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> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b > [...] > This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded present
by eganist 10y ago
> Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b
> [...]
> This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas and build an argument.
Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up.
One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences.
It helps, but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.
- krschultz 10y agoHad you presented to the meetup before applying or only after you knew that you were accepted in the conference? Even having done a talk once is far better than most applications.
- eganist 10y agoDelivered it deliberately in preparation for a submission (i.e. before we even submitted the talks but knowing full well that that would be the end goal). Both the talk and delivery were engineered with those audiences in mind, so we restricted recording and distribution of the talk at the prior OWASP meetup until after it was published at BH/DC. It didn't go all that smoothly at DEF CON (which I'll freely attribute to us both being conference noobs), but it went pretty well overall, all things considered. Don't know if we'll have anything interesting to talk about next year, but I'm looking forward to potentially doing it again.
- st3v3r 10y agoI don't think the article is saying those without experience shouldn't apply. It's just saying that, if you don't have experience, even if your abstract was good, that's probably why you weren't selected.
- hjnilsson 10y agoIndeed, I've been on program committees were we have picked first-time speakers. Usually because the subject seems very compelling, and there is very little overlap with other submitted talks. If the situation is: We have 5 talks on "Getting started with Xamarin". You pick the experienced speaker, but there is only 1 talk on "Implement your backend in Swift" it is much more likely to get picked.