Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

Conference Speaking One Year Later: Every Single Thing I’ve Learned

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I started speaking at Technical Conferences a year ago and I’ve learned so many things since then. Things about the process of putting on a conference, choosing speakers, writing talks, crafting slides, interacting with the audience, and more.

I’ve never had a fear of public speaking per se; yet I just felt like I didn’t know “enough” to get up in front of dozens of people and share what “little” I did know. A few wonderful women in the Android Community helped me come to my senses and realize that I did have “something to say”. Not only that, what I wanted to share was valid, entertaining and useful. 

 
If you’re interested in becoming a Conference Speaker, I hope that you find at least one thing in this post that can help you on your journey.
 

I’ve broken my learnings into four main sections:

  • The Talk
  • Speaking
  • The People
  • Traveling

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GR8Conf US 2016 Recap

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This was my first time attending GR8Conf and it was a really great experience. I primarily focus on Android Development now, but I enjoy dabbling in some API Development when I find the time. This conference was very inspiring and I plan on investigating many of the new things that I learned. Here are a few highlights of the event:

Overview

So the event took place at The University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was my first time in Minnesota, it’s a very beautiful city. I was especially impressed with the Skyway System, which allows you to walk between buildings without going outside. I took it on as a personal challenge to find the Target store from the main conference building and make it back on my own.

@brwngrldev basically, didn’t see people, discovered they walk around like gerbils in these walkways all day

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) July 28, 2016


The conference is focused on the technologies related to the Groovy ecosystem, such as Grails, Ratpack, Gradle, and Spock. Despite “the hate” that I sometimes hear about Groovy, I’m a big fan and was excited to have the chance to be a part of the conference.

Takeaways

So there were a few sessions that I derived a ton of value from, one was the “Grails Keynote”. It was delivered by Graeme Rocher, the Grails Project Lead. He discussed the many enhancements in Grails 3, such as:

  • Being Based on Spring Boot
  • Using the Gradle Build System
  • The Use of Profiles

He showed how simple it is to use the rest-api profile to create REST applications in Grails. I was really impressed with how quickly he was able to get an application up and running. He also demonstrated some of the upcoming features in GORM to support reactive programming, it was all very exciting to see.

Then during the “Documenting RESTful APIs with Spring REST Docs” talk, by Jenn Strater I really enjoyed learning about the various options available for making sure you have proper documentation for your REST APIs. She showed several examples of using Asciidoctor to generate documentation snippets. I had never seen that approach of using tests to ensure documentation was written before. I would love to see something similar for Android libraries perhaps.

Learning about Spring REST Docs with @codeJENNerator, documenting your API. #gr8conf pic.twitter.com/G4HpAflFxb

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) July 28, 2016


I also really enjoyed the information shared during the “Feeling Groovy” talk. Ken Kousen brought up several compelling points about the perception vs. reality of the Groovy ecosystem. Specifically he spoke on how some perceive Groovy as being “in trouble”, yet it’s an extremely stable language backed by a very engaged community. He also showed several examples of how Groovy as a language shines in comparison to Java. The talk ended with a rallying cry for those in the community to share their positive experiences with others. It was truly well done!


Further, it was really great to meet people in real life that I only knew from Twitter, like Ken and Jenn.

.@devlifehax I got to finally meet @kenkousen and you’ll be happy to know we left our capes at home 😉 #gr8conf pic.twitter.com/yp8sAjMz9K

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) July 29, 2016


This was my first time giving two talks at one conference. It was a little stressful, I admit, but I’m glad I stepped up to the challenge and had the opportunity to meet such friendly, interesting people.

 
Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Speaking Adventures. Until next time…

Write/Speak/Code 2016 Recap

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This was my first time attending Write/Speak/Code and it was an amazing experience. Not only did I learn useful information for advancing my career I delivered my first Keynote talk. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Overview

The event took place at The Chicago School of Psychology in Chicago, Illinois. It was my second time in Chicago and I forgot how amazing the food was, so yes I ate well. The conference was split into two tracks: First-Timers and Alumna. All attendees were together for the morning/evening Keynotes and lunch. Then we split into our two tracks and attended “workshop-style” sessions in various areas surrounding writing, speaking and coding. 

Android ladies at #wsc2016conf Come say hi if you’re @WriteSpeakCode pic.twitter.com/UHuXRSYH52

— Yash Prabhu (@yashvprabhu) June 15, 2016

Attendees

The conference is open to all who identify as women. Their mission is to empower women developers to become thought leaders, conference speakers, and open source contributors. So the experience level was across the spectrum, many women were just entering the field and others were very experienced developers. So it was great getting to interact with such a diverse group of talented people.

Who came the farthest to #wsc2016conf? Woman from Alaska is the winner!! pic.twitter.com/jUOlQpI5du

— WriteSpeakCode (@WriteSpeakCode) June 15, 2016

Takeaways

So there were a few sessions that I derived a ton of value from, one was about “Ask vs. Guess Culture Communication”. This talk discussed the nuances of the different communication styles, as well as strategies for bridging the gap between the two. During the discussion phase we talked about being successful when pair programming with someone who may have a different communication style from you and I really appreciated the following suggestions:

  • Do a Pairing Retrospective
  • Include lots of “I” statements
  • Establish a baseline for why you’re pairing
  • Use a Timer ~10 minutes for the “driver”
  • Swap writing tests and code

Then during the “Project Discovery Workshop” I was blown away by the many helpful strategies provided by Annie Passanisi. For instance, when you’re working on a technical blog post and you would like feedback how should you approach it? Well, here are some of the suggestions she offered:

  • Only ask people you trust to review your work
  • Send them the request with a list of questions to answer, like:
  • Did it answer all of your questions?
  • How can I provide more value?
  • What new questions came up for you?
  • What was your favorite part?
I also really enjoyed the information shared during the “Salary Negotiation” talk. Ashley Powell showed how men and women often negotiate differently and that leads to men consistently making more money than women even though they have the same experience. So it was great to see ideas for how to negotiate when you’re job hunting as well as when you’re looking for a raise. One thing that really stuck with me was that you don’t have to be “aggressive” to negotiate, just go with what works with your personality. Whatever you do, it doesn’t hurt to just ask!

Exactly what to say when negotiating from @AshleyPQPQP, I find this so challenging to do. Great advice! #wsc2016conf pic.twitter.com/qVAHTsAi2C

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) June 18, 2016


 With all the information that was being shared during the conference, I appreciated the fact that I still had time to step away and grab some ice cream with a good friend.

Taking a break from #wsc2016conf to enjoy some ice cream with @brwngrldev pic.twitter.com/88Vu1P1pmA

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) June 17, 2016


This was my first time attending an all women conference and it was just as many have said before a transformative experience. I left feeling empowered to do even more great things and to be okay with doing nothing at all. 

Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Speaking Adventures. Until next time…

Review: Talk Like TED

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If I was offered the opportunity to give a TED talk, let’s just say I wouldn’t turn up my nose at it. So I was really excited to find this book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.  In it the author analyzes hundreds of the most popular TED talks and provides insights into what made them so successful. Then he goes on to share actionable advice for how anyone can give a talk that’s memorable and engaging. Some of my favorite tips were the following:

Tell a Story

Over and over again the book highlights the importance of telling a story during your talk. Now not a, “Once upon a time…” type story, but rather something short and meaningful that relates to your topic at hand. I don’t typically think of telling a story during a tech talk but I wanted to see if I could somehow use a short story in my upcoming talk at Write/Speak/Code. So here’s a slide from my talk:
 
Here’s what I was going to originally say:

“I created an online video course for O’Reilly Media with no prior experience.” 

Now that’s definitely a true statement, but it would be much more engaging if I made a short story out of it. So I added a bit more detail and now I will say something like this:

“Last August I was contacted by Meghan, an editor at O’Reilly Media and offered the opportunity to create an online video course for them. I was very hesitant about doing it since I had no prior experience.” 

Notice how both statements convey the same thought, but the second is obviously more interesting and will get the audience more involved with the talk. At least I hope 😉

The Rule of Three

“The rule of three…is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.” (Wikipedia) The author shows several examples of how pervasive the Rule of Three is in our lives and culture. So it makes sense that we would want to apply this technique in our conference talks/presentations. Apparently it’s easier for our audience to remember things that are presented in groups of three. Here’s a slide from my talk on Screen Robots. Notice how in the agenda I only have three items. This is a technique that I plan to continue using as much as makes sense.


I’ve only touched briefly on two of the nine techniques in this post; but hopefully you found this review useful. I highly recommend this book for those interested in giving talks, in case you haven’t noticed!  Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter for future book recommendations.

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