How I gave my first tech meetup talk 🎤

#career #motivation #devrel #codenewbie

I've been speaking in tech for just over five years, and while I wouldn't call myself a regular on stage yet, I've done a lot of different kinds of public speaking in tech, including meetup talks, presentations at work, conference speaking, and giving a small workshop, and I have also mentored at Global Diversity CFP Day events.

I've learned a lot about speaking, but starting up in my tech career, being a speaker seemed really far away, so I would like to share how I got my foot in the door as a speaker through the Boston Go meetup.

Finding where to speak and what to talk about

After college, I had seen tweets from some of my old friends about speaking at tech events and saw talks at Boston PHP and Boston Python meetups from web developers. I knew I wanted to be doing that someday. However, I had no idea where I would start, and confidence does not really come naturally for me, so to me tech speakers seemed almost mythical, even though I had given presentations for school all the time.

One of the misconceptions I had at the time from seeing other people's talks about advanced topics, though, was that to be a speaker, you had to be an expert in your topic. So as I was studying Node.js and doing projects with it in order to become a web developer, I wasn't really looking for places to speak at.

Around the fall though, I switched over to Go because I was interested in its type safety and concurrency, and it couldn't've been better-timed, because a couple weeks later on Meetup, I saw that Boston had just gotten a Go meetup! I went to that #GopherDen's first couple events, and then right before the new year, I saw a message that they were looking for speakers for an upcoming meetup on web development.

It turned out that I had already built a small Go web app in order to transfer what I knew from Node over to Go, so I had the idea for my talk topic: learning Gorilla (a Go web routing package) from Express.js! I wrote to the organizers immediately asking "is Gorilla already taken as a topic?", in an email that was a bit... eager. Eager because, that call for proposals had only went out 10 minutes ago (meetup organizers often have to wait days or even weeks to get a speaker lineup)! Just like that, I was in; the first step to being one of those "mythical" speakers was complete!

Writing the slides and giving my talk

In order to design my slides, I actually started by converting what I knew about Gorilla and Express into this blog post. Unfortunately I don't have the actual slides of this talk anymore, but my talk more or less followed the format of this post: I showed how I would put different kinds of HTTP endpoints on an Express.js router, how I'd do the same thing on a Gorilla Mux router then show the webpages we were serving on the two routers.

I liked this flow for my talk because it could allow me to highlight what I personally liked best about switching from Express to Go: the code for a Gorilla router has a very similar structure to the code for an Express router. So I could use that format to compare and contrast the code and show how a Node developer might get started in a Go web app. I also really liked the examples because I could use the sloth pictures to put my personality into this tutorial-style talk.

For preparing and actually giving the talk, that misconception that I had to be an expert in the material did affect my slide design. I was just three months into using Go for backend web development, and had never worked at a startup, so with a lot of impostor syndrome about presenting, I had spent a lot of time making my slides look perfect, namely doing Go syntax highlighting by hand, and showing more code on an individual slide than I actually needed to.

To rehearse the talk, I did a lot of practicing by myself, and came up to my parents' house for the weekend to present to them and my doggo Lola the Micropanda.

I was still real nervous about the real thing, but I knew I was so close to becoming a speaker. On January 19, I came to the meetup at Brightcove in Boston, and gave this talk. I basically presented it with tips I learned in school, like projecting my voice and finishing at the end by asking "any questions?". This was partly from being new to tech speaking, but it was also to have the mindset that giving this talk isn't that different from at school, except that my audience wants to be there.

Overall, this talk went way better than I thought it would, and the sloth jokes were a hit! Mission slothfully complete! 🦥🌺

What I learned from this talk

From making this talk and giving it, even though the talk itself was a simple topic and not too different from a school talk, I still learned a ton about tech speaking at meetups and conferences, so here are my big takeaways.

The big one I learned, is you don't have to be an expert or "10x" engineer to be a speaker. In fact, as I learned at Global Diversity CFP Day three years later, talks from newcomers have broad appeal; presenting from a newcomer's perspective helps your talk click with someone else who's just getting started. Meanwhile, if someone's more experienced with your topic, they can see what it's like for someone to learn it today.
If you've got a talk idea, reach out! A big secret for meetups in particular is that often organizers really want new speakers in their lineup! So if you have an idea of a meetup to present at, check the group's page to see how to submit a talk. A lot of clubs have a page on papercall.io or a Google Form to manage talk proposals, but if they don't, you might just send an email or Meetup direct message letting the organizers know you want to speak. An organizer might even be interested in helping you practice!
Find your style speaking. I mentioned that my first talk was school-style, but with you're not limited to that style. So as you keep speaking, you should experiment with how you present. As Saron Yitbarek talks about in this video, the audience wants to hear you share something, so a style that matches your personality and lets you present more confidently will make your talks even more engaging! As an example from my own technique, I really like presenting in a conversational style, so nowadays I still put jokes in my slides, and I also like to ask the audience questions, and go for a longer Q&A when I can.

If you're new to tech speaking, you're way closer to it than you might think. I hope this story is helpful to you if you're getting your foot in the door. If you wanna speak, by all means gopher it 🐹!

Shoutout to Cat Turner for peer-reviewing this post!