(2017) - A year of talks, conferencing, and meeting up
A writeup of my year 2017, when I took my public speaking and writing to the next level. I also moved from being primarily a developer to being a developer evangelist, getting my formal start in developer relations. I learned a ton, and set some goals.
This was originally published on my DevRel Medium blog.
I’ve been doing public speaking for a few years now. I enjoy it a lot, for several reasons: I get to learn a ton when preparing talks, it helps clarify my thoughts, and I feel like I’m always improving. Probably most importantly however, is the fact I get to meet a ton of amazing people from all over the world, many of which I’m now happy to call friends.
This blogpost is a retrospective of where I spoke last year, and about what, and where I want to be in a year.
2017 in numbers
- 8 events spoken at in 4 countries (UK, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Turkey).
- 5 of them were conferences, and 3 were meetups.
- I gave 4 different talks this year — Android Testing Support Library — the Nitty Gritty, Library Development — Stuck between a Pod and a Jar file, 10-ish Things about Android Library Development, and Tools that give you Superpowers.
- My presentations were created using 3 different pieces of software — Keynote, Google Slides, and Deckset. One of them also involved a foam sword.
- 1 conference attended— DevRelCon in London. It was fab. You can read my writeup here.
- 1 meetup organised — The Dev Shed.
- I met m awesome people in this time. Looking forward to meeting lots more, from new faces as well as old friends.
- I also gave n lightning talks and demos at Pusher.
I’ve spoken at 7 of those events within 90 days between March and May. That was more intense and exhausting than anticipated, especially as this was just something I did on the side, besides my full time dev work. Pusher was awesome in supporting me there 🙌🏻.
I decided to slow down after that, and only spoke at Droidcon London in the 2nd half of the year. Pacing is hard.
Plans for ‘18
- Double that number, speak at at least 16 events. They can be meetups, conferences, or something else, either UK or abroad. I want at least one of them to be in the US.
- Expand from mobile focused events into something involving JavaScript, TypeScript, and/or Node. I’ve grown to like these a lot in the past year, and now feel comfortable enough to prepare some nice content.
- I also want to do at least one talk that involves live coding. This scares me, and that’s precisely why I want to do it.
- Prepare something with Nic Jackson. A kray kray double feature that is over the top. This needs to happen.
- Continue looking for the best effing presentation tool in the Verse. On the TODO list are Slides.com and GitPitch.
- Restart the Dev Shed meetup we host at Pusher. It’s a shame we only had it once, as it’s a great opportunity to bring the community of people making products for developers together.
Onwards & Upwards! 🚀