Why I Love Being A Conference Speaker
For me being a conference dev speaker it is a great honour! Every time I receive the confirmation email for my sessions I am one of the happiest people in the world.
I am an active speaker from 2015 and till now I was a speaker at some of the best conferences in my country, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
There are a couple of reasons why I love to be one of the speakers at tech conferences, first one and the biggest reason is sharing knowledge with the community.
Sharing knowledge.
Once your topic is approved by organizers you have a great responsibility and if you are aware of that responsibility as me than the process of making a presentation for conference consists of four main steps:
- Plan
- Prepare
- Practice
- Deliver
If you are one of the speakers you need to be aware of what your role is, and by providing new information about some topic to the audience you need to be 100% sure in what you are talking about because at that moment you are only one who is talking about it and as I wrote for me that is a great responsibility, you need to be clear, accurate, easy to understand... after all people are coming to your session to learn something new and something interesting and you (as a speaker) do not want them disappointed.
Just a few sentences about steps in making session:
Planing is very important, you need to plan what topics you want to cover on that session, and make sure that those topics are relevant and interesting for your future audience. Prepare is what comes after planing after you have basic parts about your topic you need to build a complete presentation around those little parts, for me as dev speaker big part of the presentation is a demo and you need to be sure that demo is fully working, practice is the main step and one of the boring ones for me because I need to "speak" the same thing a lot of times but at the end, practice is important because practising you are getting routine and the last step of delivering is easier.
I am talking about those steps because I want to describe what are the main steps for delivering a good session. When we are talking about delivering that is the most interesting part. Once you are on the stage in front of the audience, all other stuff disappears, there are only you and the audience.
From my first conference back in 2015 I am having stage fright, first one was the worst but I am getting better at it, that moment when the adrenaline gets into the bloodstream nothing is the same and you are in very weird and special condition, your brain is only focused on the delivering the session on the best way possible.
After the session is done and after "Thank you" slide is done every time I wish I had another 45 minutes for another session. When that adrenaline rush from public speaking is "activated" you want more, it can make you look like you don't have an idea what you are talking about and on another hand if you know how to control it you can be a winner... I am in the middle right now but with every new conference I am more stable and more relaxed with it.. and I can be selfish and say that stage fright and adrenaline is something that I enjoy and love being a speaker because of it and other things in the following of the blog post.
Besides sharing knowledge and adrenaline rush other reasons why I love to be a speaker is:
- Learning new stuff
- Helping community
- Promoting technologies
- Networking
Learning new stuff.
As I mentioned earlier you need to be 100% correct, not mistakes in demos or sessions, deliver only correct information about topic etc... and to accomplish that you need to prepare the session. The main part of preparing is learning, because you need to check every single detail about that topic, sometimes in the normal position, you will not explore and search as in the process of preparing the session.
And those details can lead to another topic that you want to learn at that moment for that session or later, in both cases you are learning new stuff and getting new skills, making you better in your field of interest.
Helping community.
This is a big reason why I love to be a speaker, every message on social media or email that I get after the sessions are very inspiring for me. Knowing that somebody is learning new stuff because of you and your presentation is such a great feeling, knowing that you are helping somebody to start learning more about that topic or to introduce him/her new technology... for me, that is a great feeling and one of the first reasons why I started speaking on community meetups and conferences.
Promoting technologies.
Every developer (or I hope so) loves the programming language, framework, IDE/tools, the technology that he/she is using as a developer on daily basis.
From my earlier blog posts, you can conclude that in my case that is C# and .NET inside of Visual Studio and VS Code and me as young dev speaker I am mainly focused on Microsoft events in my country Bosnia and Herzegovina and in my region (Balkan).
So we as Developer oriented speakers, we are some kind of evangelist for our technologies, we believe that those technologies are the best, considering that... I am very proud that some of the blog posts or session on the conference is turning somebody to try or use that technology, programming language, framework tool. Doing that we are promoting and sharing tools in which we believe that they are the best out there.
Networking.
Last but not least is networking between speakers and making a new connection with the audience. Being a speaker I had the opportunity to meet one of the best speakers in my region, a lot of MVPs and be a friend with some of them, for me as a young speaker those things are priceless.
Photo from speaker room at ATD Conference in Zagreb, December 2017.
Photo from last XamExpertDay in Cologne, October 2019.
And for the conclusion, if I need to write just one sentence why I love to be a speaker that it is because I am learning new stuff, sharing knowledge to the community and hanging out with my friends' other speakers.
Best regards!
Almir Vuk