devopsdays Amsterdam 2018

Matty and Bridget record live at devopsdays Amsterdam in the third open space slot, in a room where an open space on public speaking and conference CFPs was still going, and decided to turn it into an episode. The guests are Michael Coté, who works at Pivotal and has come to Amsterdam to live, Jessica Brown of Fastly, who led the open space and also organizes and submits to conferences, Thijs de Meester, who works for an ISP in the Netherlands and has never submitted a CFP, and Kris Buytaert, who has started three conferences, including this one, Config Management Camp and a small one called LoadDays. The cold open is Kris on the usual suspects who submit "a lot and a lot and a lot of talks."

Getting Started

Thijs gives workshops and talks inside the company but hasn't made the first CFP. Jessica says it took a long time for the first one, because Jessica is very critical of self and didn't know what people wanted to hear. Friends just say it will be fine. What helped was presenting a 15-minute talk about a project at small meetups, seeing how excited people were afterward, and expanding it to 30 minutes for the first accepted CFP. Bridget says people love hearing what didn't go well, and that a talk at a meetup with good video is golden for a submission.

Where Talk Ideas Come From

Coté says that starting from zero, without a software project to show, talks can still be built: watch customers' presentations, aggregate smart things they say, footnote them, like a liberal arts paper. Once in the loop, it's "sort of like sourdough," building on conversations and questions. Coté also thinks of "a talk I would like to have," and assigns a deadline by having a conference accept it. Matty goes title first, and ideas come from the shower, mowing the grass, or explaining the same thing repeatedly, which is good fodder for a blog post or a talk. Matty says personal stories are key, and people would rather hear how someone did Kubernetes in the real world than a hand-wavy theory. A talk proposal can also be a way to learn something and show the journey. Matty's trick is a self-help book title with the word DevOps in it. Bridget describes the talk, Docker in Production: Reality, Not Hype at OSCON 2015, which came from a year of running it and the bugs and janky workarounds, and "People eat that stuff up." Coté adds that "a lot of people don't know a lot of things," so you have to remember when you were ignorant of the topic.

How Organizers Choose

Kris says talk selection is hard: you want the best speakers, and new people whose quality is unknown, so Kris looks at whether they've spoken at meetups. When Kris helped run the DevOps track at DrupalCon, speakers needed to have spoken at a local meetup first, which raised the bar but also meant the first time wasn't at the big conference. The usual suspects submit a lot, and Bridget says that's because speaking is their job. Kris says a small topic you think is trivial, like what you did over three weeks and why, may be valuable to someone else. On tech talks, Kris says the audience is not the authors of the tool, and being an early adopter means you can say how you broke it, which Kris did in talks in 2004 and 2005 about features the Linux kernel team had just released. Jessica wants more tech talks, which are hardest to do, and Kris says "Pro tip, don't do demos."

Coté describes selecting for a Pivotal track: first eliminate talks that fit the wrong room, then ask whether Coté is interested in it, consider speaker experience and then balance the slots, such as two on a DevOps topic, three on build pipelines, some miscellaneous and "a floating one," without eight talks on empathy. Matty notes you never write a talk until it's accepted and Bridget adds not to submit three if you'll only give one.

Rejection

Matty says not being accepted doesn't inherently mean the proposal was bad, since seven CI talks may have come in, though it might mean more work is needed. Looking at what got accepted helps, and if organizers offer feedback, be kind and don't litigate: a speaker once wrote back to say why the reasons were wrong. Bridget says saying who you are or where you work leads organizers to be less interested, and Jessica says they've refused a company's later submissions for that attitude. Bridget suggests asking colleagues or friends to mark up the abstract in a doc, or asking on Twitter, and Matty mentions a website of volunteer speaker mentors.

One Sentence of Advice

Kris jokingly says "don't," then "don't submit too many because you might actually end up speaking too much." Jessica says it's the same as applying for jobs: "Let us say no. Don't say no for us." Bridget: "Don't self-select out." Matty advises trying material on the road at small meetups, perhaps not in your hometown. Coté gives three: make sure the talk lines up with the conference's topics, make the title say what it's about with a keyword, and state in the abstract what people will learn, which also makes the organizers' fit decision faster.

On this episode of Arrested DevOps, Matty and Bridget discuss conference speaking with participants at devopsdays Amsterdam 2018.

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