It feels like a hundred years ago that I went to one of my first big conferences. I believe it was QCon in London. After that, I also visited a few others. Dreamforce, Salesforce’s huge yearly conference, really blew my mind. At the same time, I started to play with the idea of actually creating my own session and standing in front of a crowd of people.

A few years later, there was a “call for papers.” I don’t know what I was thinking, but I submitted an idea. I kind of forgot about it and was so surprised when I received the acceptance email some time later. From there, it was a journey. For Dreamforce, I was in contact with the conference organizers a couple of times before the event. We went through time plans, slides, content, and also a “dry run” of the presentation. This was very helpful for me as a rookie speaker.

During the last few days, I attended a software development conference in Varberg, Sweden, called myConf. Over the past decade, I’ve participated in several industry-specific conferences, but this was my first purely development-focused conference in more than ten years. It was very different from the trade shows I’m used to attend – in many ways.

As you might know, I’ve been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for the past 15 years. My focus has always been on growth and learning. As part of that journey, I’ve attended various networking events to meet people. Over the years, a few things have stood out to me. These system-specific conferences tend to have a higher focus on selling products, services, and even ideologies. Drink the Kool-Aid. They are usually filled with salespeople trying to sell to new potential customers or to indoctrinate those already in their orbit. As an introvert, this doesn’t appeal to me – it mostly exhausts me. Add to that the fact that if you’re not a customer or a potential lead, you’re not particularly interesting.