JOHN: This episode is sponsored by Pantheon. Pantheon is the platform of choice for more enterprise Drupal and WordPress sites than any other platform. A platform with superpowers needs to be run behind the scenes by superhumans of all diversities and backgrounds. Pantheon actively supports nonprofit initiatives throughout the Bay Area and beyond such as Techtonica, the Tech Equity Collaborative, and Lesbians Who Tech. Learn more about career opportunities at pantheon.io/GreaterThanCode.

JAMEY:	Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 139 of Greater Than Code. We're doing another panelist discussion episode today, which is pretty exciting. I'm Jamey Hampton and I'm here with my great friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is for everybody listening to this. Coraline Ada Ehmke here. Happy to be here today with my friend, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Hello everyone. I am here with my friend, and Dungeons and Dragons co-party member, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Hello, hello. And let me tell you about the time that Rein cast touches Hideous Laughter on a flying manticore, killing it in one round.

JAMEY:	I didn't know you guys play D&D together. Oh, my God. That's the best.

REIN: It's very fun.

CORALINE: This month is the climax of a three-year long campaign in my game. And I have some very special things lined up including a commission by fantasy artists, like a professional fantasy artists of the final battle scene that the characters are going to be in.

SAM: Ooh, fun.

REIN: That's so cool.

SAM: Have you already planned out which one's going to die? [Laughs]

REIN: [Chuckles] Meanwhile, I tried to find ways that my bard can kill things by insulting them.

CORALINE: [Laughs]

SAM: I can confirm that that takes a while.

REIN: Yeah. I just structure all of the combats so that when it has less than four HP left, I can insult it to death.

JAMEY:	Yes! Amazing. This is our special D&D episode of Greater Than Code.

 [Laughter]

REIN: So far, I haven't felt [inaudible]. Anyway...

CORALINE: We were brainstorming things that we wanted to talk about today and realized that all four of us are veteran conference goers. And there are a lot of people out there who maybe are nervous about attending their first conference or don't know what to expect, or maybe they've gone to a couple of conferences and they want to know how to get the most out of them. Or maybe even you're interested in speaking at a conference and wondering how to get started. So, we thought we would talk today about all things conferences. Let's start by talking about our first conference experience. And I'm happy to go first. Way back in 2013, I think it was 2012 or 2013, I went to a Ruby conference. I don't remember which one it was, but it wasn't one of the big ones. It was one of the regional ones. I was under the impression that the main point of a conference was to attend every talk and take diligent notes and report back to my coworkers. So I would go to the talk, I would sit down, I had my computer with me. I would take notes, the talk would be over. I'd go outside and smoke a cigarette, go back from the auditorium and do it all over again. And I missed out on so much and I thought to myself like, "Wow, conferences are kind of boring. I could read the blog post and get the same amount of information except I'd be able to read it and maybe process it a little better. It took a while for me to figure out what conferences are all about. I'm curious if anyone else has had that sort of naive approach to what going to conference is all about.

SAM: Yes, definitely. My first technical conference was in San Francisco. I was working for a law firm and they sent me to the VBITS99, the Visual Basic Insiders Technical Summit. And I did the very same thing. I went to every slot that I could and took a bunch of notes and tried to take them back and make some sort of sense of them. And then this behavior was reinforced by a coworker who said that, "Yeah, conferences are great for getting up to speed quickly on a new technical subject." And so, that was '99. And then I didn't really go to a lot of conferences until probably RailsConf 2007. And then I started going to Ruby and Rails conferences for awhile. But it wasn't until 2012 when I went to Aloha RubyConf that I really made an effort to force myself to not go to every single slot which was a little bit harder even as I think it was. I think that one was a single or double track conference. I didn't even have to make a lot of choices, but I did have to make the choice to explicitly not go to a talk and maybe go and talk to somebody outside in the hallway. That's actually when I got to pair for the first time with James Gray. So that was a lot of fun and doing that really changed my approach to conferences after that.

JAMEY:	My first conference was an interesting experience on a lot of levels. It was Code Days in Buffalo from 2016. And I had just started a new job. It was literally my first week at Agrilyst. And Nick Quaranto was my mentor at that time and he's also from Buffalo. So we were like the two people who were local to each other. And he was like, "Yeah, I'm going to this conference at the end of the week, it's like on Thursday and Friday. It's just down the street and I have an extra ticket. So, you should come." And I was like, "Oh, I don't know. It's like my second day at work and I have to ask my boss." But it seemed like a shame to be like [inaudible] and he has a ticket for me, so it seems like I should go. And so I ended up going to this conference and I was very nervous about it. Agrilyst was really my first real industry job in some ways. I had done local consulting before. So, I went to this conference, it was a single track conference and I saw a bunch of amazing talks and particularly one that really stood out to me was Justine, @ctrlaltjustine on Twitter. She did an incredible talk about eating disorders. It was really intense and I got a lot out of it. Also, I freaked out and I left the conference and didn't come back until the next day. I felt really weird about it because again, it was my first conference. I had kind of that idea that my company is doing a really cool thing, letting me come to this event on my first week, which I know that not all companies would be okay. And I want to get something out about it. And then I just saw this talk that in a lot of ways was very triggering. I mean, I'm really glad I saw it. I think about it all the time still. But I just had to leave and be on my own and kind of cool down for a long time after that. And I was feeling a little messed up about it. I'm messing up my conference experience by doing this, et cetera, et cetera, that it was the right thing to do. And I talked to people later and they were like, "It's great that you got something out of it. It's great that you tried to take care of yourself afterwards instead of pushing yourself too far." And then I came back to the conference the next day and had a really great experience.

REIN: There was actually a really formative conference experience that I had in 2007. I was at that point, a very junior developer. There was a conference in my hometown of Austin and someone who I knew and respected in the community, Obie Fernandez who ran Hashrocket was coming to the conference and missed out on the hotel buy and was looking for a place to stay. And I said, "Hey, I could put you up. I have a futon and you can sleep there." And so he did. And then conveniently that same weekend, I was laid off of my job.

SAM: [Laughs] I see where this is going.

REIN: And so that's how I went to work at Hashrocket because I told him about that. And I was like, "Hey, are you hiring?" He was like, "You know what? Yeah, we are." And so then he hired me.

JAMEY:	That's such a tech industry story. Oh, my God.

REIN: Yeah. That is in hindsight, emblematic of a number of things, right?

SAM: Yes, right.

CORALINE: But I think it highlights an important point and that is what I get out of conferencing these days the most is meeting people and sometimes these magical opportunities just present themselves. I'm at Stitch Fix now. I just passed my second year there and I remember seeing Stitch Fix and meeting some of the people there at a conference four or five years ago and getting a very positive impression of the company. So when I was ready to apply for a job again, I went to Stitch Fix. And I would only have known about them because they showed up at a conference and I've made so many friends and I found so many opportunities. Most importantly, I've found ways to connect different people with each other in a way that is mutually beneficial to them. And when that happens, that is fucking magical.

SAM: That's so great.

REIN: Going to conferences really enabled a lot of things for me once I figured out that it was about meeting people and not about watching talks so much.

SAM: Right.

REIN: I think the vast majority of the jobs I've had have come through personal relationships rather than interviewing at some unknown place and going through that process. I've always had some sort of personal connection to the company I've been invited to come interview or so on. And I don't think any of that would have happened or at least not as much if I hadn't had gone to conferences.

CORALINE: I had a real problem at the beginning because I was very much an introvert. When I started to realize that conferences were about the people that you meet, I had to make a concerted effort to start talking to people. There was this trick that I learned or that I came up with, I don't remember if I learned it from someone else or not, but we'd be standing in the hallway and there'd be a bunch of people there and I would say to myself, "Find the person with the most interesting shoes and go up and introduce yourself to them," or, "Find the person wearing a red shirt and go up and introduce yourself to them." I had to make it a game, but eventually that became easier. And I don't want to use the term networking because it isn't really networking. For me, it was about making friends. But I made so many friends over the years. Even though I started out as an introvert, I came up with some tools to actually connect with people and those connections paid off and that reinforced that kind of behavior over time.

JAMEY:	I met Coraline at my first RailsConf in 2017. And I had followed Coraline online and really looked up to her and stuff. And then I met her there and I was like, "Oh, it's Coraline." And I was so excited about it. I was new to the conference scene and everything. And I was thinking about this because then at RailsConf 2018, I was so excited to like Coraline and I had been friends for a year ,and we had kept in touch and we are on Greater Than Code together now. And I was like, "I'm going to get to hang out with Coraline." And we like hung out. And then I was like, "Wow." One year ago, I was like, "Can I talk to Coraline?" And then one year later, I was so happy. And that was kind of a cool conference experience for me.

SAM: Totally.

CORALINE: And now you just ignore me at conferences because...

JAMEY:	That's not true at all.

 [Laughter]

REIN: I remember when I was first going to conferences, you would see the table where all of the cool people were sitting and talking to each other and you thought, "Wow, it would be so cool if I could just like walk up and sit down and start talking to them." And then I tried it and I realized that you can't just do that.

JAMEY:	[Laughs]

SAM: [Laughs] Yeah.

JAMEY:	That's so true.

CORALINE: There's a trick that Ashe Dryden taught me actually. Oftentimes, there'll be a circle of people who were all talking to each other. And I think now it's called the Pac-Man Rule, like move over and leave space. And I actually take it one step further. I will watch the people walking by and if I see someone that looks a little lost or looks a little intimidated, I will actively say, "Hey, why don't you come talk with us?" There are things that we can do [inaudible] or to make those experiences better for other people and to show them what we know about how to get the most out of them.

JAMEY:	One thing I did at my first RailsConf also was I posted on the Twitter hashtag at the beginning of the conference, like a selfie of myself. And I was like, "I heard you can get stickers at these events. So if you see me, here's what I look like. Come give me a sticker."

SAM: Nice.

JAMEY:	And a lot of people did. It was very good.

SAM: I didn't really get into the sticker thing until we started the podcast and then I had something to promote. But yeah, it's great having a little token of here's this thing and we can turn that into a conversation if you want. And if you're really shy, then that's okay too.

CORALINE: Yeah, that's been my experience too. Actually, I had an experience that, I think it was RailsConf, maybe three years ago where I saw someone tweet, "Oh my God, I saw Coraline in the hallway and I was too shy to go up and say hi." And that actually hurt my feelings because I think of myself as a very friendly and welcoming person and I love meeting new people and talking to them, even if I don't remember their names because I'm very bad at names. So, I talked to Aaron Patterson and I was like, "Do you get that too? Because you're really well known." And he said, "Yeah, that's why I have stickers." And so I made an [inaudible] with sticker which I still give out to this day, Code Witch sticker with [inaudible] portrait of Coraline in a witch hat. And I tell people at the beginning of the talk, "I have stickers. If you want one, come up and say hello to me after the talk." And people do it because people want a sticker, but also because they want an excuse to come up and talk to you. And it's less intimidating if they have even a trivial reason to do so.

REIN: I used to think about like wearing a shirt that said, "It's okay. You can come up and talk to me." And then I realized how that would look to anyone else that wasn't me.

SAM: Doesn't XKCD sell a shirt like that?

JAMEY:	My fiance owns a shirt that says, "Leave me alone, but also pay attention to me."

SAM: Nice.

JAMEY:	I do think a lot about what I wear at conferences though. You're going to meet a bunch of people that you don't know and they don't know a lot about you other than you're at this event together. And what am I going to say about myself to them before we talk based on how I'm dressed? I don't know if everyone else is like, I was going to say self-conscious, but not necessarily. I used to feel self conscious about it, but now it's more like I have this opportunity to say something about myself, but I do overthink what I wear and I wonder how many other people do that.

CORALINE: I totally do that. I used to do the conference uniform of tech t-shirt or whatever and now I just try it. I try to be as witchy as I possibly can.

SAM: [Laughs]

CORALINE: And I plan the outfits in advance and I'm like brewing alternatives. And yeah, I'm totally stressed about that too, Jamey. You're not alone.

REIN: As a side, people making conferences swag, please make your t-shirts comfortable. I only wear them to bed. They are only pajamas for me. So just please make them comfortable.

SAM: Yeah, I have a variation on the conference uniform, which is that I almost always, unless it's ridiculously cold, wherever the conference is, I almost always wear a kilt. And these days I wear a kilt and my Greater Than Code t-shirt and I have enough of them that I can have one for every day of the conference. So, it's pretty much like the uniform. But I wear a kilt because it makes it a little bit easier to tell people, "Oh yeah, come find me. I'm the one wearing a tan killed today," rather than I'm the white guy with a beard and there's 3000 of us.

JAMEY:	I was thinking about that earlier actually when I told myself this story because I was like, yeah I had bright blue and pink hair when I did that and that story might not work as well for someone who doesn't have very interestingly colored hair.

REIN: I remember meeting someone who's now a really good friend of mine for the second time and he said, "You know, I met you once at a conference?" I was like, "Oh really?" And she said, "Yeah, I came up to you after one of your talks." And I thought, "Oh, no."

SAM: Oh, dear.

REIN: Because apparently she tried to talk to me and then I just kind of ran off. And the thing that I had to explain is that I don't think I am a jerk, but what happens is that when I give a talk, I then feel like I've just been punched in the face many times and it's very hard for me to think. And I try to leave as soon as possible.

JAMEY:	I like to talk to people after I give talks, but I don't retain information as well as I wish I did. And so I'm often getting into this conversation, like I'll have really interesting conversations with people and then I'll see them the next day and introduce myself. And they'll be like, "Yeah, we had a really good conversation yesterday." And I'm like, "Oh, I'm sorry."

CORALINE: I have a trick for that now. Instead of saying, "Nice to meet you," I'll say, "It was great talking to you," or, "It was great to see you," because I'm so bad with names and faces and I meet so many people. I know I'm better at it and I'm trying to get better at it. But I never want anyone to feel like they didn't make an impression.

JAMEY:	I feel so bad when it happens. It happens to me a lot because I try to be friendly. So when I'm talking to someone, I'll be like, "Oh, hi. I'm Jamey." And I go to shake their hand. And they're like, "Yeah, I know."

 [Laughter]

SAM: A trick that I sometimes borrow from Kerri Miller is if I recognize somebody, I am sometimes okay with faces, but it's going to be five minutes before I remember your name. But if I at least know that I recognize somebody's face, the thing that Kerri does is she'll say, "So, remind me when we saw each other last?" And then since the person that you're talking to may have a better memory than you and they'll fill you in and then you can be like, "Oh, that's right. We talked about blah."

JAMEY:	It's a good one.

CORALINE: So, Rein, you mentioned speaking. I'm really curious to hear kind of the origin story of how each of us got started speaking at conferences.

REIN: I did it as a way to go to conferences because I was working for a company that had a travel budget where you could go to a conference for free if you were giving a talk and otherwise you had to fight with them about it. And also, they were a consultancy so they really wanted to get their name out, so it made sense. And so, I started doing talks because that was the easiest way for me to go to conferences.

SAM: I've discovered that I will do a lot for a free ticket to a conference.

JAMEY:	Yeah, I have a slightly similar story. It offers me the chance to go to conferences which I like, to travel to new places which I love, to meet new people. And I really prefer conferences at which I'm speaking because I feel like it gives me something to talk to people about right off the bat. It's just a very good icebreaker. I mean, people will be like, "Oh, I saw your talk," and I want to talk about the topic, which is always great. But even if not, just to be like, "Oh yeah, I'm at the conference I'm speaking and this is what it's on." It just kind of starts good conversations and I find that really helpful. And I also wanted to get into it. I went to school for television and film, and that's what I used to do. And I kind of have this, I guess, background. I used to be like a news anchor when I was younger. And so, I am in tech now and I like a lot of things about tech, but doing stuff like Greater Than Code and podcasts and conferences and talks and that kind of social thing, for me, it really scratches the itch of this other career that I didn't end up actually doing, which is really cool for me.

REIN: Yeah, the problem is I found out that giving talks is actually super stressful and takes a lot of time. The reason that I'm not fit to talk to people after the talk is basically it's 45 minutes of me having my fight-or-flight reaction engaged the entire time.

SAM: That sounds terrible. I at least have the experience where the first five minutes are panic and then it sort of gets fun.

REIN: There's always this low grade anxiety when I'm giving a talk. I can't stop the internal voice. It's like, "Do I look like a jerk or a dumbass? Are people interested in what I'm saying? Am I even supposed to be here? Why did they accept my talk? My talk isn't very good. I saw other talks that were better this morning."

JAMEY:	I think there's several levels of anxiety that are different because there's the general public speaking anxiety that a lot of people have. I don't have a general public speaking anxiety because this is what I used to do. But I still get anxious about talks because there's a difference between I could get up in front of 2000 people and say something, read something off a card and that would be fine. But to get up in front of 40 people and say something meaningful that I wrote is scarier because it's like...

SAM: Your peers are judging you.

JAMEY:	Exactly. It's not that there's people in front of me and I'm on the stage. It's that what if what I say is dumb or bad. So that's kind of two very separate things to get over separately. You know what I mean?

REIN: Yeah. I used to do acting and improv. And improv was always way worse for me and I think it's for that reason because at least with acting, I am not in charge of what I say. I'm only in charge of how I act it. So some of the burden is taken off. But an improv, not only is it all you, but you have to come up with it on the spot.

CORALINE: My latest talk - Programming Empathy: Emotional State Machines, which I was honored to give at RailsConf this year. I've given a talk three times now and it's a very, very personal talk. Every time I've given it, people in the audience have cried and I'm being super vulnerable. So I don't have anxiety exactly before I gave the talk, but afterwards, I just feel so emotionally drained because I was so vulnerable. And after the talk, I'll talk to people for maybe five or 10 minutes and then I'm like, I have to retreat to my hotel room and just reset.

REIN: Yeah. I've noticed the [inaudible] have become more vulnerable over time. I used to put up a shell where I was talking about a thing and it wasn't that I had some personal investment. I'm just transferring some knowledge to people. And over time, I've put more and more of myself into my talks, if that makes sense.

CORALINE: My first time speaking was actually on a dare. This is pre-transition. I was working for Trunk Club and I was doing a lot of work with MongoDB. No Mongo DB bashing, please. A Mongo conference came to Chicago and my boss was like, "Oh, you should totally speak at that." I'm like, "Really? What would I talk about?" And then I decided to talk about this project that I was working on. It's like a business intelligence system. It was using Mongo and it was like a perfect use case for Mongo. And actually, the thing that freaked me out then was all I had were jeans and t-shirts because that's all I felt comfortable wearing. And I was like, "What do you wear when you speak?" And this was Trunk Club I worked for, which is like this clothing company, this personal shopping service. And they're like, "Oh, we'll dress you. If you get accepted, we'll dress you for the conference." And I was like, "That's pretty cool." So, I submitted it and I didn't expect much. And sure enough, I got accepted. So, I get assigned a stylist and I go upstairs and they pick out all these clothes and they were like super fancy. I remember these like purple shoes that were like Italian shoes and they are really amazing. So, he picked out this whole outfit for me and it was really cool. And they're like, "Okay, just go over there to pay." And I was like, "Why are you making me pay? Where's the benefit here? I couldn't afford these clothes. These are high end clothes." So I was kind of disappointed in the company, but I still have the conference speaking slot. So I just ended up wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But I remember I went to the speakers dinner the day before and I felt like I just joined this elite club. And the conference organizers were like so nice and so considerate. They made me feel special. And then I gave the talk and it was really well received. And I was like, "Hey, this is something I can do." Like Jamey, I wasn't afraid of talking in front of people or being in front of people because I used to play music on stage. And also, I did a lot of speeches when I was coming up in high school and college. So, it felt natural and it felt like, "Hey, this is something extra I can do that adds value and also makes me feel good."

SAM: Okay. So somewhere back in there I heard something about our first conference speaking experience. And mine was actually kind of funny because it was kind of sort of accidental. I had proposed to talk to, I think, the first Cascadia Ruby Conference and it was not selected. When we got to the conference itself, the person that they had in one of the time slots, I think he had kind of sort of a keynote, but it was in the middle of the day. And he talked for about 20 minutes and said, "Okay, that's about all I've got." And the organizers were a little bit surprised, I think, by this. And they said, "Well, since we've got some extra time, is there anybody here who has a talk that they proposed that's ready to go that we did not select and would like to give it now?" And I'm thinking, "Oh, surely there are 10 of us." I raised my hand.

CORALINE: Wow.

SAM: And then three minutes later, I was giving a talk. [Laughs] So, that was exciting.

CORALINE: Amazing.

SAM: Yeah, and it was terrible. At least looking back at it, I can look at it and see all of the terrible mistakes that I made in this talk and in the delivery of the talk. But I got it out of the way.

JAMEY:	My first talk that I ever gave was a lightning talk at Catskills Conf. I kind of knew I wanted to do some speaking, but I was a little intimidated both by the application process and the act of doing a [inaudible] talk. And so I was like, "I'll do a lightning talk." And I think that I recommend to people if you're like, "Oh, I might want to speak," I think doing a lightning talk is really cool and great practice because like (a) you don't have to go through the whole proposal process. Most places it's just like sign up to do a lightning talk and you can do it. A thing that a lot of people have said to me is like, "I don't feel like I'm enough of an expert at anything to give a talk," which I think I disagree with for a lot of reasons, which maybe we can talk about later. But lightning talks are five minutes. You don't have to be able to talk about something for hours and be a super expert on it. It feels stressful, but it's kind of low stakes. I really like watching lightning talks too because I'm like, "Oh well, if this talk is bad or boring, there's going to be another one in five minutes." And so as an audience person, I liked that. But as a speaker too, I'm like, "If someone doesn't like my talk, in five minutes it will be done and they can listen to something else instead." So, it feels like a little lower stakes to me. And I think it's just good practice to get up on the stage and see how it feels doing it. So I just think that I had a really good experience doing a couple of lightning talks and then going like, "Hey, I really liked that. I think I want to give more talks." But it's also a pretty low stakes way to even be like, "You know, maybe that was too much. I didn't really like it. So that was enough for me." I think it's a good testing the waters kind of thing to do.

CORALINE: Yeah. Early on when I was mentoring people, I'd always encourage them to like, "Yeah, you should submit to conferences. You should start a speaking career." And it really is not for everybody. I love your idea, Jamey, of giving a lightning talk and see how it feels and see how you react and see if you feel good about making a connection with the audience and kind of decide from there. I think that's excellent advice.

SAM: I think it is, too. And I think I mentioned earlier that my experience of speaking is that there's five minutes of terror and then it gets fun. So for me, a lightning talk is the worst possible kind of talk.

CORALINE: Oh, no.

SAM: So, if you try it and you find that you're panicked, that may not mean that public speaking is not for you. It may just mean that that format of public speaking is not for you. So you could also maybe try something like Toastmasters where you have a lot of practice giving talks. I didn't discover that I liked public speaking until I had to take a class in it for college.

CORALINE: Another thing you can do is sometimes companies will have like a lunch and learn or some program like that. It's a lot easier to speak to your coworkers than it is to speak to an audience of 100 people that you don't necessarily know. That can be a great way to kind of test the waters too. I hate the idea that, and Sam is talking about this in our back channel, a lot of people that I talked to are like, "Well, I'm not an expert in what you're saying," and I think Jamey, you mentioned that too. What I always say to them is like, "Talk about how you learned something." Like sharing your journey is more inspiring than trying to come off as an expert on a given topic because that's more relatable. And if your talk is relatable and especially if you're talking is a story, all the best talks are stories, then you have something to share that people really relate to.

SAM: That's a good point about lunch and learns because that accidental talk that I gave, the only reason that I had the slides on hand was because I had basically given that talk as a lunch and learn.

REIN: I might be weird because I find the 30 or 45 minute format to be the hardest format.

SAM: Would you like it to be longer or shorter?

REIN: I feel like it is hard to -- if it's a lightning talk, then your options are very limited. A one to two hour workshop is enough to cover something deeply. But for me, 30 minutes is exactly in this sort of, what's the word I'm looking for? It's in the like, no man [crosstalk]. Yeah, between like I am just going to tell you that a thing exists versus I can actually have enough time to get into some subject deeply enough to convey something hopefully meaningful.

SAM: Yeah. I definitely feel that tension. And the way that I've tried to resolve it is by making my talk as dense as I can on the theory that 'you'll watch the video later if you missed something'. Plus I give my slides away.

CORALINE: My talk is going to be very dense as well.

REIN: The interesting thing is that compared to say, a blog post, it's actually really hard to convey information in a talk.

SAM: Oh, yeah.

REIN: So, I try to remember that the thing that differentiates a talk from a blog post or other forms of conveying information is that it's a performance in a way that a blog post isn't.

SAM: Yeah. You get to take advantage of different channels of information that you don't necessarily have access to with the blog post because you can control timing. You can put visuals or videos on there. You can play music if that helps your story along.

JAMEY:	I agree with Coraline, what she said about the best talks being a story. I don't personally get a lot out of highly technical talks that are going over like how to do things in syntax. I'm going to learn stuff about a language, I find reading a blog posts or doing a tutorial that I can do on my own time. It's just like much easier for me to retain that kind of information. So I try to focus at conferences on talks that do have stuff that's more personal or like someone who has a specific viewpoint about something that I think is interesting or unique in some way because I find that getting somebody's unique perspective is something that I'm more likely to get out of a talk than out of an article or a blog post or a tutorial. And that's kind of what I'm coming to conferences for. We were at the whole conversation earlier about meeting people and how that's a huge part and I totally agree, but I think that almost flows into talks also. I pick talks where I'm going to learn something interesting about this person and their perspective, if possible.

REIN: Yeah. So, my advice for a new conference talk giver is don't just get up there and read your blog post. Think about what's unique about the medium. Think about the fact that they can see you up there and not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it. And that whole performance is a way to convey information that you can't do in a blog post, but don't just try to take the way that you would convey information in a blog post and translate it unmodified into a talk.

SAM: Yeah, that leads into what I think is probably my least favorite category of talks and [clears throat] certain podcast episodes as well, which is the, let's talk about my library or my gem talk. And you know, the way I think about that is if you have a gem or some other kind of library that you think people should use, there's a great medium for telling people how to do that, and that's the read me. If you want to tell me about your gem, I want to hear the story of why you made it and how you couldn't use anything else and what it did for you. I don't really care how to use it because I can figure that out. I want to know why it's there and why I care. So anybody else also hit those or is that just me?

CORALINE: No, I totally agree with you. I don't learn technical details by having someone tell me about them. Like what Jamey was saying. I want to try it out. I want to read the read me. I want a tutorial. I want a real life use case. I don't need someone to get up and read specs to me.

SAM: Okay. So but we've again skipped over how you actually get from 'I think I might like to give a talk' to actually giving a talk.

JAMEY:	I was thinking that we can talk about crafting a proposal and this might actually be a good segue because I also agree with what you've said about those types of talks and not only do I not particularly like to see them, but I don't particularly like to vote for them when I'm on a program committee.

REIN: I've got a thing that I think is in the middle of those two topics.

JAMEY:	Cool.

REIN: Given that a talk is a different medium from a blog post and it has its own constraints, I like to think about why I'm giving the talk, what's the purpose of the talk is, is it to persuade, to inform, to entertain, to explain. And to think about what is unique about the talk that I can do more effectively there than I could through a blog posts. Like why am I giving a talk rather than writing a blog post is generally not to inform, for me. It's one of those other things.

JAMEY:	And I think that's a great thing to think about when you're crafting both your talk and your proposal for your talk. Because the step that we've kind of been dancing around a little bit is that once you've decided that you want to give a talk and picked out a topic and everything, you also have to get that talk accepted at a conference. And so, there's a real art to writing a proposal because you can write a great proposal and a bad talk and that might not be a good experience. But you could also write a great talk and a bad proposal and then it won't get accepted anyway.

SAM: Yeah, definitely.

REIN: So maybe we could talk a bit about what people who have been on selection committees are looking for, what your heuristics are for picking out a good talk from a bad talk.

SAM: I'm going to step back from my recent experience as a first time program committee member though. And I'm going to jump back to the second talk that I gave, the first talk that I gave on purpose, which was at Lone Star RubyConf. I proposed a talk and we had some back and forth in the CFP application. And when I got there, one of the organizers said that they could really tell in the interactions that I was really passionate about giving this talk. I do hate that word 'passion', but it does sort of fit. It was a topic that I really had cared deeply about and they could tell that I really wanted to give this talk and that I would put a lot of effort into it. So, that's one thing that you can do as part of the CFP, Call for Proposals, process is just care and show that you care.

REIN: I have always tried to look for authenticity. Especially, the very first thing is don't make it look like you're just up there to sell some product or service.

SAM: Oh yeah, developers can smell that a mile away.

REIN: But I want to know that you're giving this talk because it's a subject that's meaningful to you, not just because you think it's a thing that can get your talk accepted.

CORALINE: I think it comes back to feeling like you have an interesting story to tell. Everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to teach. And you can learn so much just by someone sharing their journey with you and showing like, "Hey, I had this problem." Or, "Hey, I had this idea and this is the process that I followed to make it turn into something real or learn something from it or turn it into something that has shaped my life in some way, shape or form." Everyone has stories like that.

JAMEY:	This is a little bit more practical, but I really love to see even a basic outline as part of the proposal as a program committee person because I think sometimes people will write things that are really good ideas and say, "I'm going to talk about stuff related to this." And it's hard to judge when you don't tell me what the stuff related to this is. When I first started writing proposals, I didn't do outlines in them. And then I started reading other proposals and being like, "Oh, the ones that have outlines just really feel to me more like this person has a plan about what they're going to talk about." They've laid it all out and they've thought that through. Because again, you can write a great proposal that I love and then your talk could be bad in theory. That could happen. And so, to see that they've thought out like these are kind of the things I want to cover and the order I'm going to do it. It's not like you need to have written your entire talk, but knowing that they've thought that through is a real comfort level for me. Yes, this person is thorough and they're not going to write their talk the night before because they're thinking about this in a thorough way.

REIN: To add onto that, the outline is generally for the committee and not for the audience. You won't get the outline published on the conference website. What I see sometimes people do is they'll put a lot of effort into the abstract and when there are other things in the CFP form that the committee has asked for, they don't try very hard...

SAM:	Yes.

REIN: ...to fill those things out, but they're actually really important because they were literally the committee telling you what they're looking for.

SAM: Yeah.

CORALINE: Especially if it's a blind selection process, or even if it's not and you're not a well known speaker, you don't have a history of talks that they can review or that they know about. Jamey, to your point, putting that effort in and giving an outline, for example, really shows that yes, I'm committed to this and yes I have a story to tell. And that can build some trust in the organizers that you're going to do a good job.

SAM: I think that I've noticed, especially in going through the process of reviewing conference proposals for the first time this year, a thing that I've noticed is that I really want people to follow a principle of, I want to call it progressive enhancement. Your talk title that you've chosen should tell me something. It should catch my attention. And then when I look at the abstract, that should tell me something more that I didn't know before I read it. So that's what the people at the conference are going to see. They're going to see your title in your abstract. And so, they're going to see those and they're going to make a decision. Maybe they'll look at the title and they go, "No, that's not for me." If they look at the title and then they look at the abstract and they say, "Well, that seems interesting." Then they can go into the talk and they can get more details about it. But there's another step in there for the reviewers, which is you teach me something with your title, you teach me something with your abstract, and then you have a chance to fill in more details in the outline or the extra details that they've asked for. And for me, that tells me that you know how to organize information at multiple layers of abstraction. And that suggests to me that you're going to be able to take that process one step further and use it to write the talk.

REIN: When I look at a proposal and I look at the title and the abstract, I think, "If I were a member of the audience, would I find these things compelling? Would I want to go to this talk based on those things?" And everything else in the proposal is for me, is to help me. So, if there's a question like, why would the audience want to see your talk, or if they ask you for an outline or if they ask you for these other things, put the effort into it that it deserves. You spend 40 plus hours writing your talk and preparing your talk, put some effort into the whole CFP.

JAMEY:	Here's another thought that I have about outlines, which is that -- I don't write my talk before I get it accepted the first time.

SAM: [Laughs] Right.

JAMEY:	And I think that's pretty common. I think that's pretty common. I don't write my talk the night before, but I have an abstract for a talk that I haven't written yet and then I apply to places. And then the first time someone accepts it, then I write the talk and then I have it. But having a good outline in your proposal helps your future self when you have to go, "Oh, shoot! I got this talk. I want to give this talk and I want it to go to this conference. So, it's good that I got accepted. But oh my gosh, now I have a month to do all of this work." And then I go to my outline that I sent to the organizers and I'm like, "Oh, good. I can paste it all in this." It's what they expect and it's what they want because they accepted it based on that. So, it matches that and it's helpful for me. So it works for everybody.

REIN: "Awesome. I got this talk accepted. Now, what was it about? That was like three months ago."

SAM: For me, there's another purpose that that outline serves, which is not only does it tell you what you're going to put in the talk, it tells you what you're not going to put in. It tells you what you're going to leave out because I've written enough talks to know that I go through these stages of like, "Yay, I got this talk accepted." And then there's this sort of brain dump and I realized that I've written a three hour talk. And now, crap, I have to cut stuff. And then somewhere later, there's a stage where I feel like nothing I have to say is of any value and so on. But before that, I do have to get to that culling stage of, "I want to put this in there, but it doesn't directly contribute to my story and it's not on the outline. So, I guess I get to leave that out and maybe see if it goes into another talk some other time."

CORALINE: My process involves similarly a brain dump. I use a program called OmniOutliner from the Omni group. I will just have a bullet point for every idea that I have and then I'll create headings and I'll move the bullet points under various headings. That gives me kind of the shape of the talk. And it also lets me say like, "Act one, I should really be focusing on setting the groundwork, what comes next?" So, these two things don't really belong there. They don't really serve the narrative. And just that process of organizing the random thoughts, organizing the brain dump into a structured outline with topics and a narrative structure really helps with that culling process for me.

REIN: Can I just mention that you threw out first act there and I think that's actually, like there's a whole thing we could talk about...

SAM: Narrative structures, yes.

REIN: But having a narrative structure and thinking about your talk in that way will help you write a better talk.

SAM: Yeah. If nothing else, you can use the like five paragraph essay structure and that will give you like, here's an introduction, here's three things I want to talk about, here's the conclusion. And that is a perfectly acceptable talk format. Having any kind of structure like that will help you make something that is more digestible.

REIN: And even if your talk isn't telling a story per se, like you're not recounting the events of the past, you can tell a story with the narrative structure. You can give people listening to your talk a way to follow along with the things you're presenting by using narrative structure. You can help sort of propel the story forward.

CORALINE: And even if you're not familiar with narrative structures, as an audience member, we're used to consuming narrative structures. So that will feel more natural to the audience, too.

REIN: There's a reason the three-act structure has been around since before Shakespeare.

SAM: Yeah. Among other things, you can use it as a sandwich. If you're trying to give a talk that you think has an important message that you also think that the audience may not like or feel like they're ready for, you can sandwich it between like here's a funny thing and then like here's the serious part. And then here's a funny thing again.

JAMEY:	Can I give a really specific piece of advice?

SAM: Please.

JAMEY:	Oh my God, don't name your talk title Make X Great Again. I don't want it. So many people do it. Enough people do it that I'm giving this advice specifically. Don't do it.

SAM: Yeah. That's just an automatic. If I'm on the program committee, it's an automatic reject. And if I'm at the conference and somehow it's made it onto the program, it's an automatic. I'm not seeing that talk no matter what's in it.

CORALINE: I think in general you should avoid cliches in your talk titles because anything that you think is clever, 20 other people's similar talks with that same kind of gimmick title and you're not really doing yourself any favors there because it's not helping you stand out.

JAMEY:	My favorite and most popular talk that I give is about spoon theory. It's called There Is No Spoon. So, I don't follow that advice.

REIN: There is some nuanced position about trope usage. Like tropes exist because people relate to them. They're useful shorthands and they're not necessarily bad.

JAMEY:	But not Make X Great Again.

REIN: Except for that one. That one's always bad.

SAM: That one is ruined forever. I'm sorry.

CORALINE: I also hate X All The Things because that's just been done to death.

SAM: Yeah. Actually now that I think about it, I did title one of my talks Cucumbers Have Layers which is a Shrek reference.

JAMEY:	Get That Good Shitposting In, your talk.

SAM: [Laughs]

JAMEY:	Actually that's my other advice. If you love to shitpost, I do. Conference talks are a great format to force everyone to look at your shitpost [inaudible]...

 [Laughter]

JAMEY:	...that's actually useful. My very first talk I gave was at AlterConf. It was like a 15 minute talk about microaggressions. And I was doing my slides, I was super nervous and I put in one of the Drake meme. Do you know what I'm talking about?

SAM: The yes/no thing?

JAMEY:	Yeah, where it's like, "Oh, no." And it's like, "Hmmm." I hope the sounds I just made described the Drake meme for other people, but I think they will. But I'm putting it in and I'm just going like, "This is awful. I can't believe I'm shitposting in my first conference talk. My conference career's over." But I'm still doing it, as I'm having all of these thoughts. And now almost every time I write a talk and do my slides, I have that moment where I'm like, "I can't believe I'm going to end my talk with like an outcast reference." But apparently that's what we're doing. But it's fun. People like it. I'm making jokes about it now, but honestly it's not fun to listen to someone just like dryly say words at you for 45 minutes. It's totally okay to have jokes and memes as long as they're not mean or offensive or something. It's okay to have fun. It's okay to do comedy. And we were talking about timing earlier and I think there's like a lot to say for timing the way you present information. But also when you have control over your timing, you can do the jokes and that's okay.

REIN: While we're talking about putting cliches in titles, I just want to mention my theory about titles and abstracts, which is that the goal of the abstract is to get someone to come see your talk. And the goal of the title is to get someone to read the abstract. It's very rare that I've read a title and been like, "Yeah, I definitely want to see this talk because I know what it's about." And the risk in cliches is that people can feel a certain kind of way about that, and maybe that's good and maybe it's bad.

CORALINE: I have to confess, I've never used a meme in any talk in my entire six year speaking career, seven year speaking career.

SAM: What are you even doing with your life, Coraline?

CORALINE: [Laughs] Not to say I don't make jokes. Not to say I don't keep things light. Even with the talk that made people cry, there are funny stories in there too. Sometimes I like to open my talk with a joke. Like before, I actually get the joke started. One of my favorite kind of things is like doing a magic trick that goes wrong. So, comedy magic is kind of one of the things that I'll turn to. I want people to be at ease and I think humor puts people at ease and can make your message more digestible. But a comedic timing is important and also the mechanism you pick for being funny I think is an opportunity to show kind of who you are and make that kind of personal connection with people.

REIN: I think also don't be too concerned that your talk doesn't convey all of the important information about a subject. First of all because in 30 minutes, that's impossible. And second of all, because many of the best talks are talks that have just awoken me to the idea that this is a thing I could learn more about and should care about.

SAM: One of the most important functions of a talk can be just putting a name to something that people have had an idea or a sense of, but haven't had a word for it. And now they have a word and they maybe have a set of values to go along with that word and ideas about what might be a good thing to explore. It's a teaser essentially for finding out more information about something else.

REIN: If you're worried that, if I have this shitpost slide, then that's a slide where I could've been conveying information and am not, then maybe instead think, "Is this helping to engage my audience with the subject and giving them..." What you want is, I think, your audience to come away from the talk thinking, "Oh, that's a cool thing I'd like to learn more about," not, "I am now an expert on the subject at hand." And maybe by being more engaging you can help them do that.

CORALINE: And with what you said earlier, Rein, it's the performance. And there are things you can convey in a performance and things you can't convey in a performance and understanding that difference I think can make a huge difference.

SAM: I'd like to go back, if I may, and jump back to before you submit a proposal to a conference, you have to have an idea for a proposal. And sometimes, I have ideas and sometimes I think those ideas might be good conference talks. And sometimes I'm just not sure. How do you all know whether you want to put all the effort into something and maybe even turning it into a talk?

REIN: I have two basic sources of conference talk ideas. One is something I can't shut up about in normal conversation. Like if I find that I just keep wanting to talk to people about a thing, maybe that's interesting enough for me to make it a talk. And the other is talks I wish someone else would give but no one has yet.

CORALINE: I like to talk about things that I've learned. I draw on weird sources for the information that I give in talks. So, I'll be all over the place - neuropsychology, alchemy, or Kabbalah or just all these weird topics. But I find that kind of like what you said, Rein, over the course of talking to people, if one of these kind of strange standout ideas comes to mind and maybe that would be an interesting hook to bring up this topic and kind of illustrate a point and tell a story with it. I keep a file in LFTM in my texts that are organization system just have random ideas that I've come across or random thoughts that I've had. Maybe even a tweet that I think there's something to it and there's something that I can develop from it. And when it comes time to submit to a CFP, I'll just look through that file and see if there's anything that I feel like really strongly about or anything I feel like really stands out.

REIN: Another one for me is when something is really emotionally or when I'm really affected by something, like whether I'm surprised or fascinated or confused or even frustrated. I feel like if something really has an emotional connection for me, maybe it will for other people too. And ultimately, that's what I'm trying to get out of my talks is not just conveying information in a planned way, but I want to make people feel a certain kind of way about something.

SAM: I love those talks that only that person could have given. This is skipping ahead once you have the idea. It's how you deliver it and how you structure it. If you give a talk that is something that anyone could have just stood up there and read all of the bullet points and delivered the talks. I don't feel like I've really spent my time well. When I get through the talk, I want to feel like I know something about you from the way you gave your talk.

REIN: I think it's important to counter balance that by saying don't look for things where you're the only person in the world who could talk about this subject. Instead, find a subject that you're passionate about and find your unique connection to that subject.

SAM: Yes. Thank you.

JAMEY:	Another aspect that I wanted to say about deciding about your topic and committing to putting the work and stuff is again, as I mentioned earlier, I don't write my talks until they get accepted somewhere. And while there is effort obviously put into writing a proposal, most of the effort is writing the talk. And so, I feel like putting together a proposal and saying like, "I think this is a good idea. I think it would be a valuable talk. We'll see what conference organizers think." And if that proposal never gets accepted anywhere, I haven't invested a crazy amount of time into it until someone else agrees and says, "Yes, I agree. I think this would be a valuable thing to talk about." Then that's where most of the work comes in. But so thinking about it that way, I like to think about it that way because it feels like I've kind of lowered the bar of pressure. And so I can be like, "Hey, I have this idea that I'm going to shop around and just see what happens with it and just see how it unfolds from there." And I find that helpful, at least for me.

REIN: I think that's actually a really good way to decide as a new talk giver where to submit your talk. Obviously after feasibility concerns, can I afford to get there to give the talk. I think a really good way to filter out to select is find conferences that are known for giving really good feedback to people who submit talks because not all of them do. Some of them just send you a form letter. But some of them, even for the talks that they reject, will give you good feedback.

JAMEY:	And some of them will send you a form letter. But if you ask for feedback, they'll give you actually really thoughtful feedback. So,. it's okay also to ask for feedback if you get rejected

REIN: Because that feedback is ultimately what will make you better at submitting talks and better at giving talks.

CORALINE: If you have an idea that you think might be a good talk, an excellent forum for exploring that idea and getting feedback from your peers would be donating to the Greater Than Code Patreon on any level. And getting access to our exclusive Patreon-only Slack community. I feel like we could talk about this for another hour, but we should probably wrap up.

SAM: Yeah. I think maybe the only other thing I would add is that, and I got this from Avdi, being a conference speaker is an excellent introvert hack because especially if you speak on one of the first days of the conference, then it gives people a reason to come up to you and start talking to you, whereas maybe you're feeling shy about starting a conversation with somebody else. So, it might be worth it just for that alone.

REIN: The only thing I would add is that you shouldn't feel like you have to give talks at conferences or even attend conferences to have a career in the industry. If that's something that you can't do or don't want to do, you shouldn't feel bad about yourself.

CORALINE: Totally. Well, thanks everybody. This has been really interesting. I've loved hearing the story of how everyone got their start. And hopefully there's some nuggets of advice that listeners will find useful. Seriously talk to your friends, talk to your coworkers, talk to your peers. If you have a talk idea, giving a talk can be a great experience for you, even if you only ever do it once. Hopefully, something we've talked about today will be helpful to you. So, thank you very much, and we will talk to you again in a couple of weeks.