Hey lovely readers,
If you don’t know me, I’m Lou, and I’ve been public speaking for over 3 years now internationally, giving about 10 speaker sessions a year. But if you're just starting, you might be wondering: how do you get to speak on big stages? Do you need a completely new talk every time? And what about getting paid?
Some speakers have a big following on Twitter (X) or YouTube, or they work for companies like Microsoft or Apple, so getting a spot at big conferences is easier for them. For the rest of us, it takes a bit more effort, and a lot more applications.
Let's dive in and figure it out together. I'll break down how I got started, answer your questions, and share all the practical tips and advice of things I’ve learned over the years.
Table of content
How to get started
I got started with speaking just after COVID because I was super active on Twitter, and got invited to talk at WeAreDevelopers Congress that has about 15,000 attendees every year. It was an awesome experience, but I’d never suggest doing your first tech talk in a country where you don’t speak the native language, especially in a packed room of 500 people.
Instead, start small. Practice in a more relaxed setting, like local meetups. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, there’s probably a group near you. Attend a few events, watch how speakers handle their flow, gestures, and tone.
Maybe even more important, get to know the organizers. Ask them what inspired them to start the group, and when/if you feel comfortable, mention that you’d love to speak too. Since many meetups host events 6 to 12 times a year, chances are they’ll welcome you with open arms. Don’t stress too much about having the perfect session; everyone starts somewhere. Even if your first talk isn’t flawless, most people won’t remember the rough spots for long.
To find local meetups, head over to meetup.com, look up the biggest city near you as the location, and filter by category “Technology” with event type set to “In person.”
Creating your first session
Did the meetup organizers say yes to you speaking at their event, or did you find another event for your debut talk? That’s awesome!
Most events will need three things from you: a talk abstract, a speaker bio, and a picture of you.
Brainstorm
Of course, the first thing that you’ll do is brainstorm what you actually want to talk about. What is your favorite tech stack? Are there any new features in your favorite coding language that you want to learn more about? Did you learn something really interesting while working on an open source project? Is there something that developers do that you think could be done better?
Think about these kinds of things and make a short list for yourself. Don’t worry if the topic sounds ‘too beginner’ to you. In my experience, the ‘introductory’ level sessions are the ones that fill up rooms the quickest.
Talk abstract
Now that you have some ideas in mind, you’re going to write an abstract for a couple of them. Talk abstracts explain what you'll cover during your session. It lets attendees know what they'll learn and helps organizers decide which sessions to include in their schedule if they have multiple sessions to choose from.
Everyone has their own style for writing abstracts. Here’s my approach:
- First paragraph: Grab attention with a question or a bold statement (e.g., “Does X annoy you?”, “Imagine a world where Y is possible,” or “Have you ever wondered about W?”).
- Second paragraph: Give a brief introduction to the tech or topic you’re discussing.
- Third paragraph: Explain what the audience will learn and how, maybe through live coding demos or interactive examples.
- Final paragraph: End with a call to action (e.g., “Join me if you want to solve X once and for all” or “Attend this session to dive deep into Y”).
Here’s an example abstract that I’ve written about rubber duck debugging:
“Do you ever get stuck on a bug and wonder if a simple chat could solve it? Imagine if your trusty rubber duck could help you solve those coding challenges.
In this session, we’re diving into rubber duck debugging, a silly, yet super effective way to troubleshoot your code. I’ll share how talking through your problems with a rubber duck can reveal hidden issues and helps you find fresh insights.
You’ll see live demos where I break down the debugging process, show real-world examples, and explain how this simple method can save you time and frustration. Join me, grab a rubber duck, and let’s turn this fun technique into your solution for cleaner, more efficient code.”
The most important thing to note here is not to let AI generate full talk abstracts for you. If you’re sending this in for a conference, these people will notice that it’s AI-generated within seconds and decline your session. Use AI for inspiration for the structure of your talk abstract, let it help you with grammatical errors, but do not let it take over the abstract completely.
Talk title
Now that you have your abstract, you need to come up with an attention-grabbing title. I normally always format it like this [Core idea] : [Short phrase to explain the session]. A couple of examples of of talk titles I use:
- Modern C# : A Dive into the Community's Most Loved New Features.
- Azure functions: From Zero to Hero.
- Minimal APIs vs Controller-Based APIs: Finding the Best Fit for Your .NET Projects.
If I had to come up with a talk about rubber duck debugging. It would probably be something like “Let’s go rubber ducking: How a little duck can help you solve coding challenges”
I often let AI come up with a list of ideas and then mix and match until I find something that I’m happy with. Also, notice that every single one of them is in title case? That makes it look more professional. Some websites can help you with transforming text into title case, like this title case converter website.
Speaker bio
The speaker bio is just the introduction to who you are, so that the attendees have an idea of who they’re listening to and what your experience level is like.
Speaker bios must be short, to the point, informative, and written in third person.
Here’s an example of a format that I would recommend:
”[First name] [Last name] is a [career title], with a passion for [whatever tech you’re interested in]. While working in tech, they really enjoyed working on [whatever project you’re proud of].
Apart from being a [career title], they love to share knowledge about [topics you want to talk about].”
Of course, feel free to add hobbies that might be interesting, events you might organize or are part of, volunteer work, awards you have, information about content creation, etc. Most importantly, keep it short and to the point.
Picture
For speaker pictures, the same rules count as pictures on LinkedIn. It should be a professional-looking picture, no obvious selfies, no group picture cutout. And your face should be clearly visible, also as a small profile picture format on a phone, for example.
Getting inspired
Do you need more inspiration for your speaker bio or talk abstracts? Take a look at my GitHub repository: https://github.com/lovelacecoding/awesome-sessionize-profiles
Getting on Sessionize
If you want to get into conferences or bigger meetups, you will need a Sessionize account. Sessionize is the biggest platform for public speakers. You can put all your talk abstracts on here and your speaker bio, and easily apply those to multiple conferences.
If you go to Sessionize.com, you will be greeted by this homepage:
As a speaker, you can click on ‘Try For Free’ and choose a way to start your account. I would advise using ‘Classic login’ in case you want to get rid of your social media accounts at some point. Most importantly, pick an email address that you check quite often.
Once you’ve done that, Sessionize will ask you for a picture and a speaker bio. You already made those if you followed this blog post, so add them in there.
Once you have everything filled out on your account, your overview will look something like this:
Sessions
On the sidebar, there’s a ‘Sessions’ tab.
On the session tab, you can add a session by clicking the “Add Session” button. You can also edit, archive, or delete sessions on there once you’ve added some sessions later on.
Click on “Add Session” and add those sessions you’ve written abstracts for earlier.
Once added, you will see it appear under ‘Active Sessions’ and later it will also show you at which conferences you submitted it for.
Public Profile
If you click on ‘Your Public Profile’ in the sidebar, it will take you to your public profile page.
This page is what other people see if they visit your Sessionize account through an abstract submission or through a search engine like Google.
Your sessions, where you selected 'Show in my public profile' in the Session tab while adding it, show up here, as well as your speaker bio, and your profile picture. You can add a banner and socials in here as well.
This is my public account. Keep in mind that you will not get the ‘Most Active Speaker’ badge and/or the Microsoft MVP badge. Those are both because I’ve been public speaking a lot. You will not have any badges starting out.
Finding Conferences
So you’ve given a couple of sessions at meetups now, and now you want to try bigger stages or get out there internationally. There are a lot of conferences every year for every possible tech stack. Some are huge (up to 20k attendees), while some are smaller (200 attendees). Some are close by (car distance) and some are far away (12 hours by plane). Some are online, while others are offline. In this chapter, I’ll help you find conferences, apply, and hopefully get approved.
What to keep in mind
There are a lot of conferences for lots of different developers, to filter out some of these conferences there are some things you have to decide for yourself:
- Most conferences will pay for you to fly over and stay in a hotel near the conference if you’re speaking at their event, but not all of them do. Are you willing and able to pay for your own stay and/or travel?
- There are conferences around the world, so how far away are you willing or able to travel?
- There are online and offline conferences. Do you feel comfortable giving a talk in front of just a webcam, or do you only want to do an offline audience?
- There’s always a timeslot. When starting, it’s important to decide if you feel comfortable giving longer sessions. Are you okay with 60-minute talks, or do you only feel comfortable with 15-20 minutes
The more flexible you are, the more places you can apply to. However, keep in mind what you’re comfortable with and what your boundaries are. I only did talks up to 30 minutes for well over a year, just because 60 minutes sounded intimidating to me. Personally, I also would never talk at a conference that makes its attendees pay for a ticket but is not willing to pay for at least my hotel. But those are my boundaries; you should decide what works for you.
Finding conferences
Once you've made those decisions for yourself. The first way to find conferences is through Sessionize itself. If you look at the sidebar, you will see a ‘Discover events’ tab.
In here, you can find conferences or meetups that fit your interests that are open to receiving applications. If you click on one of the conferences, you can find info like their location, the date, what kind of sessions they are looking for, and if they pay for travel and / or the stay.
Not every conference has a submission page on Sessionize. If you want to see what else is out there, I recommend taking a look at the following websites:
https://cfp.watch/
https://nexttechevent.com/
Decide what you want to talk about
Every conference has different tracks and different kinds of developers attending. You need to keep this in mind before you apply. Of course, you’ve already decided what kind of timeslots you feel comfortable with, and what kind of financial compensation you expect, so that’s the first thing you look at. If that's all what you expect it to be, you select the session abstract that you want to submit with.
You can apply with the abstracts you just added to your sessions page by selecting 'session from your speaker profile' and then selecting the abstract you want to apply with in the dropdown.
Put some time and effort into putting it on the correct track, and make sure it fits the conference. Don’t submit .NET talks for a Java conference. Don’t try to submit with Python talks if it’s an Azure conference unless it’s Python with a bit of Azure. Altering an existing abstract to fit a conference more (I changed a talk from React to VueJS before for a VueJS conference) is totally fine.
Keep in mind not to spam conferences with session abstracts unless they explicitly say otherwise. I have had conversations with conference organizers who mentioned that some people apply with 10 or more abstracts. In those cases, they are often automatically rejected because it comes across as spamming. Giving program committees options is great, but three to four abstracts is usually the sweet spot.
Some other tips
There are some other things I’ve learned over the years that can help with applying. The first thing is to look at the schedule of the event last year, look at what kind of talks were selected a lot, and let that decide what abstract you’re going to apply with. You can pick an abstract similar to what was very popular last year, or pick something that you haven’t seen at all yet in their schedule.
Another tip is to always leave a supportive note or extra comments for the conference organizers to look at if that option is available. Very often when you apply, there’s an ‘additional notes’ section at the very bottom that only organizers can see.
Tell them, ‘best of luck with selecting the best sessions’ for some extra support. Tell them that you've been to this conference before as an attendee if that's the case. Add a link with recordings, demos, blogs, or slides for them to look at what you’ve done before. Program committees do hard work, checking and rating a lot of abstracts, so a nice comment or extra information for them to make good informed decisions, is really appreciated.
Dealing with rejection
Some conferences will never tell you whether you were accepted or rejected, and you will figure it out through their speaker page on their website. Others will reject you multiple times in a row. Getting into the speaker world is not easy, especially when you start applying internationally. That is why starting with local meetups is such a good first step.
Even if you've done meetups, getting accepted to conferences is, and always will be, difficult. Most of the time you will be rejected, sometimes close to every submission you send out, and that is normal. It is something every speaker has to get used to.
There are many reasons for rejection that have nothing to do with you. A conference might already have too many talks on the same topic, your session might not fit the focus of that specific edition, or it might simply come down to limited slots and tough choices.
It is not personal. Keep applying, keep refining your abstracts, and keep going.
That’s a wrap!
Now you know how to write abstracts, how to find conferences, how to apply to conferences, and how to deal with rejections.
In part 2, I will talk about what happens after you get accepted. We will look at preparing your talk and demos, dealing with nerves, and what the actual day of the event looks like.
If you have questions, experiences to share, or things you are unsure about, feel free to leave a comment under this post. You can also find me on my socials if you would rather reach out there.
Top comments (1)
This is an excellent, very practical guide—especially for first-time speakers. I really liked the emphasis on starting with meetups, writing honest abstracts, and not over-submitting to conferences. The notes on rejection and boundaries felt very real. Super helpful post. 👏