So You Want to Speak at Software Conferences?

https://dylanbeattie.net/2025/12/08/so-you-want-to-speak-at-software-conferences.html

32•speckx•1h ago

Comments

hibikir•51m ago

He's pretty right on the "get bored" bits. I have few friends that are doing a lot of conferences every year after, say, year 6, and they are people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.

hinkley•23m ago

I had a coworker in Seattle who commuted from the far side of Steven’s pass every day. That was a 2 hour trip each way. I desperately wanted to know what was up with her home life.

Some introverts can use a long solo car trip to wind themselves up to deal with people or decompress afterward so they don’t take it out on their family. Others find it all too stressful and just makes it worse. But that’s like 20 minutes for me. I can’t imagine two hours. We didn’t drive that long to get to grandma’s house.

thetrumanshow•12m ago

>> Write a talk nobody else could do; tell a story nobody else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach them that.

That's an extremely high bar, no?

SatvikBeri•5m ago

It's doable if you pick a very focused topic. In my first year of using Julia, I gave a talk on gradually adding Julia to a large Python codebase. Very few people could give a similar talk because (1) Julia is a fairly niche language, (2) most of the people who understood Julia <> Python interop knew it too well, and had forgotten all the common beginner challenges.

ValentineC•8m ago

> Finally, watch out for events that put video of their sessions online. Having a couple of YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciate audience can make all the difference when a programme committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.

This, very much this.

I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.

A short meetup talk or a lightning talk at a different conference could make all the difference towards being selected, because we need to know that you're vaguely capable of conveying what you want to share to the audience.