Tell em what you know

There are things you do in software development that you believe in. Things you feel in your bones that they matter and provide value. There are also things you barely think about at all but do without hesitation. One of these is your next talk.

Me with a microphone in front of a slide saying "The real world sucks"

Picture from the Flutter meetup I recently spoke at. Photographer: Fredrik Björeman

Some of us are driven by novelty, we want to put on a show and we get bored by the current and want to present the next thing. That's not where we start. And I think it is mostly a trick for keeping ourselves moving forward.

My first talk was stuff I knew. I stitched it together in fairly novel ways and I built some new code to make it happen. But I knew Membrane could do the audio bits. I had played around with Whisper and knew I could do it in Python if Bumblebee wasn't there. The LiveView parts were almost an afterthought. Experimentation is a large part of what I like to do so I'd already worked with every part of it before. Not for client work or a real project but out of curiosity. The topic of the talk is really about that creative curiosity and experimentation.

"But I have nothing to say" or "I just do normal stuff" is what I hear from a lot of people around giving talks. I get it. We all want to impress.

When my team were fresh into Elixir the talk they saw that resonated the most with them was practical, down-to-earth and doing everyday things with Elixir and JavaScript. It gave some heuristics for when to use LiveView, JS hooks and Vue respectively. It was all practical day-to-day stuff. That was the talk that met them where they were at. There was a lot of distributed databases and rebuilding Erlang in Rust or whatever that was super interesting to me but useless to them.

If you practice TDD consistently you have things to share with people. If you have a particular way you like to structure your calls to Ecto, you have things to say to people. If you burned yourself on particular parts of the ecosystem there is a story there to tell. If something clicked for you and you think you can explain how, gold. We need talks that meet people where they are at and that they can actually apply.

I'm a novelty monster and while I think it is kind of wise to not give the same talk multiple times these days I really don't even want to use the same presentation techniques multiple times and I feel like I'm slacking off whenever I have normal slides and just tell people about a thing.

The thing is. That's a me problem. That's artistic ambition and a bit of ego. I get great feedback even when I roll a talk straight down the middle for a meetup. The point is the open sharing. The flair is for me. I give the same recommendation for blogging as for speaking. Share something you know well. Know how to handle health data? Cool. Dealt a lot with Open Telemetry? Perfect.

Sharing something you already know is a great starting point. You don't have to stop there. But the first few times the hard part of speaking is making the decision, applying, preparing and speaking. The hard part of writing is the writing it out and actually publishing. We don't have to make it also be novel research and an art piece. And if you want that it can always come later.

I've spoken a fair bit in the last .. 4 .. years. I still feel kind of "new" at it but I'm way less nervous. Let's see what I can find:

Elixir & Erlang, Fundamentally Pragmatic - Func Prog Sweden Meetup, August 2021
I had forgotten this existed. Wow. Deep pull :D
Chatbots as User Interfaces - ElixirConf Africa (remote), 2022
Doing remote talks is kind of neat because you can do weird production stuff :)
Also a demo-stunt with a Telegram bot in the end.
Lively LiveView with Membrane - ElixirConf, April 2023
My first on-stage conference talk and one I prepared very seriously for.
Live podcast with Sasa Juric and José Valim - Code BEAM EU, 2023
Experimental live podcast format with Code BEAM. Great guests :)
Introducing Elixir: Your entire web stack - Oredev, November 2023
I tried to cover a lot of ground on this. It seems to have done well?
Do you use Erlang tracing? - Elixir Australia Meetup, February 2024
I'd hoped people would try Entrace. Also an overview of Erlang tracing.
Keeping Secrets - NervesConf US, May 2024
A fun ramble through a bunch of embedded security topics. Kept talk simple as I was prepping Simplicity at the same time.
Live podcast with .. everyone? - Gig City Elixir, May 2024
This was so much fun and worked out so well. Quinn blew the topic space wide open.
Simplicity - Gig City Elixir, May 2024
Keynotes are hard. I'm curious if this landed with people. I am not sure it is memorable.
The Nerves Community Fleet - Code BEAM EU, 2024
Latest high-effort talk. The slides are grade A stunt-material. Overall really liked how it came out.
Iterate fast on hardware with Nerves - Oredev, November 2024
Less prep time due to illness for this one but worked out quite well, feedback was good.

None of these are flawless from my perspective. Most of them are technically somewhat interesting or tries to be thoughtful but they were not generally beyond what I knew and was doing day to day. I just happen to do somewhat unusual stuff sometimes.

Consider giving a talk. Is anything stopping you? Let me know on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.