Why are they here?

This directly relates to Sasa Juric's phenomenal Tell Me A Story talk. Speaking at technical conferences I think a lot of speakers as we grow more comfortable in the role of speaker tend to look for bigger fish to fry. Let's talk about organizational concerns. Let's talk about greater concepts. Let's inspire people to explore. Let's fix Pull Requests.

I think most speakers really screw this up. At a technical conference, with a technical audience you choose to lean into topics that are usually covered by agile coaches and management consultants. You can give a more grounded version due to your technical knowledge and by virtue of still being on the ground. But from all events I've ever been involved in, it is very unusual that you'd hear "this needed fewer technical talks".

Individual people might want that. And while we harp on the importance of community that very community was gathered around the technology first. When you forget the technology you lose people. We included more people-oriented talks in Goatmire and I have no concerns with that. But let's look at what Sasa did. Sasa got at essentially perfect scores in content and presentation from a crowd that was definitely willing to dock people points on either end.

The talk is about communication, it touches a lot of nice high-flying things around how to care for the people you work with. But it is all right there in the workshop with you. We're looking at Pull Requests. A much debated tool and it is looking at how bad the culture gets around Pull Reqests. All human concerns. The talk then dives right into concrete code, with a lot of flair, sillyness and humor we get our code in order and then he starts walking through how we can communicate our changes. How we can tell a story. It is a technical talk in terms of how to use Pull Requests more effectively. It is hands on. But it feels like way more. It is way more.

Letting go of the technical to discuss bigger ideas of design or people, is not always the right way. Some of the best talks I've seen show concrete code and concrete examples while making their larger points. Especially for such specific conferences as an Elixir conference. Use the fact that you speak the unifying language of the assembled crowd. Show them code. It is a shortcut to your shared understanding. My Goatmire talk didn't do this and it was overall, confusing. Not my best work.

I'd love to hear if you agree or disagree. I suppose this is me integrating some of the feedback from Goatmire into my understanding of speaking and why I think people essentially always want more "technical" talks.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.