Speaking at Conferences With Ryn Daniels

Bridget hosts solo, with Matty and Trevor out this time, and talks about speaking at conferences with returning guest Ryn Daniels of Etsy. Ryn last appeared on the show for the episode on starting a new DevOps job, and is now finishing a book, Effective DevOps, with Jennifer Davis of Chef, which is known as the Yak Book because O'Reilly's animal for it is the unshaven yak. It is due in late May or early June. Ryn has also been building infrastructure provisioning tooling at Etsy, and just got back from the Codemania conference in New Zealand, talking about applying software development practices to operational tooling. The side project that blew up on Twitter was Necro Atsume, a heavy metal cover of Take on Me from Etsy's talent show, with a logo of a cat in corpse paint that became a Teespring shirt.

How It Started

Ryn started speaking in 2013, when Jason Dixon, who organizes Monitorama, asked for a talk at Monitorama EU in Berlin. Ryn's first reaction was that there was nothing to say, and Jason's answer was "I follow you on Twitter because you have things to say." Ryn had just changed jobs and had opinions about monitoring changes they hadn't been empowered to make at the previous one, so the talk was about that, and it was well received. Ryn's reasons for speaking are to share stories as a way of helping others learn, and it helps a career to be an established speaker. Conferences also led to Etsy, and to meeting Bridget at DevOpsDays New York, where they were both giving lightning talks.

How Organizers Choose

Ryn is involved with DevOpsDays New York, which anonymizes submissions to reduce unconscious bias, then rates them and discusses as a group, leaning toward newer speakers. "I don't want the DevOps community to become an echo chamber where we just hear from only the same people over and over again." Bridget says that is why she spoke at fewer DevOpsDays in 2015 than in 2014. Ryn says some conferences are invite-only, which can produce a diverse lineup or a group of friends who look just like the organizer. Bridget adds that organizers have to encourage participation from communities who haven't attended. Ryn wants DevOpsDays New York to include more of the organization beyond dev and ops, and Bridget mentions a marketing speaker from Atlassian at Minneapolis.

Preparing

Ryn is slightly less nervous each time, and thinks a little nervousness shows you care. Preparation starts about three weeks out with a written outline, sometimes as long as a blog post. The Codemania talk drew on a Code as Craft post. Slides come a couple of weeks before, starting with five or six header slides for the problem, the solution and what was learned. Ryn's message to organizers: "I'm not going to give you my slides 2 weeks in advance. I'm a professional." They're still iterating the night before. Ryn rehearses three to five times, since more makes the talk boring, and an Ignite, which has 20 slides that auto-advance, gets much more rehearsal. Full-day trainings are the opposite, because so much depends on the students. Co-speaking works best when it feels like a conversation, and Ryn will present on Nagios at Velocity with a coworker.

Bridget shares that the shortest gap she has had between giving the same talk twice was before and after lunch at a local conference. She used the same deck and it turned into two different talks.

Getting Started as a Speaker

Ryn's first step is to work out what you want to say, since enthusiasm makes for a better talk than something to check off a list. On slides: "If you have enough words on your slides that it takes people more than like 2 seconds to read them, you have too many words on your slides." Bridget adds that corporate decks are different, and Ryn says a deck should still make sense after the fact, unlike some of their own decks that are "just cat pictures with no context."

Next is finding a conference that fits. Look at past lineups. A tutorial submitted to a conference with no tutorial track won't be accepted. Ryn recommends the Callback Women Twitter account, which tweets CFPs from a wide range of tech conferences, and the Technically Speaking newsletter, which also notes whether travel or lodging is covered. Bridget recommends trying a talk at a local meetup first, especially a lightning talk.

Writing the Proposal

As a reviewer, Ryn wants to know who the audience is and what they'll get, since the abstract often becomes the schedule listing. At a multi-track conference you have to say why someone should choose your talk, and at a single-track conference you should still think about who that conference's audience is and check past agendas for how-to versus advanced. Ryn loves 101 talks. "Talking isn't about you as a speaker. It's about the audience." Use the form fields, since they're there for a reason. Bridget, who reviews for Velocity, says vagueness hurts, and "don't leave this a mystery." Ryn suggests two to three paragraphs and a few bullets, since one isn't enough and more than three burdens reviewers, and to put detail in the field for organizers and leave a little mystery for the schedule.

For a speaking portfolio, Ryn keeps videos when a conference makes them available, and has a page on their website listing past events with links to slides on SpeakerDeck and embedded video. Bridget adds a high-resolution headshot, and a short bio saying who you are and what your background is.

What Conferences Owe Speakers

Ryn has strong feelings on this. Some conferences don't cover admission for speakers, which Bridget calls complete nonsense, and Ryn points out a talk can take 30 to 40 hours of prep. Conferences that say exposure is payment don't understand that exposure won't cover the rent. Ryn gives leeway to new or small conferences, but a five-year-old conference with too many sponsors to fit on a page that doesn't cover travel and lodging is "taking advantage of them." Bridget says she prefers to take speakers at their word if they say their company won't pay. Both like a low-key speaker event beforehand, and organizers sending information about where to stay and what to do, since radio silence leaves speakers overwhelmed. Ryn says "there's nothing more stressful to me as a speaker than having no idea what I'm walking into," and praises Bridget's blog post about what organizers should tell speakers.

Day of the Talk and After

Ryn prefers to speak early in the conference so they can relax, though Bridget notes speaking later lets you refer to earlier talks. Bridget recommends going to the other talks, so you know what has been said before you add your voice, and can reinforce or push back on other speakers. Her summary is to "go to the other talks, kids."

Afterward, people come up to you, and Ryn's advice to those people is not to be condescending, since the speaker has considered the basics. For Q&A, Ryn sometimes times a talk so there's no time for questions and invites people to find them afterwards, since fewer people make statements when they don't have a captive room. Bridget will sometimes ask a "strategic softball" that lets the speaker elaborate, and as an organizer she likes it when the crowd moves outside the room. She also suggests a buddy who holds your things on stage, and says her partner, an AV professional, plugs in and packs up her laptop. Ryn likes a friend in the front row.

They both recommend putting your Twitter handle on every slide so people can live tweet you, and Bridget embeds the tweets on a page for each talk and has shared them up the management chain at work. Ryn admits to being too polite and Midwestern to retweet strategically, and Bridget says conference organizers love it when speakers publicize their talks. Slides go on SpeakerDeck, and usually as PDF without speaker notes.

Advice to an Earlier Self

Asked what they'd tell themselves in 2013, Ryn says "it's hard to A/B test your own life," but would spread the talks out, since five in two months is exhausting, and would be less nervous about giving technical talks. They gave mostly cultural talks partly from imposter syndrome. Bridget says you don't have to be pigeonholed, and that her 2015 was all Docker until a job change made her want to talk about how organizations learn. Ryn says branching out gets you to other conferences, like Codemania, a development conference that was out of their comfort zone.

They finish with ways in that aren't conferences: internal lunch and learns, Etsy's weekly Ops School series, local meetups. Ryn's last word: "I used to be super intimidated by all the cool Etsy people who were up on stage talking at Velocity, and now I'm one of them. You can do it too." Ryn has committed publicly to only four conference talks this year, including a keynote at Continuous Lifecycle London in May.

• Effective DevOps by Ryn Daniels & Jennifer Davis

• Lara Hogan - Day-of-talk countdown

• Bridget - tl;dr: Your Talk is Accepted

• Ryn Daniels - On a Conference Speaking Routine

• Nekro Atsume shirts

• Draconian - Sovran (Oct 2015)

• Walls of Jericho - No One Can Save You From Yourself (March 2016)

• Lovemeow.com

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