elm-conf 2018

Last week I gave a talk at elm-conf and attended Strange Loop 2018. This was my second year attending, but my first time giving a talk.

Speaking at a conference

The organizers of elm-conf did a fantastic job; I felt very well taken care of. For all the first time speakers, they paired us up with previous elm-conf speakers so that we’d have someone to guide us through the process of preparing a talk. I was paired with Matt Griffith. I think this was a great idea. I had someone to bounce ideas around with and keep me on track. I probably wouldn’t have written a complete draft as early as I did if I didn’t have a call planned with Matt every few weeks.

Preparing a talk was a lot more work than I expected, but I had a lot of fun doing it. When you have several hundred people execting to see something interesting, there’s a lot of motivation to be prepared.

In reality, you’re never completely prepared. I had a rough outline of what I wanted to talk about a couple months before the conference. The code for the robot was more or less finalized several weeks before. I put my slides together in the week leading up to the conference. After that, I started to feel the pressure of a deadline.

Some of the diagrams on my slides were hand drawn with pen, and then I took photos of the paper using my phone. This is partly because I like the style, but also because I was drawing them from my hotel room the afternoon before.

About 24 hours before I gave my talk, I reahearsed it and found that it was 45 minutes long instead of 30. I spent the evening before aggressively cutting anything that wasn’t completely essential from my talk. The organizers built in buffers to the schedule in case anyone went long, but since I was speaking right before lunch, I didn’t want to keep a bunch of hungry people in their seats. In the end, I got it down to 30 minutes.

Attending a conference

With my talk finished on the morning of the first day, I was free to enjoy the rest of elm-conf and Strange Loop without having to worry about anything. There were a lot of fantastic talks at both conferences, and I’m looking forward to seeing the videos when they’re uploaded.

It’s a lot of fun to meet new people and hear about all the interesting things they work on. It’s also fun to meet folks who you see and interact with online, and actually get to know them as people, not just a Slack handle or GitHub user name.

Both conferences were mostly but not entirely technical, and I really liked that. There were prominent talks about the human side of software development. They focused on the dynamics of working with teams (try stuff together!), the current state of computer science education (it changes quickly!), and the historical factors that lead to things being designed the way they are (it’s important to have a clear vision).

Thank you!

Thank you to all the organizers, speakers, AV team, captioners, venue employees, and everyone who attended. It was a great experience, and I’m looking forward to going next year.