editor I was using before and even better so I want to share that with the world and I just did this myself and then I turned that into a talk and when I give talks at meetups it's always something I just did at work some day how we build our Django stack for our websites in production like we recently discovered GraphQL instead of REST API so I talk about that so bleeding edge new stuff then nobody can ask you the difficult questions because it's so new that nobody knows about it or you can say it's so new I still don't know myself right so you don't have to worry about the questions as well and super new stuff so this is how I approach it I talk about things that I'm very passionate about and at that time I think there are different styles like you said you can either talk about something that blew your mind or something you tried for the past six months I have done that before in my talks but the approach I am going to take in the future from now on once again I'm going to begin in that area is a project that I've built for the past six months or one year and then I want to share that project or let's say an open source project that got really popular some people are using so there are different styles I don't think there is any wrong or right way I would say look at the conference the type of people who go there sometimes I also give talks I think one of you mentioned is I want feedback from the audience so I give a talk in such a way that I have something to learn from the audience as much as I share as well so if you want feedback talks are also great it's a difficult topic so I have too many things it's more about for example I did a talk at the Hong Kong Big Data Conference as well as like five or six years ago and I sort of happened to fight a discomfit by accident I was asked to do it I was like I don't know anything about Big Data but you know what I'm just going to take it and I essentially did a giant research project and put together a talk and it was I don't think anybody particularly interested and I actually literally kind of had all of the you know the text sort of written out and everything kind of just went through it but then you know three years later I did a couple of talks and to be honest I felt really awkward doing it because I just felt like I had no business being there but whatever but I did a couple of talks later at some IAE conference so basically I have a digital media so I did some ad tech related talks and those like I had a completely different experience because first of all I was really really in touch with the material and I had a story to tell and so it was really like the arc of the talk was very much a progression in the story I felt much more comfortable but again that topic that I kicked was it was a bit scoped by where the talk was fitting in right so it was actually intended to be a series of training seven hours right and so the topic was ad tech I kind of sort of drilled down a bit more so but now you know I've been hardly lacking in today's because I haven't really done any talks in a while and I've been working I've been working in a company for the last four years that essentially has gone from an eight person company to almost a hundred person company and I've been really really we've done so much stuff we've built so much tech we've built it's like a dead organization there's so much learning there right and so much interesting stuff that I think I could talk about but I just I'm having a really hard time just sort of like figuring out okay where do I start you've already answered part of it if your presentation style if your presentation style is narrative if that's if making working with a consistent story arc is in fact how you present now that's one of the majority with a very large fraction of people present that way then you start with your list of twenty I have this problem right now before I say start with this of twenty things that you might talk about okay which of these can I tell a coherent interesting relevant compelling recent story about okay now there are three left right and then okay what's about it and just pick one right but it is a fit as can you talk about stuff is it something to be in is there a coherent story arc is it current is it this both for each of them I mean really at the conference all the night there is six still takes time to work sounds like you are actually in a perfect situation I'm in a similar situation in a startup and we build new stuff all the time bleeding edge stuff and so on and and then the imposter syndrome comes in right you're like okay of all these cool things I learned this myself but is it actually so important maybe I was an idiot and everybody else already knows about it right but I think if you had to learn it yourself there are probably one million other people on the planet who also would benefit from your journey how you learn that so just do it don't worry about it so I get chased all the time to do meet-up talks right and I'm just never I always make some excuse not to do it to be honest right but you know you mentioned your gym story right and you know so maybe think you know we're doing some interesting things right now except that we're just digging into that we're probably being novel like for example one of the topics that we're doing is sort of like how we're using bitmaps to sort of really really compress and speed up how we manage our you know sets of integers and all this kind of stuff right and we're essentially this is a problem that's being driven by scalability issues in our current architecture right so we're looking to sort of replace this and it's a space that's a bit new for me but like I know it's going to be really cool and like I would like to be able to go off and say spend 20 minutes talking like look this is how we essentially reduce our storage size by 10x like using this approach right even though I didn't write the library that does it that we're going to use it right but it's more just an experience report and you kind of like give me permission to do that right because I tend to think if I'm not an expert in something I have absolutely no business going on talking about it right How do you use these as relevant exactly because many people use them great I think audience are always in for a great story so if you can tell a great story I think case studies are perfect like you have things to share like I love case study talks alright so I have to cut it here we didn't even get into I think Q and A sessions but do not fret so what's going to happen next is lunch lunch is provided Tim is lunch outside outside awesome so we're going to go grab lunch and take this opportunity to get yourself in groups and find them what mentor that you want to talk more about or have them help you with your CFP so we're going to have seven to eight people per group so what's happening after lunch is that you're just going to sit in your group your mentor will find a place for you I hope you all brought like pen and paper if not then come see me I have some spares and then you're going to start working on your CFPs if CFP is too hard work on your bio and then mentors are here ask questions and then you know we have speakers in the audience as well so help each other so take the chance to know each other and enjoy lunch we'll see you after in about half an hour