DEV Community: Umar Hansa

The Benefits of Speaking at Tech Conferences

Umar Hansa — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:28:05 +0000

I’m a web developer. Having spoken at a few tech conferences, I thought I’d share some benefits I experienced through speaking️. If you’re considering speaking, maybe this article can provide some extra insight.

When you decide to speak at a conference, it’s not just that 20–40 minute talk slot you’re involved with. Other factors come into play like preparation, travel and money.

There are some more obvious benefits, such as learning new technologies, getting out of your comfort zone, and personal branding. But in this article, I hope to share some of the less obvious benefits, such as traveling, easier access to future conferences, and some other aspects.

For me, the biggest benefit is travel️. All-expenses-paid trips to new countries can be really great. If you want to go traveling but money’s an issue, being a speaker at an international conference can help with that.

I’ve been lucky enough to explore the Netherlands (🇳🇱), United States (🇺🇸)️, Ireland (🇮🇪)️, Czech Republic (🇨🇿)️, Switzerland (🇨🇭)️, Poland (🇵🇱)️, Ukraine (🇺🇦)️, Romania (🇷🇴)️, Greece (🇬🇷)️, Germany (🇩🇪) ️and more. All I really paid for was food and additional accommodations.

There are huge benefits to traveling in general which I won’t cover here, but you can research yourself. Conference organizers are usually happy to help you explore their city in a way which makes you comfortable. They can tell you the good spots to go to without you having to read through endless TripAdvisor reviews which have questionable integrity. You can ask organizers for advice at pretty much any stage, and they’ll try to accommodate you.

If you have a partner or a close friend 👬, you may both be able to tick off traveling from your bucket lists. If you ask the organizers, your partner can probably attend the conference and speaker’s dinner too. They may not be interested in the conference topics, but it will still be an experience for them to see you speak. On a few occasions, I requested the organizers book a flight for my partner too, and this typically came out of my speaker payment️.

Most of these visits are through conferences. Not shown: U.S. where I attended Google I/O a few times and spoke in New York

I find a good strategy is for your partner or friend to explore the city independently while you’re at the conference. You can meet up afterwards. But the real benefit of the ‘travel’ aspect is through the extra days you book where you don’t have important commitments to attend to.

The trick is to extend the days you’re located within that country. When the conference has a decent budget, the organizers will pay for your flights plus a few nights at a hotel, but you can request the return flight is (for example) one week after the conference️. In between, you’ll want to stay at an Airbnb or a hostel, rather than the expensive hotel they book for you on conference nights.

On one occasion, I negotiated with the conference organizer to cover a very cheap Airbnb for me and my partner for a whole week instead of a fancy hotel for a few nights. All we had to pay for was food and bus tickets for that whole trip.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Accommodations

In my experience, it’s almost always been super fancy hotels by my standards. It feels unusual at times, but definitely an interesting experience. If the conference pays for your hotel, they’ll probably include a hotel breakfast too!

Tasty!

When you arrive at the conference city, rather than paying lots of money for a roaming data plan, the organizers can hook you up with a prepaid sim card which includes data. Make sure you ask about this if you believe you’ll benefit from it.

Some conference give speaker gifts 🎁️ too, which is very nice. It’s also very touching to receive a handwritten card. Extra touches like these create strong positive vibes on the trip and makes the overall event a rewarding experience. Be careful to manage expectations with yourself however, otherwise you’ll take these things for granted.

Local snacks, travel card and a sim card

Fancy chocolate

One time, I received a wireless keyboard plus fitness tracker as a gift, which was a surprise!

When you network with conference organizers, it’s not unheard of that you’ll be invited back again in the future, maybe as a speaker or an attendee. I was once fortunate enough to be invited back to run a workshop.

Stole this after the workshop, it’s now my new duvet cover

Networking allows you to gravitate towards people you care about. Here are some types of networking I’ve observed and experienced:

A previous speaker had returned as a photographer (so there’s room to grow into other roles if you meet the right people).
Another previous speaker had taken over the video editing work a conference needed. I guess a dedicated audio/video production team would normally be contacted, but in this case the organizers went with someone they knew personally.
Sometimes, attendees who work at cool companies happen to work nearby, and it’s not uncommon to get invited to their workplace for a lunch and chat…and maybe pool.

Oxford, UK

Flights

The organizers pay for an economy return flight on the dates I ask for. On multiple occasions I’ve asked if I can stop-over in a new country and usually pay for the extra flight cost.

Tip: You may want to do the stop-over in your return journey since your talk would have finished by that point.

On a few occasions, after arriving at the conference destination, the organizers were waiting for me at the airport to direct me to a taxi which took me straight to the hotel — very convenient.

If you might want to use public transport later on, you can ask the organizer what sort of travel card to buy (airports sometimes sell these) — this can also be useful if you don’t speak their local language.

Prague, Czech Republic

Subject

A note on recycling talks: that is, giving the same talk at multiple conferences. Generally, this is fine. If in doubt, ask the organizers.

Once you’ve given a talk, you can reuse the following at a new conference:

📑️ Your talk proposal document (such as ‘In my talk, the audience will learn…’) which you send to the organizers for them to consider you
📽️ Slides
💬️ Speech

And those three reusable points can save many days worth of preparation. Realistically, you’ll iterate upon your slides but for the most part things can stay the same.

You’ll have to use common sense to decide when to stop reusing your talk, however one big factor for me is: when do I stop learning? If I continuously reuse the same talk, I won’t have any new topics to learn about. Using a conference talk is a great excuse to learn a new technology, technique or concept.

Branding

Speaking even just once allows you to build and maintain a personal brand. This can help with future speaking gigs and work opportunities. For example I met the CEO of a company which I was later employed by. I met this CEO during the break of one conference right after they complimented my talk!

By building my brand, I’m pleased to say I’ve been a Google Developer Expert for over 7 years ✨️!

Note: conference speaking has helped, but is not the main reason I was accepted into the GDE program.

After

When you arrive back home after a conference, you’ll want to take a retrospective look on what happened️. For example:

What did you gain and was the whole thing worth it?
How was timing and pacing during the talk?
Did you feel fully prepared before the talk? If not, what was left to do?

For myself, it’s inevitable that I’ll feel motivated and passionate to achieve new life goals. This probably sounds cheesy, but that’s the effect of being put into a new location with a new routine!

A while after my talks, I sometimes get:

💌️ A thank you email
🖼️ Professionally shot photographs of me speaking
📼️ A video link of my talk

So if ever I need a normal looking photo of myself, maybe to use as a profile picture somewhere, or because an employer is asking, I can use the ‘professional’ looking photo.

My conference talk videos have helped me out too:

If I ask to speak at a new conference, I can simply send that video link to the organizers so they get a feel for my speaking skills.
If done tastefully, you can include a link to your video in job application cover letters, it normally reflects well.
When I watch my talk well after I’ve presented it, I pick up on all sorts of mistakes which helps me improve for next time.

When I receive the video from the conference organizers, which is after the conference has finished, I embark upon one final task. Getting conference talk material online so others can benefit.

For my conference talk at ScotlandJS, I went through a few steps to get the slides online 🌐️:

Removed any references which don’t make sense in a non-speech environment.
Replaced all live demos with either videos, or code demos.
Link to the video from the slides.

This combination of steps helps ensures the content is still useful to the tech community after the talk is given. I’ll also leave a comment in the YouTube video linking to the slides. Where possible, I’ll go through the video and collect timestamps️ corresponding to the individual topics. This is so folks can easily jump to parts of the video without having to watch the whole thing.

Timestamps link to a specific point in the YouTube video

All of this post-conference activity doesn’t take very long, helps provide value to the community, and results in building up your personal brand. If your content is good, your talk will live on!

Tip: If you speak about a niche or specialized topic, there’s a chance you’ll be presented with opportunities 👥 for work as and when others in the industry encounter your slides and video.

Employers

There are many industries where the employer will not support you in attending conferences, but tech is not one of them.

I’ve written some advice on this topic before, go and have a read if you think it applies to you.

Almost all of my employers have supported me in attending conferences. This means:

I can attend a conference during ‘work time’ 💻️ without booking holiday.
I can travel during ‘work time’ as the conference will increase my skill set for work.
I don’t always get paid for speaking, when this happens, a few employers allowed me to expense transport costs.
To solidify what I’ve learned and to share knowledge with my peers, they’ll encourage me to give an internal tech talk which in turn increases my evangelism skills.

Some employers ask you to book holiday if you are speaking at a conference. They might do this if they feel the conference topics are unrelated to what you do, or maybe they’ve never allowed such a thing before. If so, consider communicating to your line manager about the benefits of you speaking or even attending a conference.

Here are a few things to watch out for:

Sometimes I end up in interesting situations like:

In this photo, I believe a local television network wanted me to say nice things about the developer community in their city but I get nervous with those things. Looking back, it’s really no biggie if you pass on an opportunity you’re uncomfortable/shy/nervous about!

Another example is a Q&A session after your talk, if you’re not into it, just let the organizers know as early as possible so they can have an alternative plan. Looking back on this opportunity and many others, I don’t regret a single one!

Each Q&A, panel session, group chat and recorded interview was an honor to be part of and I am glad I did it.

People thinking you’re smarter than you are

I am a front-end web developer. With all the speaking, some employers and potential employers end up thinking I’m much more skilled than I actually am.

Not everyone makes the distinction between evangelism and web development. Many speakers I’ve seen are real experts at their craft so this won’t apply to everyone, just something to think about.

A wrong way to travel?

I don’t really think there are right and wrong ways to travel since people desire different experiences which changes throughout one’s life. I feel a lot of my traveling for conference were very luxurious (such as airport pickups). This is however totally within my control, if I want a more independent experience, I can simply mention I don’t need an airport pickup and fancy hotels to the organizers.

Just a heads up however, doing conference speaking for long enough can warp your perspective of what it means to travel.

Conclusion / Recap

Speaking at a conference is a unique experience:

You’ll get out of your comfort zone
You’ll learn a new technology (assuming your talk is about something you don’t already know)
You’ll build a network of friends
You may receive some cool speaker gifts
You’ll get to explore a new location and culture
You can get a holiday out of the whole experience while paying very low expenses — your partner or friend can also share this benefit
You’ll have a bunch of resources and assets from your talk which you can use in CV’s, cover letters and portfolios
You’ll improve your personal brand and evangelism skills
You’ll get out of your usual routine and be exposed to a different culture

Public speaking will bring a bunch of goodness to you regardless of the industry. Here’s a big list of call for papers where you can submit a talk proposal and have the organizers consider your talk.

For my next talk, I’ll get some videos up onto my YouTube channel so you can understand exactly what goes into preparing for a conference.

I post lots of developer tips on Twitter — also, if you have any questions or you’d like to work together, get in touch with me through Twitter.
I have a mailing list for Chrome DevTools tips.
I also post on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram
Conference badges

A post shared by Umar Hansa (@umarhansa) on Dec 1, 2016 at 12:32am PST

Data Visualisation with 1 Billion Shazam Music Recognitions

Umar Hansa — Tue, 26 May 2020 13:18:16 +0000

While at university, I joined Shazam as part time web developer. I stayed at Shazam for 5 enjoyable years. This post is about one hackday project I worked on. The project involves plotting one billion Shazam recognitions onto a blank canvas, and then observing the result.

This post also touches upon the process I used to create the visuals.

What is a ‘Shazam recognition’

Think of a Shazam recognition like this. You open up Shazam, the mobile app, and have it ‘listen’ for a piece of music that’s playing in the background. A recognition is the successful identification of the song.

Location data

A user may opt-in to sharing their location data with Shazam. Shazam then makes some of the anonymised location data (latitude and longitude) available to employees, depending on their use case.

Having anonymised location data to visualise was a cool experience. It taught me a lot about processing large datasets, visualisations which tell a story, and visualisations which look pretty but don’t do anything else.

The visualisation

One thing you need to know, all visualisations follow this idea: One dot represents one successful recognition. Dots are plotted onto a geographical coordinate system. This is not the same as taking a Google Map and then plotting location markers over it.

Chicago, London, New York, Full

Zoomed into New York

I have used colour to differentiate between Android and iOS. Can you guess which is which? Hint: Look at the major cities. Which device type do you think is prevalent there?

Android: Red
iOS: Blue

If you look closely the the dot maps, you can notice clear definitions for the roads. This can be explained by passengers who are Shazam’ing music playing from car speakers.

I also made maps with alternative colour schemes.

Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, United Kingdom

Interactive Maps

I thought it would be fun to visualise the map interactively. In the same way you would drag/zoom on a Google Map, what if you could also drag/zoom a Shazam map? This element of interactivity is what encourages people to use, explore and learn from the maps. Rather than just being something static that you never revisit.

To do this, I needed to generate millions of map ‘tiles’. For example, here are some tiles of London, taken from Google Maps.

Each tile is a separate image. Take note of the different zoom levels. As you might guess, when you drag and zoom on a Google Map, it presents many different images to you, the images are referred to as map tiles.

Here are the tiles of the Shazam Map.

In total, I created over 40GB worth of tile data. This is because of the zoom level I had specified. A high zoom level means those viewing the map are able to zoom into a greater level.

Upon reviewing the visualisations with colleagues, we kept wondering: What “place” was in the location of large clusters. For example, was it a music venue where people would frequently be using Shazam?

To help answer this question, I had an idea: What if I used a location service to determine what places are currently present. To do this, I used the Google Maps Places API. Every time you scroll to a new location, I query Google Maps API to ask the question: What places are within this location?

When using this feature, we began to realise that clusters of dots would typically be the result of: cafes, night clubs, shopping centers, convenience stores and others.

I also synced a Mapbox map (similar to Google Maps) so as you drag and zoom into the Shazam map, the other ‘regular’ map would move around also. This allows you to quickly identify what geographic location you are currently looking at

The code

Like with everything I do, I’m only benefiting from hard work done by others in our community. All credit goes to Eric Fischer for their excellent work on datamaps. If you follow the instructions on that Github repository, you’ll be able to make your own visualisations. You’ll need a dataset consisting of longitude and latitude points, you might find something on Github, for example, awesome-public-datasets.

If you end up trying it out: here are a few notes I made for myself which you might find useful.

First, you need a big long list of latitudes and longitudes. However to even get hold of that data, you might have to do extra work. In my case, I got it from an internal Shazam API. I used a Node module called fast-csv to parse data. Using streams in this fashion makes parsing large data (gigabytes worth) simple to do.

csv.fromStream(stream,{headers : true}).on('data', handleRecord);

The handleRecord function does this:

function handleRecord(record) {  
   const location = tag.location.latitude + ',' + tag.location.longitude;  
   console.log(location);  
}

The output looks something like:

lat,lon

-22.1028,166.1833

29.8075,-95.4113

51.2168,-0.8045

27.3007,-82.5221

20.5743,-100.3793

-36.0451,146.9267

26.7554,-81.4237

At this point, you can begin to plug it into data maps (there are detailed instructions within the project documentation).

Following the documentation long enough, I arrived at a point where I could create the final image. To create a datamap of London, specify the bounding box as location coordinates that you wish to capture:

./render -A -- output 14 51.641353 -0.447693 51.333508 0.260925 > london.png

Because I created the same static maps so often (when experimenting with colour for example), I decided to script the whole process. Being a web developer, I did this all in Node.js, however a simple Bash script would have been fine. First, I made an object containing all the maps I wanted to render.

Data structure to render all maps

Then it was a case of constructing the command you saw earlier, but for each location entry in that JSON block you see in the image above.

Presenting

At Shazam, there were multiple hack days. Then after a few months, was a demo day. You presented your hack day work on the demo day. Showing folks this particular project was well received.

To those developers creating command-line applications or going on code refactoring adventures during hack days, consider that a demo day audience may prefer more visual demos, rather than technical (this has been my experience). One way around this is: blog about what you’ve done and share the resources after, skipping a live demo entirely. Or even better, figure out how to distill technical concepts to a non-technical audience, introduce more visuals, and continue to give your demo to a live audience. It’s harder, but more rewarding.

High resolution images of the data maps

Note: You can zoom into these images with the Google Photos interface

World — Notice which countries/cities have high iOS usage
United Kingdom — Notice the cities
Toronto
San Francisco
Paris

Conclusion

I’m grateful to Shazam for encouraging us to learn new skills and technologies. Also thanks to Eric Fischer for developing the datamaps project in the first place! If you have access to location data, consider the many interesting ways of visualising it. You could also try using Tweets from the Twitter API, just make sure they have location data attached to them.

Want to see more like this?

Follow me on Twitter: @umaar and let me know! I try & tweet out lots of web development resources.

Please like and share if you enjoyed reading my article and leave a comment with your experiences in data visualisation.