I have to come clean.
Speaking at APIWorld this past week wasn’t actually my first talk acceptance. I had a talk accepted a few years ago, but the conference itself was ultimately cancelled due to the lack of sponsors. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a slight bit relieved at the time. I was prepared to deliver the best talk I could regardless of the circumstance but I battled so heavily with belonging that the thought of getting on stage to share my opinion terrified me.
Fast forward to two days ago, I finally took the stage after mainly speaking at and hosting company meetups over the years. This time was different. To me, it wasn’t about belonging. That wasn’t the headliner in my mind. It wasn’t about feeling worthy either. It was about sharing about this thing I built and how it helped me see the correlation between two approaches to deploying AI into production. Two approaches that are more complimentary to each other than I think a lot of folks realize.
But the stage wasn’t the preparation, it was the fruit of everything that happened off stage. The months building the project, writing bad CFPs, getting feedback (thanks Nnenna Ndukwe), going back to the drawing board, and writing a CFP for a session I, myself would actually want to attend.
Here’s a few things I learned from delivering my first talk:
1. Your talk can be innovative without being inauthentic.
There will be so much temptation to find a trend and build a CFP or talk around it, but that wasn’t working for me.
The goal of conferences is to bring curious minds together from far and wide to strategize on where we’re going, being honest about where we are, and using where we’ve been to inform the others.
With that said, it is far greater to speak about what you’re excited about and if it just so happens to align with an industry great, but don’t force it.
Which leads to the next point, do study trends and build with tools and technologies like MCP, agentic best practices, etc.
So trends become a way of doing, not hype, and you’re solving real problems and when the time comes to write a CFP for it, you’re speaking from experience.
2. The gap between awareness and adoption is still real
Technology is moving fast, adoption at the top doesn’t always trickle down to the masses as quickly.
There are folks who need to know where to start just as much as those intermediate who want the latest and greatest.
And constantly making this bridge accessible through giving new perspectives of already established things like the impact of LLMs on APIs for instance is a start.
3. Stay witty my friends
I aspire to allow my wit to shine more as I speak in these spaces. This may seem like an odd point here, but go with me.
Name a memorable conference talk you watched that didn’t have even a sprinkle of wit in it.
All day everyday, we’re discussing some weighty stuff, highly technical with an undertone of the chaos happening in the world.
So folks come into these talks with all this on their mind and sometimes it can keep them from the enjoyment of learning.
In our desire, to learn something to land a good job or look favorable in our industry, I don’t want us to lose that.
So wit is a way to loosen everyone up and say hey just enjoy the moment, learn something and let’s have a good time. Never underestimate the power of wit to prepare folks for learning not just listening to another talk.
A note on speaker preparation:
Write the script, practice it until, in the words of the late great Prince, “It seeps into the floorboards” and I’ll add let it seep it into the walls from you practicing, reciting aloud tweaking, so it’s airtight. Record yourself saying the script, then play it back as you navigate between slides.
So write the script, practice it, then on stage let it breathe, meaning you’ll have set with the material long enough to see a slide and know the point you’re trying to make and convey the message in your own words, ie speak extemporaneously.
And if none of this makes sense, I’ll just say my account was hacked and we’ll pretend this never happened.
Kapeesh?
Check out my slides and project here.
https://github.com/arober39/decor-agent
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