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.

I remember asking John how many people he thought would be in the audience. His response was vague, maybe 50 or so. Fast forward to the day of the event. My talk was one of the first breakouts. I got access to the room 5–10 minutes before the talk was about to start. After setting up my computer and testing that everything was working, I looked out at the still empty room. My gut feeling said this seemed big to host 50 people. I started to count the chairs. Roughly 300 seats. The room filled up, and I even had people standing along the sides and in the back.

I survived. It went well, and I think people enjoyed it. The year after, I had two talks, but none with this many participants. I have written about these before on this blog in one of the earlier blog posts.

After this, I’ve had plenty of smaller talks at various meetups and user groups, mainly with a Salesforce focus. But since I’ve gradually transitioned out of this ecosystem into more traditional development, I’ve started to take part in meetups and conferences focusing on that instead. I feel it’s time to step back out into the world of meetups and conference talks.

My main challenge when it comes to these things is coming up with a topic or idea to talk about that can be interesting enough. I want to find an area where people can learn something new, but at the same time not be too far from what they already know.

With this in mind, I’ve started to build a small community for my students and former students. It’s open to anyone who’s interested. If you want to know more, you can read about it at kodkunskap.se. You will need to speak Swedish though. Here, I have a target group I can design a talk for.

Another thing I do when I try to find topics for blogs, YouTube videos, and now also talks, is to start digging where I stand. Currently, I teach a class about test-driven development. Therefore, I chose to talk about the SOLID principles and Hexagonal Architecture since these help create testable and more easily maintainable projects. For experienced developers, this might be a bit too foundational, but for junior developers it can be great.

In Malmö, the closest bigger town to me, there’s a place called Goto 10 where it’s possible to host events like meetups and small talks for free. In addition to this, they can also help with some marketing of the event. This is the venue I plan to use. I’ll do it at the beginning of next year, probably at the end of January to fit my calendar.

I’m super excited to be back in the conference and meetup speaker world! Check back here on the blog, since I’ll probably do some additional posts as it progresses.