5 ms·

I'm quite envious of conference speakers. I would love the experience but I never have any solid ideas that I think I could turn into a good talk.

dkersten 9y ago
I'm similar. I give a lot of talks in the local clojure meetup (I'm one of the organisers, so I'm often the fallback speaker when nobody else is available). I find it difficult to come up with good talks for that, but I guess I manage (passably). For conference talks though... I always draw a blank. I've wanted to give talks a bunch of times but could never come up with something that I would be interested in talking about, that I am knowledgeable enough to be confident talking about, and that is interesting for others too.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  I think this should be approached backwards - FIRST one should have a good idea that he wants shared with the world and only then he should consider giving a talk about it (vs other mediums of communicating the idea). A talk is just a tool, not and end in itself. A btw, wanting to give talks because successful people give talks is a cargo cult.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    Of course, which is why I've never given a conference talk. I haven't got anything I feel like I should share. The desire to give a talk is because public speaking is something I want to be better at, because sometimes I've had opportunities where I could have talked about something but didn't feel confident enough due to lack of experience. Also, my employer would like me to give talks, but again, I don't feel confident enough to do so. At some point you just have to take the plunge and I'd rather do it at a generally friendly tech conference talking about something I'm interested in, before I do this in a more hostile environment. Maybe that's too selfish a way to look at conference talks...
masklinn 9y ago
You could always start with poster sessions or tutorials if a conference you like/are interested in has that.
- d33 9y ago
  Or lightning talks. I guess that the worst case scenario if something goes wrong is not that bad there.
tomekowal 9y ago
To me ideas just come unexpectedly and often because I see someone mistaken https://www.xkcd.com/386/ https://www.xkcd.com/386/ I had a talk where I showed how Elixir and Elm programming languages complement each other and someone in the audience asked what are we using Elixir for in our company. When I said that for payment systems he looked surprised, because he heard about "let it crash" in Elixir and he thought it is unusable for anything critical. That inspired me to talk about how we use Elixir for handling money. I also answered questions on Stak Overflow for some time. Of course there are many typos or library quirks that are simply missed, but often you see a person that just entirely misunderstood the concept. This is also a target for talks. There might more people struggling with the same thing (especially if your question gets more views). Pay attention to what surprises people when you are talking with them. If someone didn't know what you find obvious, there is a good chance more people don't know it. We have some kind of bias where we think that what WE know is common knowledge and automatically EVERYONE ELSE is smarter than us (because they know everything we know and some more that we don't). That is obviously not true :) If you find a topic that surprised couple of people it means you have and idea worth sharing. It doesn't have to be novel! I often put quotes and references from blog posts that I read about given topic to show that this idea is not new at all! Old ideas are often not widely known or forgotten. They are perfect for conferences, because they might be crystalized over years, so it is easy to research them.

dkersten 9y ago

I'm similar. I give a lot of talks in the local clojure meetup (I'm one of the organisers, so I'm often the fallback speaker when nobody else is available). I find it difficult to come up with good talks for that, but I guess I manage (passably). For conference talks though... I always draw a blank. I've wanted to give talks a bunch of times but could never come up with something that I would be interested in talking about, that I am knowledgeable enough to be confident talking about, and that is interesting for others too.

taway_1212 9y ago
I think this should be approached backwards - FIRST one should have a good idea that he wants shared with the world and only then he should consider giving a talk about it (vs other mediums of communicating the idea). A talk is just a tool, not and end in itself. A btw, wanting to give talks because successful people give talks is a cargo cult.
- dkersten 9y ago
  Of course, which is why I've never given a conference talk. I haven't got anything I feel like I should share. The desire to give a talk is because public speaking is something I want to be better at, because sometimes I've had opportunities where I could have talked about something but didn't feel confident enough due to lack of experience. Also, my employer would like me to give talks, but again, I don't feel confident enough to do so. At some point you just have to take the plunge and I'd rather do it at a generally friendly tech conference talking about something I'm interested in, before I do this in a more hostile environment. Maybe that's too selfish a way to look at conference talks...

masklinn 9y ago

You could always start with poster sessions or tutorials if a conference you like/are interested in has that.

d33 9y ago
Or lightning talks. I guess that the worst case scenario if something goes wrong is not that bad there.

tomekowal 9y ago

To me ideas just come unexpectedly and often because I see someone mistaken https://www.xkcd.com/386/ https://www.xkcd.com/386/ I had a talk where I showed how Elixir and Elm programming languages complement each other and someone in the audience asked what are we using Elixir for in our company. When I said that for payment systems he looked surprised, because he heard about "let it crash" in Elixir and he thought it is unusable for anything critical. That inspired me to talk about how we use Elixir for handling money. I also answered questions on Stak Overflow for some time. Of course there are many typos or library quirks that are simply missed, but often you see a person that just entirely misunderstood the concept. This is also a target for talks. There might more people struggling with the same thing (especially if your question gets more views). Pay attention to what surprises people when you are talking with them. If someone didn't know what you find obvious, there is a good chance more people don't know it. We have some kind of bias where we think that what WE know is common knowledge and automatically EVERYONE ELSE is smarter than us (because they know everything we know and some more that we don't). That is obviously not true :) If you find a topic that surprised couple of people it means you have and idea worth sharing. It doesn't have to be novel! I often put quotes and references from blog posts that I read about given topic to show that this idea is not new at all! Old ideas are often not widely known or forgotten. They are perfect for conferences, because they might be crystalized over years, so it is easy to research them.