Coding Blocks - Should You Speak at a Conference?

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

We discuss the pros and cons of speaking at conferences and similar events, while Joe makes a verbal typo, Michael has turned over a new leaf, and Allen didn't actually click the link.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 169. Oh, you know what? No, let me redo. You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 169 on late night WJZZ Atlanta's number one hit for all things programming. Because there were so many people that liked the late night DJ stuff, right? Or was I supposed to come in all hot and heavy? Like, you know, like good morning. We're going to be talking about code. Yeah. Is that how you guys did so many variations now? I don't know which one it is,

but whichever one you prefer, uh, there's all your different intros. So subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher more using your favorite podcast app, uh, leave us a review or smash that thumbs up, whatever your options are.

Yeah, see, this is what happens when I'm not here for an episode. I come back with all this like pent up energy that I wasn't allowed to get out before. That's right. Yeah, I'm just stunned. I don't even know. I mean, I guess you can go. I'll just read. I'm just going to read this.

OK, visit us at codingblocks.net. And you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and more. And send your feedbacks, questions, and rants to comments at codingblocks.nte. N-E-T? You mean? Oh, yeah. Sorry, D. Let me fix that here.

Okay. Codingblocks.net. You made a verbal typo. You can follow us on. Codingblocks.net. You made a verbal typo. You can follow us on Twitter at Codingblocks. Or head to www.codingblocks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page. Thank you, Macho Man. That's right. That's right.

When you want to get your code on real good, you want to listen to the Codingblocks. You know what's awesome? I was just looking at the videos up on YouTube and somebody was like, hey, could you please upload this with the DJ voice? Yes! So yeah, with that, I am Alan Underwood.

I'm Jacek. And I'm crying. Yes. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, the cloud-scale monitoring and analytics platform for end-to-end visibility into modern applications. All right. And today we're talking about talking at conferences and meetups. We got one of those coming up here on the corner. So it's kind of topical and I thought it'd be a little bit of fun.

But first, I'm going to drop my wedding ring and then we're going to talk about some news. All right. So as always, we like to thank those who have taken the time to write in and leave us a review and see us how Outlaw is back. I mean, who else can do these? Okay. Okay. So from iTunes, The Whole 1337 and Pezri.

Yeah. That's good. Would that be The Whole Leet maybe? I don't know. Well, probably. Yeah. i don't know well probably yeah i don't know interesting i like it though yeah so uh and then i thought oh man i realized i put a typo here in the show notes i wanted to give an update on the keyboard oh that didn't turn out well at all uh yeah so it's been, what was it, about beginning of August, I think, when I finally got it back from Willis C. The warranty was up, so now it couldn't have been.

It was like two years later, but that's fine. Yeah. It's the Moonlander. The Moonlander is what he's talking about. So, yeah, for those that haven't been been following along i got the moon lander keyboard uh i think it was around the beginning of august that i switched over to it and gently used gently used yeah just just gently used uh everything had been worn off of it all the plastic was really smooth um but uh, you know,

in my first, my first take on it was like, oh man, this is, this is difficult to get acclimated to, right? Like this takes some getting used to, and then it takes a lot of brain power.

So now, uh, because I missed the last episode has been what? Probably four weeks since I talked to you guys about this. And so, uh, four weeks later, yeah,

I think when we last spoke, my words per minute were probably in the, um, I think in the 50 ish range. I remember, right. Um, now I still am,

you know, doing a lot of, um, you know, typing practices. I'm trying to not say you knows, and now I'm saying more you knows because that was one of the feedbacks we got

was about the you knows, and now I can't like, ugh. You know what I mean? We don't shh. So yeah, I still do the typing exercises, but now I'm peaking at 75 words per minute. So it's getting better, but still this keyboard, just it still takes a lot of thought process to use.

I'm still like, where did I map the quotes? Where did I map the forward slash? Where did I map the page up or the end key? I'm still getting tripped up on some of this because they're not the printed keys. So the jury's still out for me, and this has now been what? You're on month three here. Yeah, we're into month three now, and I'm still not sold, I guess. And plus, I really hate the fact that with my configuration for it, if I want the function keys, then I have to go into a different layer in order to get to the function keys.

And sometimes that's annoying because like if I'm debugging and I want to use the function keys for like step into step overs, you know, those kind of things. And then maybe I want to like do some typing and like maybe the you know, if you're in Chrome, you might want to do something in the console to like try something. Or maybe if you're in like a rider or a visual studio and you want to go into like the immediate window and, you know, type something to be like, well, what would this do? You know, or, or just, you know, Oh, I found a bug. Let me correct it right there. You know? And so you want to type right there while you're already in that layer. Then I find myself like typing while I'm still in the function layer. And I'll go to like press a key that I've like trained in my mind to be like, Oh, that's where I've mapped this key to. And then all of a sudden weird funky things

happen because I'm no longer in the, the, the, you know, normal typing layer. I'm in the function key layer and things get interesting if you start typing that. So yeah, I'm, I'm still, I'm still torn. And by the way, like my video gameplay, since I started using this keyboard in August has tanked. Like I have stopped, like stopped playing seriously. I haven't been playing since I got this keyboard because the, I think that we talked about this before about like shifting your hand over for the WASD keys that as a result, then, you know,

he trying to hit what should be the shift key, like the left shift key, which is critical, you know, let's be honest. Uh, I, I,

it's just too small a hit point in, in to like retrain my mind to be like, Oh, let me do that with my thumb. But then what if I want to press the space bar and the shift key at the same time? Now I've got to like figure out how to do that with one, you know, my thumb, press both buttons. And you know, that's weird if I were to like remap it to the thumb cluster. So I'm still not convinced, man. Like if I would say this, if you're looking for an ergonomic keyboard and you were considering a split keyboard and this was one of the split keyboards you're going to think you were going to consider, then it would really be a matter of like, well,

how long have you already been typing? Right? Like if you are in high school and you're listening to my voice, then, you know, you might be able to acclimate to this keyboard and use it for the rest of your life and it'll be great. The ortholineal column layout will be just fine for you. You'll have no problem with it and you'll get acclimated to typing fast on it and playing games on it. already been typing on a regular keyboard for decades where you're like, you're used to, you know, shift keys being like double the size or double or triple the size of a regular key or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Then, um, I don't know that I would recommend this keyboard for you in that there are other split keyboards that don't have that problem. But on this keyboard, with the exception of the thumb cluster all of the keys are your same your standard size i don't even know what you know your single your single

column row size key right nothing is there it's not like a normal keyboard where your enter is like double sized or whatnot or like oh i think those are called like the piano keys, right? The, the, the, the, the longer keys are like the,

I think are called the piano keys. So those are only exist for the thumb cluster on this, on the moon lander. So, you know, you've been warned. Are you going to eBay it? Um,

I don't, at the moment I'm still. Taking tests on it. I'm still trying. You know what I'm saying? I'm still putting in my effort, my due effort to try to get acclimated to this keyboard. But it has been an uphill battle. And I don't know that a lot of people are really going to want to put that kind of focus and time into a keyboard,

right? Like most people, you know, I think even Alan, maybe at the start or something like that might've said something about like, I just want to, Oh no, it was Alan when he was talking about, like, he didn't bother to do any kind of typing tests or exercises because he just wanted to grab a keyboard and start working. And that was it. Like, you know, why should you have to spend any time to learn the keyboard? Right. We've already been typing for how many years. And so, you know, but I, but I have been putting in the effort to try to get acclimated to this keyboard and using their tool to, to do the training for it. Cause they have, they do have a nice little training tool for it, which I have some pros. And I mean, it is nice that you can see it. Cause like

the bottom half of the configurator will show you, or I'm sorry, the bottom half of the training tool will show you the keyboard layout and, and it'll be updated in real time. So as you switch to a layer, like the display on the bottom half of that page will update to show you, oh, you're now on this other layer and here's all the keys for that layer. And it'll highlight the keys as you're typing them so you know what you're typing.

Although if you're trying to type for speed, then you kind of really can't focus on that part because you're trying to follow along on the part that you're typing. But then that's the part that's also kind of frustrating too, because there's basically like, you know, two colors, red and green, you know, green, you know, type this, or maybe it's blue. I forget now, you know, there's like one color that's to follow color that you're going to like, you know, wherever that, wherever the color is for that cursor. Um, Oh, that's what it is. It's blue is where you're currently at. Green is something you already got

right. And red is something wrong. You typed wrong. And so you'll see where the cursor is blue and you type in that letter and you get it right. And it turns green and it moves on to the next one and no big deal. But if you get it wrong, the frustrating thing is it'll turn red. But then in my mind, sometimes like i've already moved on and i'm like yeah i realized i typed it wrong but i've typed it right since and so i'm expecting to move on and the cursor will still be like no you did you really didn't and i'm like no i thought i'm pretty sure i did so i don't know that's too much work it is. Exactly. That's the thing. So, you know, short answer now to Jay-Z's question about the eBay. You're going to eBay it?

Well, I'm really hoping that – I talked with Alan because he has the Kinesis Freestyle. Gaming RGB. Yeah, gaming RGB. And I was going to give that one a try and see if I liked it better. You will. And, and if I do like it better than I'll probably buy one of those. I would say for,

I would say for 90% of people out there looking for a split ergo keyboard, they would love that Kinesis gaming way more than they would the moon lander. Yeah. Yeah. The moon lander. Yeah. Yeah. The moon lander is an investment investment in one. It's not cheap. It's like, we're at 370 bucks,

360. Yeah. Um, and, and I don't even know, I don't even think that's shipped. Right. Was it,

I don't think that was the shipped price. I don't remember. Um, I don't remember. And then it's a, it's an investment in time. Cause you got to really, you know,

get ready for it, you know, train yourself on it. Uh, you're probably going to replace the cables. That's my absolute favorite part. But then like, if I do decide to keep this keyboard,

then I am going to invest in having these blank keys that there, cause, cause like half the keyboard just has a dash on it. The keys only have a dash on it. So, and then that's because like, you're going to likely, you know, remap that key to be something that's important to you. But then that's where the brain power comes in while you're using it, because you've got to remember what you type, what you map that thing to on a particular layer. And so I will probably go through the expense of actually having those printed to be what I actually mapped it to if I opt to keep it, you know, and to continue using it. So, well, as a matter of fact, remind me. So this next bit of information that we have here is it'll already be passed when you hear this

episode by a couple of days. So Atlanta Code Camp is this weekend, October 9th. So Outlaw and myself will be there. I'll be doing a presentation there and remind me and I'll bring that keyboard Saturday morning and you can take it back and actually enjoy typing again. So we'll do that Saturday. Hey, Alan, could you remember to bring that keyboard on Saturday? Yeah, saw that coming. Exactly what I was looking for. We are a very helpful group here.

I don't know if you've gathered that yet. That's what we do. Speaking of conferences, that's what we were going to helpful group here. I don't know if you've gathered that yet. That's what we do. Speaking of conferences, that's what we were going to talk about today. And unfortunately, I am going to have to miss this year. Some stuff came up, so I planned on it and I plan on doing a talk.

And yeah, it's just not in the cards. So, hey, see you next year. But yeah, we put together some notes on kind of our thoughts about it. And like,

we didn't really, you know, go through and do a bunch of research. We really kind of wanted to focus on the kind of um our thoughts about about it and um like we didn't really you know go through and do a bunch of research we really kind of wanted to focus on kind of our feelings and just thoughts around it and uh you know just kind of talk about it so here we are and so i guess i'll kind of start it out just because like i do the uh what little notes we have together and just kind of wanted to do like a basic like what why who you know when where kind of situation with it so i wanted to say that we're kind of focusing to do like a basic like what, why, who, you know, when, where kind of situation with it. So I wanted to say that we're kind of focusing on basically the kinds of technical presentations you would see at conferences or meetups.

And we're not really talking about work presentations or like kind of Toastmaster wedding speech. You know, there's a whole other persuasive sales speeches. Like this whole world of like public speaking and kind of communication and stuff that's kind of uh we're just not even getting into it we're just kind of focusing on what is relevant for us and um you know for you as a programmer and uh i got a couple questions here to kind of sprinkle without so one thing i wanted to kind of throw in there first is um how similar is twitch or youtube content to speaking at a technical conference because i wasn't sure if that counted so i think it depends on how you treat it right so i i guess before we do that one though let's back up and we're talking specifically

about speaking at a conference or a meetup, right? Not, not attending them, but, you know, presenting at them. And I guess my take on that and Jay-Z, you've done this a lot too. When you make a presentation and you make something like, there's a lot of time that goes into creating those slides, right? And then there's a lot of time in trying to, at least in what you've done and what I've seen you do and what I And then there's a lot of time in trying to, at least in what you've done and what I've seen you do and what I do, there's a lot of time in trying to make a demo that actually works so that you can show things and then show some code. So from that perspective, I think if you are creating presentations like that, that have slides and all that, and then you do that for your YouTube channel, then it can be exactly the same, right? Like it can be 100% the same. I think the only thing you miss out on there, if you're not doing a live stream, well, which I guess Twitch

is, um, is the questions, right? Like typically you'll get some questions sprinkled in throughout while you're doing your presentation or at the end. That's the, that's the only thing that I think might be a little bit different. But otherwise they can be identical in terms of how you, how you approach the subject. Well, I was going to say one, it would depend on the format that you're doing the presentation in. Like, and I'm speaking purely from like hypothetical, cause it's not like I give presentations at these conferences. So I would think that it would be the format you would give it because if you did a live thing on a Twitch or YouTube, then you could have immediate feedback like you might in a real setting. And in fact, you might get more participation in those types of settings

because people might be more inclined to, you know, maybe a little bit of anonymity, you know, because it'd be on the web that they might feel a little bit more comfortable asking a question or, you know, than they would in person. But also, uh, if you didn't do it live, then it would be a totally different experience. Um, because then you don't have any of that pressure of having to get it right the first time or the demo gods being on your side when you do your presentation. And if you made a mistake, you could go back and edit it out or anything like that. So, you know, definitely the format in which you would give it would be, would, would totally matter as to whether or not you would count it as the same or not in my book. And, and that also includes like, um, now if, if you gave the presentation live and

that was recorded and then put on YouTube, obviously that would be the same cause it was done live and in person. Cause that's a lot, you know, I see a lot of conferences that I go to where the, the, the speaker is either streamed live or it's recorded and then posted, you know, in fact, we've referenced, uh, many conferences, uh, you know, videos to conferences for things like that. I will say the one thing that I've noticed over time, I mean, we've had our YouTube channel for a while. Typically longer content, which is what you would do at a conference, right? Or a meetup is you're typically going to do a 45 minute talk. We'll say right anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. Those are great for conferences and meetups and whatever they don't typically do as well on YouTube. I don't know about Twitch. I've never paid much attention to it, but, but I know on YouTube, like I've seen some fantastic talks

from conferences and stuff, and there'll be, um, 200 views from, from a big conference. Right. Um, and so I think in general, when people are looking at something like on YouTube or whatever, they're not looking for that longer tail content. So while I think it could be the same, like what Outlaw said, if you record it and you just kind of stick it up there and you're not doing a bunch of editing and all that, then it could be the same. I think that there's a different engagement level typically at a conference or a meetup. Yeah, definitely. And so I think this is a similar overlap, just like we talked about. Those are the two that were kind of interesting. you hit the the points i was kind of thinking

about with that um do you have a preference yourself on conference versus youtube versus meetup or like is there anyone that you'd like to do better i like twitch because i feel like you could make mistakes and engage and adapt and go in different directions. So it kind of feels more fun to me. With conferences in particular, there tends to be a lot of prep and kind of thinking about and trying to imagine the audience and practicing. And so there's a lot of this time that you kind of spend up front. And then you go deliver it and you hope that your assumptions were correct and the internet worked and everything else. And YouTube, you can kind of make mistakes, try it it out but there's also some downsides there too like you can kind of get into analysis paralysis with youtube or just kind of um you know like leave too

much to editing or just kind of misfire and you don't get that engagement to realize where you didn't address your audience's needs and so i think i've got pros and cons but i think um there's something about twitch to just be able to get up there and go. That was really nice. Hey, so along those lines real quick, cause I looked through the rest of the notes that you had here and I didn't see it.

So along those lines of when you're prepping for a talk at a, at a meetup or a conference, like you said, you're trying to think ahead of, of the questions they're going to be asked and all that. I know that you've done one or two of your talks multiple times, right? Like I remember Jamstack. You got tired of it, right?

Like it was probably like Eric Clapton singing Tears in Heaven. He was just like over it after the thousandth time. Well, that one, that's a bad reference. That's probably not a good one. That song also came from a really dark place in his life, a dark time in his life yeah totally yeah so maybe not the best maybe not the best example but so from that though when you would like the first time that you gave your jam stack talk when you got questions from it did you take that back put notes in update your presentation and then when you went to do it the next time you had those in there as talking points

somewhere injected in and and rinse repeat did you do that kind of every time iterate on the presentation oh yeah definitely uh took the feedback i don't know that i'm curious i'm not curious in the right word i wonder sometimes how much better it really got though it's the first time i did the talk i got kind of challenged on a couple of number points and it was good because i went back and i kind of edited and made sure to address the things that people had kind of brought up or, you know, the things that they had disagreed with. And next time I gave it, I felt like I did a better job of kind of addressing that stuff and delivering a presentation. But I really missed that pushback. Like that to me was like engagement.

So, you know, maybe I just did a better job. Maybe it just, you know, you know, it could did a better job maybe it just you know you know it could have been a number of different things but i kind of wonder if like there wasn't some value in having a little bit less of a balanced talk you know it's the difference between like watching watching someone speak to you and watching an infomercial you know i think you can get like a little bit too polished too robotic if you do too good of a job which sounds a little weird but maybe like purposely inject mistakes so that people can like have something to to discuss right so they can feel like they're engaged in part of the you know they have a vested interest in it too right i think

there's probably a way to do that without necessarily having it be like a hard mistake but you know like i know scott hanselman a little how it's like funny slides or memes or things that just kind of like make you jump a little bit and keep you engaged. And so so I don't know. But I wish that there's some things I liked about the talk that I gave early on where I like the challenging. I liked the feedback. I like people coming up with, you know, trying to think like of ways to kind of either disprove or, you know, like, I don't know. There's something about the kind of that engagement that i missed after after the talk got better that that totally makes sense

yeah that's that's interesting i would never really would have thought about it from that perspective but it does it does get people more involved yeah it was kind of it was really like by the time the last time i got the talk i like had all the ammo like i was ready for like anything anyone might say like counter examples and stuff it's like oh no that's no i mean it's you know what's interesting for me so jam stack that's not something that you could necessarily build on in this way um i know you've done other talks like on elastic search and stuff which would have probably been more along the lines of what i'm, what I'm about to share is like when I did, um, the Kafka streams stuff that I would do with Apache Kafka and Kafka streams is every time that I finished giving one of those talks, I think about, oh man, there's something else that I could show that would help people sort of understand more of this. Right.

And so after every one of those talks, I would inevitably, it was like building software, right? Like it's just like that. You're like, oh, I can add this and it'll make it better. And if I put this slide in here, then they'll understand this transition better, right? So I was constantly doing that, like even to the point where I think the last time I gave that talk,

I probably spent another 20 hours before that last talk, just tweaking what I already had, right? Like updating the code and adding more slides and all that. And, and at some point you almost get tired of it, but I did want to share this one thing that, um, maybe you'll get out of this. And I totally encourage people who want to speak at these things to do it. Um, and we'll get into the reasons why here in a minute. It takes a lot of time. One of the ways to minimize the amount of time you actually spend doing these is build a presentation that's sort of, I don't want to say evergreen, but can be more like that. There are speakers who make a career of speaking the same exact talk at conferences every year for a decade. I'm still talking about COBOL.

Just like that. But, but yeah, I mean, if you find something that is valuable, like I would say like, there's all kinds of things out there that could do it right. Like clean code or something like that. If you find something that is valuable, like I would say like there's all kinds of things out there that could do it right, like clean code or something like that. If you put together a presentation on that and you went and spoke at conferences, I guarantee you could make your way around the world doing it every year.

The same thing more or less every year with just a little bit of updated content. And then that way you're not spending 50 hours every time coming up with fresh new content to go talk at at the next conference. You brought up Jay-Z's Elasticsearch presentation, which could easily be something like that though, right? But the irony is he can't

find it now. I'm still searching. They keep changing. They release so much. It's a major version. I don't. I'm still searching. They keep changing the... They release so much. It's a major version. I don't even know if my old talks would work anymore. I have to spend some time just to get it working again.

Now that we're going into version 8 on Elastic. They bring up a lot of really good points about content and what kinds of content to give to. I've got a couple notes on that coming up, I think, after the break. But yeah, all really, really great valid points. And it kind of brings us to a little bit too is you have to understand

why you are wanting to give a talk in the first place. And I think there's a lot of different reasons. I did find an article that we'll have linked in the resources section of the show notes, but it kind of had a list of different reasons. I did find an article that we'll have linked in the resources section of the show notes, but it kind of had a list of things that you get out of talking. But I think before we even get into that, you kind of have to understand what you want from getting a talk. Because for the most part, there's no money, right? Like conferences, unless you're like a big huge keynote speaker like you're not going to you know make any money if you've got a product to sell you're probably only speaking to

like 20 to 30 people you know initially you know as you level up conferences that'll get bigger but how many sales are you really going to get out of there and so uh you know you got to think about what exactly you're doing there and kind of understand that and those are going to be personal reasons you know so we'll, we'll go over the list here of like some ideas, but I thought it'd be interesting to hear, like, like,

I don't know for you, like Alan, like why do you want to give talks? Um, I think looking at this list here, man, let's go through the list and I'll tell you the ones as we, as we hit them,

which ones were really important to me. All right. So the first one I got here is can help you build an audience. I like that one. Right. But I mean, that kind of goes along with what we do here. Right. We love to help people.

We love to talk to people and talk about the things that we do and all that. But we didn't start this show to build an audience, though. Right. No, no, totally. But I mean, that's just, you know, any, any following any audience has been fortunate now. I agreed. Yeah. I mean, we did this 100% organically. I know we've talked about this on the show just a little bit over time, but we didn't ever pay for, for eyeballs on anything, right? Like we didn't ever go out and get ads to get people to come to the podcast. You know, it all happened organically. But when I decided to start doing more speaking at conferences

and meetups and stuff, it partly was to get more people to know about the podcast, right? Because, you know, I think the more that we've done this over time, and it's not, it's not greedily just to get, you know, sponsorship dollars or anything like that. It's more about the thing of there's a lot of developers who sort of, we've talked about this, they have imposter syndrome where they feel like they're on an island or they're nervous because they're around a bunch of people that they think are smarter than them. Like a lot of people have this. Why are you describing me, man? This is so awkward. I feel so uncomfortable.

But I really – I think I can speak at least for me and I think all of us. We've gotten a lot out of doing this, right? Like we've met a lot of cool people and we joke about it with the reviews and – but in all honesty, when we get these emails from people, sometimes we get emails that aren't even public reviews or whatever, where people are like, hey, you guys help change our lives. You know, you know, I was really down in the dumps on what I was doing. I'm enjoying it. And, you know, like all this kind of stuff has been really rewarding. And I like I love it that we have built a community of people that generally and genuinely want to help each other. Even our Slack channel is full of people that are just amazing.

We have had very few problems over the years in that Slack channel. And that's unheard of for a Slack group the size of ours. And just seeing that positivity and people trying to help each other and really trying to push people up is just amazing. And so that is definitely one of the things building our community. I want people to know about it because I think it's not you know you gotta remember like you're only doing this to like 20 like at the max if you're doing you know most kind of smaller presentations like if you're doing like um i forget the one you down in europe in dc and yeah that was huge right those can be really big but for the most part like i say 20 like you might get five you know your first couple talks like it's gonna be small you're not gonna build a huge audience based on your speaking you're gonna spend you know 10 hours getting ready for your presentation, do it to five people. And maybe you'll, you know, hear from one of those ever

again, but it is a good way to build a strong audience. And if you have a book or podcast or, you know, a company you're starting or some idea that you believe strongly in, it could be a good way to find people that are like-minded and kind of can partner with you as you grow. But aside from that, I think there are more effective ways to build an audience. Yeah, totally. It's not going to make your huge audience, but it will get you a good connection with those in your audience, which is nice, right? It's an intimate, it's almost like going to a small plane by a band right like they can they can chat with you and have fun as opposed to when they get huge and they're playing in front of you know 80 000 people they're not going to do that same interaction so it's not that we're ever that

big but you know maybe that analogy will play out one day yeah uh second one here is established credibility and i think that you know kind of the podcast that makes sense too if you're trying to make a name for yourself but i think this helps a lot when you have like a certain domain you're going after like if every year you went and you did kafka talks or you wanted to be the elastic search person or you're really into static analysis or something if you can kind of find like a more niche topic you know establishing credibility doesn't really work if like every year you do something completely different and to completely different audiences a more niche topic. Establishing credibility doesn't really work if every year you do something completely different and to completely different audiences.

You really need to have that kind of saturation. I interpreted that one as like an MVP, like a Microsoft MVP kind of thing, right? If you wanted to establish credibility to be like, this is why I should have this particular MVP. Like I should be an Azure MVP because of X, Y, and Z. And here's, here's the credentials that I have to follow that. Oh, here's presentations that I've given to, you know, you know, cause they, they want you to quantify those kinds of things, you know, when you do that. Right. So that's the way I interpreted that one. Yeah, that's a good point. So interesting for you, Jay-Z, on a zero to 10 scale, the help you build your audience, where does that lie for you?

Before I did it, it would have been like a seven. And now it's like a three for me. Interesting. So the build your audience is really low for you. I think mine's probably a six, seven, somewhere in that ballpark just you know to engage with people so on the establish your credibility where's that one lie for you so for me personally it's like a three because I have been doing scattershot I've every topic is different it's different audiences every time who like you know like I feel like it's just not really helping establish you know

like the brand if it's different people all the establish, you know, like the brand, if it's different people all the time. So I think it would be better served if I was like trying to be the Google cloud person or, you know, like a Microsoft MVP, if I was really gunning for that hard and it stayed focused. And I think it would be more important for me.

But what about you? Um, so this one's interesting. I have a bit of a different take. So you're, you're kind of picturing it as like the julie lehrman with entity framework right like yeah that's where you're kind of coming at this from she's been doing that for years that's all she talks about and so she's she is

the guru on it right i'd say this one for me um established credibility is right there in the middle it's about a five and i am also scatter but I think for me, it's just showing that I do understand how a lot of technologies work together. So as opposed to being a full-on expert at Elasticsearch, like what you were talking about, right? Like if you had just gone after that gung-ho, then you would have been the guru on elastic search. But I think for me, it's more about just understanding that there are different technology stacks that solve different problems and seeing that out there, that's kind of where this is. And so that's why it's kind of a five. I don't see it as being bad, being scattershot when they all sort of tie together

for some purpose overall. It also depends though, on where you are like career wise, because, um, if you had your own agency, for example, like, and you were doing your own consulting, then you going out there and giving talks about a particular technology or stack or language or whatever, like, you know, the people in that audience might think, Oh, that guy is a gun for hire, or gal, that is a gun for hire that I should go after to do my Azure migration or whatever. What came to mind was, do you remember Azure Steve? I do, yeah. Yeah, so Azure Steve is a guy that we met,

that Alan and I and Joe have met at some of these conferences and he's known for giving talks on Azure and has made a name for himself in a good career related to all things Azure. And you know, you'll see him at his talks are going to be Azure based and he, and I think he had his own consulting agency that he started up as a result of, uh, you know, so, so he definitely, I bet if you were to ask him, I mean, it's definitely an opportunity to like build credibility as well as like some advertising and, you know, build a name for yourself. Yeah, that's a good point. And you can find him in azuresteve.com.

Oh, I guess that as a, your next one there. Then I kind of stole some of that thunder. Yeah, all good promotional opportunities. So basically, that's if you have a service that you're trying to render or something like that, that's a great chance to kind of find people who might actually pay for you. Or like here, you also find a lot of people like Guy Royce. We've mentioned his talks several times. His fantastic talks. Now he's working with Redis. And so I'm sure he's going to be Atlanta. I think he lives in Ohio.

But he's probably going to be at Atlanta Code Camp this year. And he's probably going to be talking something that has to do with Redis. And it's not going to be like getting started with Redis. It'll be something like Dungeons and Dragons and machine learning. And Redis is going to be in there for sure. But it's about kind of

dipping in on the kind of talks he's doing it's either going to be about trying to kind of expand and bring redis to you know new people new uh people and show them what can what it can do or it can be trying to take people that aren't maybe already you know using redis and showing them how to kind of expand that but either way he's working on behalf of a company there and it's because there's money to be made there um just either spreading the name or just deepening those relationships and so that's a really big reason for talking so for you on the promotional opportunities how high is this on the scale uh it's a zero we've talked about this before too where i if we had something to sell if we had a clothing box book or something um you know so

there's like the youtube channel and stuff like that but i kind of lumped that in more than building an audience so for me it's just you know it's a one out of ten i guess yeah same here and it's i would love to have something to sell you guys but we've just never taken the time to do it um so i don't know maybe maybe one day we'll have something but yeah yeah, promotional is very low on mine. And the next one is networking. And that's more about meeting people rather than connecting Ethernet cables or whatever. And there's a lot of networking that happens at these events. There tends to be speaker dinners the night before sometimes where you get to meet people.

A lot of times they'll have speaker rooms where people can go and kind of practice and make sure their audiovisual stuff is going to plug in. They'll have equipment similar to the rooms and a lot of you know talking and meeting and getting to know people happens in these rooms and so that's a lot of times where you'll see the same speakers if you get into like the the circuit for doing uh like talks in your kind of region in the world you're going to see a lot of the same faces every year and you're going to get to know the people and be friendly with them and so these conferences become a chance for you to kind of get out and see your friends and strengthen those relationships the next thing you know and they have a you know a need for something or you know uh some sort of monetary or uh you know some sort of benefit uh or question or uh help a person might need that they think

hey you know i knew that person that gave a talk on redis last year let me look them up get her you know uh my buddy alan did a talk on kafka last year let me give him a call so it just strengthens those bonds so where is this on your scale uh i am you know i'm not looking for a job or anything so it's i'm gonna say a five here because i do like that i i you know maybe i'll say a six because there's some people I just really enjoy talking with every year, and I miss that during these COVID dark years. So I like it, but I don't know that I would call it necessarily beneficial other than to just my personal happiness. Yeah, I would probably put myself up there. I'm probably about a seven or eight because I really do enjoy it.

I've met a lot of great people. Jared, um, Atlanta code camp, right? Um, it's how we hooked up with them. Dan,

Dan, Addis, those guys. Um, I mean, I've met people all over the place because I did this as a matter of fact. Um, I met Jamie,

um, GA program and Taylor, right? Yep. Because I went and spoke at the NDC thing. And so, you know, I got to meet him and do all that. Like, so I, I totally love doing this because especially through the podcast, I've gotten to meet people that would have been really hard and difficult to meet over time.

And I hate to leave out names like Zach Braddy and those guys, right? Like, um, I got to meet a lot of people because I've done this. And that's amazing. That's a lot of fun. Yeah, I always think it's funny when I can name people I know from Florida and you know them. So it's like,

I can go to lunch with Santosh. It's been too long. Santosh, we should do lunch again. In a park, socially distanced. But I can say like, hey, I ran into Santosh last week or whatever. And you know who I'm talking about. You've been in conferences together or whatever, like John Callaway from – I think it's that crazy guy over in St. Pete or Tampa.

But you also know him. Right, yeah. You should check out the Six Figure Developer if you don't already. And that's why it's so much fun right like um you truly build relationships with these people and and even though we haven't seen each other in you know two three years now uh you know tim cory just said that he's going to be coming up to atlanta code camp he tweeted us back and you know that's another guy that you know we've seen at code camps and it's just it's a lot of fun to meet people and and get together and talk about it and you know just have a good time

yeah and these people are doing really cool stuff about it and, you know, just have a good time. Yeah, and these people are doing really cool stuff too. Like some of the people we just mentioned, you know, very casually or just they've got really like, you know, powerful, really cool consulting businesses or YouTube channels or, you know, just all sorts of different things. They're just doing really interesting, cool stuff. And, you know, of course, they also know other people in the community. So if you're, you know, it's literally creating a network. So it kind of connects you to even people that are even further out that are in the same domain as you that you maybe not, you know, have a direct connection to.

But you can say like, hey, John, can you introduce me to whoever? I've never done that, but I see it happen in movies. It's got to be real. Right. Oh, I got one good one here. So free travel or conferences. So sometimes conferences will pay for a little bit of travel or maybe just getting into the conference for free, which can be really nice. So how high is this for you? Low, low. Okay. I'm not a big

traveler. Oh man. See, that's, that's crazy talk. So for me, this one's big. I've only had it happen to me once I think. Um, but it was awesome, but I will tell you. So as somebody that's on a number of different mailing lists and stuff, I've gotten emails before where it's like, Hey, we want, we want a speaker to speak about a particular technology or, or maybe not even a particular technology, just come do a tech talk. And I remember one specifically for Russia and in the email, it said, Hey, if you'll come over here and speak at this conference, we'll put you up at the nicest hotel here. We're going to give you a personal tour of the Kremlin. You're going to be able to go do this. You could also fly a companion over with you. So if you'll do all this, we'll pay for all of it if you'll just come talk. So, I mean, like, seriously, that's pretty awesome. If you are

into the traveling thing and you like to experience things, I mean, that's a pretty sweet gig to get a personal tour of the Kremlin just because you wanted to come talk some tech. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. So many jokes. I'm like, my mind is flooded right now with like, okay, you just had to provide your 401k number. Yeah, I was going to say, say i was gonna say like outlaws like did you check that link yeah it's like don't click that link in the email you should type that address yeah that's so good something to argue but but in all seriousness like they will um

you know potentially pay for your travel like your airline as, as well as your hotel. And it's, it's a good way to be able to go experience things. And, and let's be honest, right. You're going to be prepping for the conference and doing your presentation and all that kind of stuff, but you can have a lot of free time to go explore and do some cool stuff. So, you know, it's a good way to get around and check out some things. Well, I mean, am I wrong though? Cause I would imagine that the cost that they're going to pay, they're going to pay for the flight and the hotel necessary for you to be there for the conference. Correct. But, you know, if you wanted to stay a couple days later after that, like, they're not covering that.

No, you're going to foot the bill for those nights. There's not going to be too much extra time to go explore. If you only stayed within the boundaries of, like, this is what they're paying for. So that's the thing. I mean, typically when you're speaking in a conference, you have a time that you're going to be there to talk, right? Technically the rest of the time, you don't, you don't have to do much, but you actually, um, you can, like I did, I extended my stay, right? So they still paid for the flight to and from, cause I was going to have to do that. Anyways, I paid for my extra nights and then life was good. Right. So it's, it's still benefits you

if you want to do it, but yeah, it's a, it's pretty cool. And Oh, by the way, that typically also gives you a ticket to the rest of the conference, right? So if it's a three day conference, they're going to put you up for three nights, even though you're only speaking one day, you know what I'm saying? So, so you still get that extra time and you still get to go check out all the other stuff that's happening yeah that's a good point too it's kind of an investment so if you're like i want to go to uh big conferences i'm going to go to build i'm going to go to you know uh whatever google's uh google next um those can be really expensive like you know a thousand dollars or more um gonna go way up you could say you know what if i if i'm speaking there

i'll probably get in for free you will yeah and that's that's pretty amazing and but it's kind of hard to go from never done doing a talk before to one of those right so it's almost like you need to kind of build up to that sort of thing if you're interested in it but then yeah i mean that's pretty cool i think you can go to the biggest coolest conferences every year for free yep and and here's another tip for people who don't necessarily want to speak you can go to the biggest, coolest conferences every year for free. Yep. And here's another tip for people who don't necessarily want to speak. You can also volunteer for some of these things. So if you don't have $2,500 to get a Microsoft bill, but you really want to go and you volunteer to help, you know, set up things and do things at the show, you can typically get in for

free just by, you know, offering your time and a little bit of help. So, you know, those are opportunities to get out bit of help. So, you know, those, those are opportunities to get out there if you don't have the cash to plunk down. So some quick Googling for two conferences and we'll just see like how close you guys can get to be. What do you think the ticket price to attend Apple's WWDC was for, uh, was that for 2021? Let's say it's,

let's say it's within the recent years and not necessarily put a specific year on it. 5,000. How many days? That's a great question. I don't know. Everything I'm seeing doesn't specify if it's a ticket for single day or multiple. But if I recall, I think the WWDC tickets were like, I think it was for the whole thing.

Maybe. I don't remember. How many is that? Three days? Three days. Usually five day thing. Well, yeah. WWDC is, you know, atDC is at least three to four days,

somewhere in that range at least. From what I remember, it's been a while. 7,000. Wow, you guys. Way off. So at least within the last few years, it was 1,600. Okay, that's not terrible. Oh, really?

That's not bad at all. The heck? Per day? Oh, wait? That's not bad at all. The heck? Per day? Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. This quote is saying that's just for the workshop, not for the keynote. Okay, that would make sense. I thought it was higher.

And it's Apple. There's the Apple tax anyways. Yeah, now what do you think build cost? I think build's $2,500. I want to say it's right there. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Build came up at 2,400 for the 2020.

Yeah. Builds really cool. By the way. Um, I did, I, you know, a couple of years ago I went down with John Galloway and we did that, that episode down there because we did, you know, a podcast at the place they let us in, man, that, that was cool stuff. That was a really good conference. So, uh, last one on the reasons why is I think the most important one, like everything so far, like if I, if I had, you know, given past presentations, I would have ranked all of those pretty low,

but this one, a great way to learn something I think would rank the highest. It, because it's kind of like what Alan was describing at the beginning. I think it was Alan, you were describing it where this is one of those like sink or swim moments, right? So you're, um, what's the, isn't there a, isn't there a type of learning, uh, where, where, uh, Oh yeah. Like the learning truth, the pyramid or whatever, um, deep immersion or something like that, or total immersion. Yeah. I think that's what it's called. Like, this is like total immersion type learning if you're going to give a presentation. So you're going to force yourself to try to think through the questions that people might ask, like what Jay-Z was talking about and be prepared for those and then also be caught off guard. And maybe you're ready for it or maybe not but to me like that would like to learn something would be the the biggest reason why

you know i would have any interest in doing it maybe because like the networking one i know you're probably shaking your head like oh my god you wouldn't rate that one high that's the reason why you attend the conference not the reason why you present at it right you're both both yeah the great way to learn something is pretty high for me. I'd say it's up there around an eight. I mean, um, you know,

maybe I'll even get my presentation done for Saturday, which is three days away and I'll have learned something by then. So yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. Yeah. And, and I would say when that was pretty high for me. So it's kind of nice.

And just like you said, if there's something about, um, having that goal goal it's kind of like with the um the certifications too where like having something to focus on makes you really kind of round out something and like at the end of it uh you come out the other side like with the ability to really speak to something and even like years later someone might ask me something like i still have that stuff just on the tip of my tongue and it's organized there's a lot to be said for just being organized with your thoughts on things too. So you can kind of share that and really teach other people quickly. Oh, especially when you can like, here's a link.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really nice. Episode. Yep. I mean, you know, this, this show in some ways is kind of like giving those talk conferences, except we do have the luxury of not being live and all that. So going back to your YouTube Twitch question, you know,

it's not exactly the same, but, uh, from the point of view of forcing you to learn something or, you know, come out, you know, step outside of your wheelhouse and read another book that you might not have otherwise thought about or something like that, you know, step outside of your wheelhouse and read another book that you might not have otherwise thought about or something like that, you know, and then discuss it. Like I have found immense value in doing the show because of that. And some of the books that we have, you know, like Designing Data Intensive Applications, one of our favorite, I think, I think collectively that's one of our favorite books

that we, that, you know, the three of us would agree on that we've done on this show. If left to my own devices, if we weren't doing the show, I don't know that I would have ever thought to pick that book up. I not, not no, uh, knock on that book.

And you know, that's not a stab at the book in any way, you know, maybe more of a stab at myself. They, I, it wouldn't have occurred to me to like, Oh yeah,

this might be something interesting to read. So, you know, like trying to put together a presentation of any kind of media that you're going to share with others, whether it be live and in person or something like this, it does force you to learn other things. Hardcore. Yeah. So that one's probably more like a 7 it does force you to like learn other things, you know, hardcore. Yeah. Yeah.

So that one's probably more like a seven or eight to me. That's, that's high up there. So I always tried it. That's part of why I'm so scattered shot on my topics is, is really important for me to find something that I want to really round out my knowledge on. So I kind of pick on something that I want to really go after. I like this next one.

Yeah, so I just added this one. I'm sorry I didn't add it on there. And the idea is that, and I'm going to tweak it a little bit. The idea is that by doing these presentations, you can become a better and stronger communicator overall because you're kind of practicing

doing these things and speaking to people and getting your thoughts organized. And also just even, uh, writing the presentation, everything, uh,

teaches you about writing and, uh, attracting people that kind of attracting your audience and like writing to find that audience and, and, uh, the whole thing. Um,

so I think this is probably like a 10 out of 10 for me. I think this one's pretty high for me too. I think you have become a better speaker before and I like communicator as well. I think I really enjoy the, I love watching people who are great speakers like a outlaw. You remember when we went to that view talk at Atlanta, JavaScript or whatever,

dude's talking about connect tech, connect tech. Yeah, that's right. And he was talking about connect tech. Connect tech. Yeah, that's right. And he was talking about his dishwasher for like the first five minutes. And I was like, where's this going? And he was such a good storyteller and,

and he had the audience, right? Like he, there are some talks, please, please pay attention to your audience. If you, if you are anybody that's going to be speaking and you look around and

everybody's dead, like next time you do it, spice it up somehow. This dude had practiced, right? Like he had, he had sharpened that skill of being a great speaker and a great communicator.

And, and people were smiling and people were, you know, reacting to things that he said. And it just, when you're talking about tech it can be real easy to go deep and dark and and and boring on some stuff and you want to keep people engaged you want to keep that hook there so that so that you keep reeling them back in right and and that's an art and that's something that i really like i love

working on it i don't know that i'm good at it, but, but I enjoy it. I enjoy trying to be good at it. I'm trying to find his name again. He's, uh, he, I remember he was a Microsoft developer talking about view. I believe he worked for Microsoft at the time.

Oh, well, yeah, that's what I meant by Microsoft developer. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. And he was out of Nashville.

I want to say, right. If I remember correctly, but yeah, it was so good. So, I mean, it make people laugh,

you know, um, make people question something that you say, right? Like, like Jay-Z, you were talking about the pushback that you were getting. That was probably good because people,

you know, they're engaged. You're like, wait a second. He said something that, that, that tweaked me in a way that, that I can't, can't sit still with. And that's good to a certain degree, right? Like you don't want to agitate your audience, but, but having them engaged mentally is, is a big thing in these talks. Yeah. One thing I tried to do with some of my recent talks is like, I kind of try to like come up with one sentence that i want this is what i want everyone to come away from come away with and then everything else is to support that one kind of thesis like this is what i want everyone

to come out for and i think with the the jam stack talks what i wanted people to come away from that with is saying maybe i could be doing things better and uh i didn't expect anyone to go rush out and rewrite everything i also didn't want to find a bunch of people who already were doing that sort of thing and we're just going to be kind of bored of the lack of details i wanted to find the people that weren't doing it yet and try to change their minds and it was totally fine with me if they listened to what i had said i had to say and say no i think you're wrong or this this is not going to work for me and i was totally fine but i just wanted them to really consider it right and so to me when the people were challenging it and uh kind of fighting back on it that's that's what i wanted so yeah convince me right like and

that's good yeah and i think that's much better than just just missing out a hand or being like yeah yeah i know i should do this or that or whatever but i'm tired right so yeah so this last one yeah uh is is speaking fun you no i should say the act of actual speaking, no, I don't enjoy it. I do enjoy the writing process a little bit because, I don't know, there's something about the kind of challenge of really honing down your message and just trying to come up with a good talk. And that to me is kind of fun. But the actual act of speaking, I pretty much despise. That's hilarious.

I love it. I absolutely love it. I will say for me, it's like I said, when I did the Apache Kafka talk the first time and the second time, third time, whatever, I was always trying to hone it,

right? Like something that I felt like I wasn't getting across well on the first one, like I'd always go back and be like, how can I make this come across better? Right. And so, so the act of speaking, like I want to make back and be like, how can I make this come across better? Right. And so, so the act of speaking, like I want to make people laugh. It's just, I like to see people

smile. And then I also want to see light bulbs go off. Right. So, so trying to find that balance of what's good to show on a slide versus what's good to say just to get a reaction. Right. I love that. It's so much fun to me and sometimes i've done really well sometimes i'm like wow um either i'm off my game or these people are all asleep i don't know what's up but you know could be both yeah so uh yeah there's just i enjoy about it um but the day of i'm always a wreck and like immediately before i just can't think about anything else i can't focus then i do the talk and you know it's kind of like you've i've practiced a bunch of other times so the talk itself isn't terrible um but then afterwards i

just feel like a deflated balloon just need to like go crawl into a bathroom stall and like catch my breath for an hour so i think i found it not only i'm trying to see if i found even the actual slides but it was burke holland that sounds right yeah i'm 98 maybe 97 certain well if you're certain then i'm probably 93 certain that's totally him yeah but uh yeah yeah i'm pretty sure that was the the guy that gave the the dishwasher talk and yeah for the first you know few minutes of the presentation you're like what am i in the wrong i'm in the wrong room are we talking about dishwasher repair why one of my favorite talks of all time. Like, seriously, it was excellent.

I think just to kind of recap it, so for me, you know, it's a lot about just learning to be a better communicator and learn something. And I love the idea that I could be in, whether it's a job interview or a work presentation or something, but a topic come up, and if I've got a strong point I want to make, I want to be able to deliver that point and get that

kind of thesis statement across with the three supporting arguments and have it be organized and really accomplish my objective and that's kind of what i want out of it i think it's a great way to get it totally uh so who got a little section here on like kind of who speaks at conferences uh and yeah this is kind of short there's a really a lot of reasons why but we've kind of talked about these so we've talked about the like the sponsors like people who have like a product or company so i just thought it was kind of one thing to call out so if you're in a talk you can kind of

think a little bit about who is giving that talk and think about what they're trying to get from you if that makes sense so like next time you're going to talk about like static analysis or something and uh you know the person that works at a company that has a static analysis tool you got to kind of keep that in mind that uh there's you know they're a bias in their presentation which can be totally fine maybe you're interested in that tool which is something to remember uh the other one is practitioners which are kind of talks from people actually doing it and sometimes they'll have a like a specific result or um you know something that's kind of like a here's a challenge that i had and here's how we solved it with uh you know animated sprites or i don't know something um and so those are kind of like more like my people kind of talks

and let me see there's one more that i forgot to finish writing the notes on um hey along the lines while you're doing the notes on this the practitioner so i do want to call out something if you're going to a conference this is more as an attendee to a conference you guys remember going to elastic conf right where at the time we were getting into elastic search and we were really trying to find out some answers, like some really technical questions on how to overcome some shortcomings. So what? Hurdles.

Hurdles. Yeah. Some hurdles with the technology. And just know that sometimes the answers may not be with the specific technology that you're looking at. Right. Um, I just, just as an example, one of the things that we kept asking every engineer at the bar, like,

uh, how can we join some data between two, two indexes? Right. And Ed, we got all kinds of wacky things and nothing made sense. Nothing would have worked. And what I realized later is when you were at a conference on a specific technology, there is a ton of knowledge on that technology wrapped up in that technology.

Rightfully so, right? Like the people work on it, they're programming it, all that. When you might be able to use something like PrestoDB to do what you're trying to do, that is outside that view, right? And it's not going to be something that people there focus on because they're focusing on the challenges of improving that product. So sometimes you might want to go outside that realm. So don't necessarily think that you're going to go to a conference on a particular technology and get all the answers you want for your particular use case. You might need to step back and go to a broader type area to,

to field those questions just, just as a, as a heads up. Or said another way, uh, that technology for that conference that you want to go to, don't think that you can make it your new hammer and everything is a nail and you can use that one tool for everything. Totally. But, but if you're going to do that, just know that you probably won't get those answers or yeah,

or you might get answers. You totally don't like, right? Yeah. The, the last kind of archetype that I found here was, well, I think the article calls them different, but idea people.

So I think it's like people have a strong belief in something that's controversial. And maybe they've got an axe to grind or a chip on the shoulder. Maybe that's like an idea that's percolating into a product or something. And if you've ever seen like a talk on like unit testing or why you should get into unit testing or talk on like functional programming or something like, and then the talk has a general name, something like intro to functional or why you should be unit testing or something. And that's kind of something there because it's almost like the people giving those talks are like, I wish my coworkers were here or I wish more people were programming like this, or I think this is the right way to go, but there's not enough people that believe it yet.

So it's kind of like a persuasive type talk. Uh, and so that's a, you know, some, sometimes a strong motivation for people that will get up and go do a talk. Oh, there's another thing that we could put here too, that I didn't even think about. Uh, so at companies that, you know, you've got your different levels, right? Like Amazon has their SD one, two, three, et cetera. A lot of times there are requirements for getting to some of those higher tiers. And some of those higher tiers might require that you go speak at conferences because they want to have a presence from their company at an important conference to show that they are leaders or thought leaders in the industry, right? So you will also find people that maybe they're an engineer at Amazon or Google or something, and they may go speak at a conference because that is how they're going to make it up to the next tier because to get into some positions at your companies, there are requirements

like that. Yeah, so that kind of goes back to that credibility thing. And now it's credibility even within your own organization. Tied to your job. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. I can't really think of any other thing. We talked about some motivation,

so there's different tie-ins there, but I think those are the major categories. I like it. This episode is sponsored by data dog the unified monitoring platform for full visibility into all of your serverless functions troubleshoot performance issues faster by seamlessly navigating between logs lambda metrics and distributed request traces all within one unified platform. Datadog provides real-time screen boards and service mapping so you can get complete observability in your serverless environments.

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And that's one of the many things that Datadog provides with their observability tools. I got a whole new reason for you to fall in love with Datadog. You ready for this one? And Jay-Z, I know you, I expect you especially between the three of us are going to love this. Did you know? Okay. First of all, I think we've covered so many times before the ridiculous number of integrations that data hot dog has. Right. I mean like last count, it was over 450,

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So I'll have some links to the Datadog blogs where they talk about, because of course they would have a blog about this. Have you ever seen their, if you haven't already seen Datadog's blogs, you really need to go look at it because they have everything commented and documented. Like there's pick a technology. I dare you. And you're going to find something on Datadog about it. I'm sure. So, uh, start monitoring today with a free 14 trial, and receive a free Datadog t-shirt after creating one dashboard. Yep. Visit datadoghq.com slash codingblocks to learn more about how Datadog can help you optimize your serverless environment.

Again, that's datadoghq.com slash codingblocks. Okay, so we didn't say it beforehand, and you guys both did it. I don't know. This is becoming such a thing. I guess I got to just embrace it now. So here it goes. Oh, God. Wait, am I doing the late night DJ?

Is that the one? Because Jay-Z tried to flip the script and do the rocking one last time. So I guess I'm going to... Hey, listener. If you haven't already left us a review, we would greatly appreciate it. We'd be forever in your debt. You can find some helpful links at www.codingbox.net slash review. Why do you sound like somebody off South Park?

South Park? That's the last thing that came to mind. Or Chef. The Chef. Yeah, Chef. Chef off South Park. And I don't even watch South Park. Well, he would probably say something like, now children.

Gotta go. He would, because he was always talking about the children. Or no, did he just say boys or the children? I forget now. I never watched it, yeah. But, yeah, so, you know so we're heading into my favorite portion, but I do have a question for you. What do you call

a sad coffee? Decaffeinated? I don't know. Depresso. Oh, gosh. Okay. Yep. MikeRG, thank you. Hey, and because we're heading into Halloween, how about this one?

Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? I don't know. Yeah, I can only think of real reasons. Well, you're pretty close because he had no guts. Oh. That's pretty good yeah pretty good that was that was from the dad jokes api and i was like oh that's too good it's like you know it fits because it's october yeah i like that yep all right so uh i i i have a gripe session that i want to have but but first we'll go to this question first. So let's go ahead and head into, welcome to Michael's favorite portion of the show, Survey Says.

All right. So a few episodes back, we asked, what's your IDE of choice? And your choices were, I prefer a lightweight IDE such as Visual Studio Code or Atom. Or, I like a fully functional IDE like Visual Studio or IntelliJ. Or, I like to use editors like them and tell others it's an IDE. Or, I like to use editors like Notepad plus plus or sublime, bury myself in plugins so that it can act like an ID. Now I know what you're thinking.

You're gonna be like, well, that was kind of judgmental, Michael, and you're not wrong. All right. So this is episode one 69. So,

uh, according to tech codes, trademarked rules of engagement, Alan, you are up first. All right. You know, I'm torn on this one because I don't even know what mine is now. I think I'm going to go with, I like a fully functional IDE like Visual Studio or IntelliJ. This one's going to be tough, though. I'm going to go with a good 32% on this one.

Okay. Well, uh, I'm also going to go with, uh, like a fully functional ID, like visual studio or intelligent way for it. And I'm going to go with whatever,

whatever Alan said, plus two, you are a dog, sir. I don't remember what you said, but whatever it is, I'm going to take it. So Alan says,

I like a fully functional ID like visual studio or IntelliJ for 30% of the vote. Correct. 32, 32% of it. Okay. Uh, and then Jay Z says,

Oh, I also like a fully functional ID, but 34%. Yeah. Plus you get 33. I'm going to scream. Yeah. Plus equals two.

Wouldn't that be awesome? I'm hoping for it, actually. Well, you know there has to be a winner and a loser, right? Not necessarily. That's right. You could both be losers. Right. But that would be really rude of me to say to you guys.

And I'm not going to be that kind of mean no i this is 2021 i've turned over newly from being a nice guy uh you know that was my october 1st resolution so Yeah. Alan, you lost. Oh, God. Yes. Yeah. Jay-Z came and swiped it out from under you. Yeah, it was 49% of the vote was fully functional IDE. And like Alan, I was torn out because I don't know, man. I mean, I use Visual Studio Code for everything else, you know, for just about everything it's always open right yeah yeah it's my favorite tool to like just browse the code repository

if i want to search the repository if i just need to make simple edits if i want to view any file if i want to like open up a new file and paste something in and format it because maybe the JSON was minified and I can't read it all on one line because it's a thousand characters long and I want it pretty... But the problem

is when you actually need to get some work done, then full-blown IDEs are hard to ignore. yeah yeah you're you're not wrong it depends on the type of development though totally totally so if you're doing something like angular maybe not as bad if you're doing some some compiled language do java i don't even think i want to know what it would be like to do java in visual studio code imagine all the maven plugins you need just to like compile your java app with intellij now

imagine all the maven plugins you'd have to add on top of visual studio code to make it act like intellij and then no man no no i mean like these days I find myself doing a lot of, um, uh, I'm, I'm torn between, I have three editors always open, uh, IntelliJ for everything that is not C sharp writer for C sharp and then, uh, data grip for everything data related. You haven't, you have visual studio code open also. Didn't I say that? I thought that was the first one I said. No.

What did I say? Writer. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant, I meant, I, did I really say intelligent?

I meant, I meant visual studio code for everything. That's not C sharp. And then, and then writer for C sharp. There you go. Wow. Memory's the first thing to go.

That's our, it's all starting early. Oh no, help me downhill from here. Yeah. But I mean, you know, if you're,

you know, visual studio code for Python development is just a fine experience. Python's way better. Yeah, probably, probably. Probably. Because all of the IDE-based IDE IDE's are

pretty awesome at what they do. Totally. Yeah. Alright, so would you rather have a gripe or a joke? Which one do you want? I got both. I got multiples of each. Let's do the gripe and then we'll back into a joke and maybe that'll lift it back up.

Okay. Obviously, we've established now that I wasn't able to be part of the last episode, right? Correct. But really, really, like, first of all, there's one point of the episode where you guys were talking about a song. And because of Joe put together like the playlist, right, of all the songs based off of the emo thing. And you guys tried to go with this, really? Like, see if this works.

Really? That's what you confused that song for this. Oh, yeah, that's not Rick Astley, is it? How do you get those two songs mixed up, sir? Did I put the wrong one on the playlist? Well, I don't know about in the playlist, but it was just like as I was listening to the episode. Because, hey, I'm a longtime listener, too. First time caller so I'm listening to you guys

and you know we get emails from listeners all the time where they're like I'm screaming at the car because you got something wrong well that was me I'm screaming at you two guys because I'm like that's not that's Simple Minds how do you get that song no

I was going nuts. So, yeah. It was worth it right there. I'm glad we talked about that beforehand, Jay-Z, that that was worth it. You set me up. But you know, though, if you were going to Rickroll somebody, there's a much better

version of that song that I don't know if you've ever heard. Oh. going to rickroll somebody there's a much better version of that song that i don't know if you've ever heard oh i don't know how well it's coming through this is from a live performance it's coming through i'll have a link to it in the show notes, but that's Foo Fighters with Rick Astley playing. So he Rick-rolled the audience, and they performed a Foo Fighters version of the song, and it is way better.

That's awesome. Yeah. So, okay. So then let's do a joke then. Why did they make cookies out of in Middle Earth? I don't know. Jeez, I can't think of anything. Sauron something.

So easy. They made it out of Frodo. Oh, gosh. Okay. That was another one from Mike RG. Thank you, Mike RG. So then there was this other thing, too. We mentioned the review from the whole 1337 or Leet. We're still up for debate on that one.

And he questioned, like, hey, because we've been around so long, it's time to name the listeners. And Justin Bieber has the Beliebers, and what do we call the listeners? So I don't know about you guys. And I don't know if we've ever said, I think maybe this has been mentioned before in a past episode, but like, I've always thought that the term, uh,

like the way I've always thought of it, it's like, well, we're all just a bunch of blockheads. Like that's, you know, cause the coding blocks, right.

It fits. And so like, I've always thought of the little, um, like the logo with a little guy chipping away. I think like I always were like that in my mind, I always named him blockhead and all the files that I have of just him. I was like blockhead.

So blockheads is what I always thought of as like, you know, what we should all call it. But I wasn't sure like how well, like maybe that maybe the listeners would think that would be too negative to like, you know, why are you referring to us as a blockhead? So that's why I don't know that I ever made a big deal about it before, but I might have made a subtle reference to it in the past. Yeah, we'll have to think about this one because I saw the Belieber thing, and of course my head started going, I don't know, what would it be? And I did think immediately about you, Outlaw, because you always have called everybody, hey, we're blockheads. So, yeah, I don blockheads. So yeah,

I don't know. I have to think about it. I kind of like it. I don't think it's a negative. Um, doesn't have a big negative connotation to me, but maybe it is. I don't know.

Yeah. I kind of like it. Yeah. I kind of liked it. All right. So, uh, for this episode survey,

we ask, you know, cause we're talking about presentations and all. So how likely are you to give a presentation, especially after listening to this episode? And your choices are extremely likely to attend one. Oh, you mean speak at one? Oh, no, definitely not. Or extremely likely to think about giving a presentation, maybe a little daydream about how awesome I'd be at it. Or extremely likely to say that I'll

give a presentation, but go through with it. Ain't nobody got time for that. Or extremely likely to actually give a presentation. I love the opportunity to learn and share with others. So, yeah, there you go. I'm excited to see the results of this one. All right. So now on to my favorite section of this little episode here. How? And so for this particular how, I meant like how do you actually get the talk

together um we'll have another section coming up uh next on how to actually give that talk and way to give the talks but for now just how and i got a couple questions here so uh how do you pick a talk to do all right so for me it's very much either something I really want to learn. It's usually not something I already know because I just I'm bored with it. I don't want to I don't want to do anything else on it. You know, it's usually either something I want to learn because I just have an interest in it or because I'm trying to solve a problem that I've run into and I want to know the pieces involved. And so that's kind of my way of forcing myself to learn about it. Yeah, I think for me, I really like to find something that's a combination of like something I want to learn and also something that I can try to almost like a persuasive style essay on it like i just really like the kind of style of talk where i want to kind of take something and try to uh you know kind of convince which is i don't know maybe i'll maybe i'll kind of talk that anyone will want to see but i don't know

for some reason i always like to kind of gravitate towards that so um like the the most talk most recent talk i did was uh San Diego Elasticsearch. Thanks, Jay, for hooking me up there. It was virtual. But I really wanted to show that you could do really cool things with Elasticsearch and Kubernetes locally with a tool called Scaffold. So for me, it was about showing you what you can do and what really was about persuading you that this is a viable, cool option that you could really consider and might make your life better. And so hopefully it wasn't pushy or anything, but I just like having something I can kind of bring to you and show you. So I'm not really interested in kind of deep diving or kind of like sharing, you know, things I've learned or anything like some types of talks. Like you'll see like how we improve build time is

by 300 and those are really great and I watch those kind of talks but that's just not what I want to do right hey this reminded me too I have a tip so I learned this when I did get to go do the NDC thing is if you are giving talks on things and your pool of competition for those talks come from big players, it's going to be hard to win it. So by that, what I mean is if you're trying to give a talk on.NET, anything.NET related, chances are you're not going to get selected over somebody like Damian Edwards or, you know, somebody that's flying out from Microsoft who is on the product development team that can talk to it probably way better than just about anybody else.

Right? So if you are picking things like that, it's going to be hard for you to get accepted at big conferences because people from Microsoft, Google, those people are going to be at that conference giving those talks. So if you can find something a little bit more niche, then you'll probably have a better chance at getting accepted to those conferences, right? So that's also another criteria that I do is I look around and I'm like, well, you know, I know everybody's talking about Docker. I know everybody's talking about.NET and everybody's talking about Vue and React. Like, I'm not going to be able to compete with people that have been talking about this stuff for two

or three years. So I try and find a topic that will allow me to come in and give and also give people a break from the typical stuff that they'll be attending right like um sort of break it up a little bit yeah i do want to like make one correction though it's not necessarily that they're better at or or know more about that particular topic it's just that their name will likely be a bigger draw. And so the conference organizers will want to maximize attendance. And so if there's a better name, you know, a Scott Hanselman or, uh, you know, kind of name, then they might be more likely to pick that presenter for the record name recognition. Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. That's a absolutely that's a

that's a really good point the people selecting these talks a lot of times they don't have a whole lot of time they maybe have 700 submissions for a big conference and they've got to select 100 they may ask you to submit uh you know any videos you may have prior talks or whatever talks they are not watching 700 people's presentations for an hour and then all debating and talking about it. No. So that's like used for kind of tiebreaker situations. So it's like if they're looking to you and you've got an intro to Docker talk and they've also got an SRE from Docker wanting to do an intro to Docker talk or, you know, something like that.

Like, you know, who are they going to go with? Right. Right. Especially if that person's been around in the scene longer. So, yeah, absolutely. You got to kind of know your audience and yeah, go niche for larger conferences. If you don't have like that kind of backing or that talking resume that might kind of help you out there.

Yep. And we kind of hinted before on sometimes conferences will encourage like tracks or certain kind of topics if they're like either lacking or maybe sometimes they're just like trying to get a more diverse set of speakers. So like an example, like might be if you're doing a conference this year and this is your first or maybe sometimes they're just trying to get a more diverse set of speakers. So an example might be if you're doing a conference this year and this is your first time this organization is doing a conference, they may want to get people from all over the world to speak there, and so they might encourage that.

Or they might be having a hard time getting enough talks on a certain subject that they want to emphasize, and so they might put it out there and say, hey, we are looking for more Kubernetes talks or whatever. So just be on the lookout for that uh and then this one um i i thought too is kind of cool it's like think about the talks that have stuck with you like you y'all mentioned the talk about the about the uh dishwasher uh you know that's something that obviously stuck with you so what was that you liked about that talk well Well, how can you, can you incorporate that into your talk and what does it have to do with topic selection? Um, so that's just kind of something that I had a little note there to

keep in mind. Yeah. You know, what's funny about that is I actually, after I, or before I went and did the NDC talk, I actually went out and bought a talk on presenting and they walked through a bunch of points on, on how to do it. Right. Like don't put all the information in front of people immediately. Right. Like you always want to kind of be edging into it. Right. Like it's almost like a movie. You build up to a climax so that, so that there's this point of tension that you get to. And so that's how you want to approach it. Right. And, and that's what I like about talks that are really good is they do a good job of,

of, of just edging you along. Like you constantly like, well, where's this going? Where are they taking it? Right. And that's,

that's the kind of talk that I want to be at. And it's gotta be, it can't be dry. Do not talk monotone the entire time for the love of all things in this world. Please inject a little bit of personality into a talk i think it i will say that too like uh a well-polished talk you know if you if you have the luxury of having already given talks and you have one that's well polished

those do or can go over well. Because, I mean, we've talked about one of our favorites, which was JavaScript is Everywhere, I believe was the name of the title. So good. But the talk, you could tell that the presenter, he had given this talk many times and had probably, you know, uh, over years, like would, would add to it because during the talk, he would show examples of the same application, the same JavaScript application written on literally every platform you could imagine. Uh, you know, it, it taking it from like,

Oh, here it is in a webpage. Okay. That's cool. Let's put it on a watch. Oh, that's cool. Let's put it on a, uh, Google home. Oh, that's cool. Let's put it on Alexa. Oh, that's cool. Let's put it on Siri. Oh, that's cool. Like, uh, I don't even remember like all the crazy things that he did with it. He had like, here, let's put it on a raspberry pie and let's make it to where, uh, instead of, you know, a visual representation of the data, it's now like, you know, lights light up on the pie or, you know, things spin or whatever, you know, you're interacting with the real world. You know, that was a, that's an example of a presentation that he bent, he benefited from,

I'm assuming that he, he'd given that presentation before and benefited from the ability to, as something new would come out, he's like, oh, it takes me no effort to make that thing work on a Google Home, this brand new Google Home device that came out. Oh, now there's an Apple Watch. Oh, it'd take me no effort to put it on an Apple Watch. Let me do that. And so, um, you know, as new devices come out, he could easily iterate on that same presentation and put the application on a new device and, and just keep making the car that kept making the talk relevant by doing that.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think we kind of showed them this point already but um basically do you aim for something you know or that you want to know and i think it kind of speaks to your motivations like it was some of the people that we mentioned that do the same talk every year like they definitely have different motivations someone who's picking something that they want to learn. Um, yeah, let me hit that one. So how do you write your talks on? I don't, isn't that terrible? I mean, it all honestly, like I think you and I are polar opposites on this, right? Like the way that I do it is I sort of create the demo that I want to show the thing that I want people to look at and go,

oh, wow, that's cool. And then I try and back into it from the, how are most people doing this right now? And it's like you said earlier, I want to almost, I want to convince people that they need to think about or try this new thing. Right. And so I back out from the demo that I create and start with where I think most people are. And then I try and build that story on, on what this is going to buy you and you, why you want to do it. And so that's how I write it. It's not like I sit down with notes first. It's always trying to build the story from what i'm trying to show yeah and uh for me just like i said total opposite like i tend to write things very much like i try to keep a conversational tone but i very much like write them out slide by slide and it's such a bad idea and there's a

reason why everyone tells you not to do that and uh you know it's just how i think i can't help it like i think about it like uh about it from a writing perspective first. And I'm very careful with my sentences. And I make sure to repeat things the right number of times as I go through. But the problem is you can't easily memorize an hour-long presentation, 40-minute-long presentation. So what's happening is you do the talks live in front of people. And people have questions.

Or you can tell something's not getting across. Or there's something you think is boring. So you want to skip ahead. And so you start modifying the script that you've got memorized. And next thing you know, you get to the next slide and, oh, you've already mentioned some of those things. And you decided you want to skip some of those things. And so it starts falling apart because you've changed the script and now things don't fit together easily. And so just like Alan said, the way everyone will tell you how to do it is to basically come up with

the story first and then just go give the story. You know, what's interesting about that also to, to speak back to that, I typically try not to put a ton of words on a mind. I will have bullet points, right? So that people can,

because people like to visually tie what they're seeing to what they're hearing. That's good. But I try and really draw the story with pictures. Like I really try to leverage PowerPoint or keynote or whatever I'm doing the presentation in. I try to utilize those tools to show transitions and animations that kind of take people's eyes from A to B where I want it to be and see how it's getting there.

Like I really try and leverage the visual tools more than I do the words. Yeah, that's good. I just assumed like, you know, not having given, you know, the, I keep saying that he knows these, the author of that review knows what i'm trying to do uh i i just assumed like having not given these presentations at uh big conferences that i would craft these around like where do i fit in this joke and how can i fit in this funny meme and like i found this funny picture on the internet like how did i make that work in here that's part of it believe it or not for me like seriously if i find something where i can put in

a funny picture i have to do it like i don't think i've ever i don't think i've ever done a presentation at work in front of a crowd in front of a group a conference whatever i don't think i've ever done one where i didn't have a picture in there that was just made to make people laugh or smile or something. Right. Like that's, I don't know. It's always my thing. How can I squeeze something in here? That's what I'm doing wrong. Speaking of doing wrong, how do you practice for a talk? This one, I think I probably do very similar to you um I I will I will actually run through it just like I plan on doing in front of the group right like I will start with the presentation

now what I'm I'll start a timer and I even get out the clicker right like if if I'm if I'm planning on using a clicker or a pointer that I'm going to be using up on the screen I'll get that out I'll use it so that I'm comfortable with where the buttons are. And so I don't screw up and hit the wrong thing. I'll walk through it. I'll time it. And then I'll even switch over and be like, all right, well, here, let me go to the demo. bit me the very first time I spoke at like a code camp specifically is when you hook up your laptop to the screen, you have two options. If there's only, if there's not a screen in front of you

along with your laptop, then you either have to mirror your entire screen and that screens behind you. Or if you don't want to mirror it and you want to keep like certain things staged on your computer but the display stuff on the presentation behind you it's impossible like you're constantly turning around to see what's on that screen and then turning back around and look at your computer and like oh sorry guys i can't i can't type like this and it's really cumbersome and awkward and it detracts from the presentation. So we've talked about it before, and it was on one of our shopping sprees. I ended up getting a 15-inch separate monitor, just a screen that you can plug in with a single cable to your laptop.

So that if I ever get in a situation where they don't have a screen for me as a second screen in front of me, I can plug that thing in and have a staging monitor and then the monitor that I mirror up to the screen so that I can see what everybody else has seen and so that I can have my staging area. That's super important. Get the setup exactly like what you think it'll be when you get there for worst case scenario so that you can do what you need to do. As someone who's attended a lot of meetups and a lot of conferences, I would say the majority of the time, the speaker does not have the luxury of having a second monitor provided for them. That has been super rare. And one of the only facilities that comes to mind where that is a thing is here locally in our area microsoft often or at least pre-pre-pandemic provided their

office facilities or specifically the conference rooms in their offices here in the Atlanta area for, um, the Microsoft related meetups in the area. And there, if you were speaking there, because it was like a permanent conference room at a very tech friendly, you know, company, right. They had it set up for,

for the speakers. So it was in a very friendly format like that where, hey, here's two or three extra monitors at your disposal, and we'll project it onto these four monitors for you. That's an extreme, though. Conferences there at the Microsoft facility were always nice because you knew that you were already walking into a conference room permanently and professionally set up for that purpose. Yep. The other thing, Jay Z to, to cap that off is I'll also stand up and try and do the same motions.

Like, you know, if I'm by a podium, you know, I don't want to pace back and forth across the stage. You do your Vanna whites like over here is, yeah, show this,

but you did ding, Like over here is where I show this. But I don't want to put people to sleep, right? Like pacing does that. But there is a thing to where when you're making a point like in this, this goes to the being a better speaker or whatever, like that thing that I listen to, like step towards the audience, modulate your voice, right? Like when you want people to sort of lean in talk a little bit softer right like just things like that i will practice in my room before i go several times just to try and make sure i'm not going too long i'm not going too short you know i'm not walking back and forth and wearing a hole in the floor right so i do all of that yeah that's hard though you're talking about an hour-long presentation you do it several times that's several hours oh dude it eats

up so much time prepping for one of these things now what about you oops sorry well i was going to ask like related to the prep because like i while i haven't given talks at conferences, I've given plenty of talks within the companies that I've worked in over the years, um, sharing with, with the team, which it's not the same, but you know,

there's some similar similarities there. And I have found that like, if I do practice a lot, then I tend to, it's almost like go back to what Jay Z was talking about before, where I, I'll tend to, it's almost like go back to what Jay-Z was talking about before, where I'll tend to like memorize it. And then by the time I do get up to get it for real, because I've ran through it in my head so many times and I have it so rehearsed, then I can like, uh, speed through it faster than what I intended to. And then if I rehearse it less,

I comes out better. Does that make sense? Like if I, if I at least have an idea of what I want to talk about, but shoot from the hip a little bit, you know, then it comes off, you know,

somewhat better. But, but again, I'm not doing it. You know, I'm speaking maybe to a crowd of 20, not a crowd of, you know, 50. I mean, in of 20 not a crowd of you know 50 i mean

in fairness when you have spoken or yeah when you've spoken at some of those things like you do a really good job of it but i think i think it goes back to the less words on the slides is better right have the notes at the bottom of it so that if people get the slide deck later then they can have all those notes and those things that you were talking about. But having less sentences, fewer sentences on the slides themselves makes it to where if you do get ahead of yourself, it's not that obvious, right? Like it doesn't, it doesn't jump out at people. Yeah. I mean, I remember like even in college where we, we had to do presentations and and uh one of the things that was talked that was talked about there was that if you did put up a lot of words on the screen as you're saying

then you would lose your audience because the audience would tend to read whatever you put up there and you know if you did want to put up a lot of words, then you needed to be careful about one bullet at a time kind of situation where I hate doing those animations that are a pain. Oh, they take a long time. Yeah, to put in like, okay, now. And then, oh, man, I got to go back a page. Let me click. And then you want to go back forward and you got like 18 clicks before you get through all the bullet points. But so there is totally that downside of like the audience will read ahead.

But I meant regardless of whether or not I did that, I've just found that if I practiced it too much that I would race through it even flipping through the slides. So you better be quick if you're going to listen yeah yeah yeah i think there's somebody who said for for over practicing for sure my um i mean first of all i do things kind of wrong like where i tend to the first couple times i practice i tend to do the script and i know that i shouldn't use the script so eventually i kind of toss it and just you know practice without um but my solution for trying to uh not over practice is not practicing

a couple days before if i can so i practice the heck out of it like the weekend before and then i stop and so that usually kind of helps me um so it's like i've locked into muscle memory but i'm also not just sick of doing it you know so i think one of the worst like the worst talks i've given are the ones where i've like practiced it the night before and the morning before. And I'm just like, let's get this over with. That's basically the point. One other thing I do is kind of interesting is I do tend to practice the first couple slides more than I do the end, which at first I found myself kind of doing that naturally. It seemed like a bad idea because I would keep starting over.

But I've kind of found is like the first couple slides are kind of the most important for kind of setting the pace and once you get past like slide two or three like some of the nerves and the butterflies have kind of calmed down and you just kind of fall into your rhythm so there's something about like having those first couple strong slides being like really strong and locked in and the rest just kind of happens. Yeah. I like that. Um, I will say you can also, and I, I debate how effective this is because I have a tendency not to look at my screens a ton when I'm in the middle of a presentation. But if you're doing that dual screen setup, like what I mentioned to where one screen's mirroring what's on the presentation and the other screen is your presenter's screen so that you can do it you can

kind of see what's coming next in keynote or in powerpoint or whatever you can see what's coming up next so you can you can remind yourself as you go um that tool's there i'm not great at using it but i do try and let it remind me that hey don't jump too far ahead because this is what's coming up next yeah i like that um oh another question here i had was there's any differences you feel for like uh digital or physical presentations yeah totally i feel like a caged animal in a digital presentation so like you're talking about like doing a virtual type thing yeah like i like the the motion of walking around and and you know sort of stepping away from the podium and and making a point and you can't do that when you're sitting still yeah there's the whole like is this thing on thing like yeah somebody like did i unplug the power you know

no because like there's no noise you know you kind of have to look for chat or something which can also be really difficult especially if you're scaring you're sharing your screen it's not easy to see if there's like questions or whatever yep I mean I will say though the one time that we did the video game thing that we did last year where

we did it on what's the name of it January January but Twitch we did it on Twitch, who just got hacked. Like, that was a really cool experience. I'd never done it before. And that was fun, right?

Like, the interaction and all that kind of stuff was neat. But I still do like the in-person better. It feels more weirdly, oddly relaxed. Yeah. Well, that's because that's because I would, I would argue that that's because just, uh, that's the way humans are wired to communicate period.

So, I mean, there have been studies that have said that living in this zoom kind of world is, is more stressful because you don't, uh, even though I can see you, like we don't have the same kind of nonverbal communications back and forth in our, in our subconscious isn't interpreting it in the same way. And so there's, it is from some studies supposed to be more stressful. And so totally being in person, I completely understand why

you would say that. Yeah. What about you jay-z digital versus physical yeah i definitely prefer physical um but you know there's advantages to uh the digital and just like you said like twitch is like a whole nother animal where i love to just be like yeah today i'm gonna do this and we'll just research it live and whatever and if people are bored then they could just check out and leave and so there's a lot of a lot of pressure and prep so i definitely prefer like, uh, you know, twitching things.

Um, it's even, you know, even over making YouTube videos just cause I tend to spend so much time on them. Yeah. Um, which was actually my last question here is like,

how long does it take to do a presentation? Oh my God. What about you? Let me think on mine. I mean, it was probably like 20 hours. I figure, um, the practicing is several, um, I rewrite a lot. So I probably go nuts and do too much. You know,

I definitely do too much and the presentations don't benefit from that time. So I think if I spent 10 hours on a talk or 20 hours on a talk, the quality of the talk would not change, Man, it's so hard to really quantify. I mean, it depends on what I'm doing. Like this Flink one that I'm working on, I can tell you that I mean, my life's been crazy here the past few weeks, but I've probably spent 10 hours just trying to get something to work the way that I wanted it to work. Right. And that's just getting a demo. I haven't even started on the slides yet. Like, I'm not even kidding you. I've got today's Wednesday, I have Thursday and Friday night left to, to get things done. I haven't even put together

a presentation yet. So, I mean, I've got, I've got 10 to 15 hours and haven't even started on that. I'll probably have 10 hours and slides and transitions and all that kind of garbage. And it seems like that's crazy amount of time, but by the time you animate things and get things the way that you want, like you spend a lot of time doing those little stupid animations. So I I'd say 25, 30 hours for a 45 minute talk is not uncommon. And that's why I also say, if you can recycle and reuse and build on because if you build onto it then you're going to spend another couple hours on top of it instead of another 25 30 hours for brand new content yeah yeah yeah your your estimate's probably

better than mine too it always seems like a lot more but when i say 20 hours it doesn't seem terrible but then you factor in actual conference and traveling and stuff too it's in practicing right like you said you spend two three hours practicing and you know it adds up i mean it's it's usually over a couple two three weeks that you're doing that but it adds up now i know that i know that we're talking about like conferences in you know meetup type presentations but but I can think of internal presentations that the three of us each gave that was for an audience of hundreds of developers. And I know that Alan,

you went on a separate day for your part of it and Jay-Z and I went on a subsequent day. And Jay-Z, I would say that you and I spent at least a week in preparation and putting together that thing. And so maybe depending on what the stakes are, that might be part of how much effort you're going to put into it as well. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah.

And sometimes you have to phrase things kind of like very specifically, or like you want to be really precise with your language, which kind of makes things tougher. Cause you like, you really don't want to have to remember to say a sentence perfectly. So like you want to figure out what those things are that are really important distinctions and figure out how to kind of honor them in their own slides and stuff.

So a lot of times it's like refactoring your presentation as you discover kind of more about your presentation that you want to give. Yeah. Like you said, I mean, even for an internal group of people, you guys spent probably 20 hours each trying to do that thing. Oh, no. I meant 20 hours each. to do that thing. And it's, I mean, it's, I meant, I meant an entire week. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy how much time you spend trying to prep and speak. And especially

when you're going to be speaking in front of a group of people, you don't want to give misinformation and you, like Jay-Z said, saying something a little bit wrong can also lead people down the wrong path. And so it's, you know, you have to be very precise and you have to catch all that stuff. And it takes a lot of time to, to hone that and get it, get the right message out there. And it's funny, it's like most people come away with like only the top, like high level details, but it's, or the high level, uh, you know, kind of topics, uh, less so much, whether you said 11 or 12 in reference to you know nodes or something but uh if you don't get the details right you can look like an idiot so yep yeah

all right so uh do you have something no i thought i heard okay uh last section i had was kind of where it was basically just real quick like if you're interested in giving presentations meetup.com you can find meetups in your area. There's also a website called comps.tech, which redirects to IP, which is kind of funny. But it does have a lot of conferences that you can use to kind of find. But I mean, really, Google's your best friend. So if you want to give a talk, think about what you want to do. You can Google like JS meetups or js if you aren't doing javascript

js conferences or you know whatever more niche you can find stuff all over the place so really really uh if you want to do it you can find it meetup is your best place to start yeah no no question it's so locality based though that's why i kind of mentioned google too because there's a lot of like online meetups and stuff that are doing things now that weren't doing that before so it's gotten easier to do that. Yeah, that's true. Didn't even think about that now that we're in the virtual world.

I kind of miss the in-person world guys. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't seen you in like two years in person. So I mean, yeah, I mean we've, we've probably run into each other two or three times in the past year and a half.

That's about it. Yep. Yeah, Atlanta Code Camp. Going to be the first time. That's right. In quite a while. That's right. That's crazy.

So a couple quick questions here at the end. Is speaking in conferences worth the time you have to put in and the anxiety? Yes. Yeah. And I mean, yeah yeah i wouldn't do if it did and balance out but for me i think it's more it's closer to the to not being worth it is for y'all i don't know man it's a lot of work but i think again i go back to if you can if you can reuse and build on to your presentation you'll be way closer to the yes than you will the no. But that initial setup is a brutal one.

And so it's really easy to be closer to the no when you're first putting together one. Well, this is why I said that if I were doing conferences, big conferences, I would lean towards the one to learn something as what I would get out of it. And in that case, I would assume then my answer here would have been, Oh yeah, sure.

If, yeah, because, so it depends on what you're trying to get out of it would be what I would assume to be an individual's answer to this question that does give the conferences. Yeah. Yeah.

Or that you got to figure it out for you.. Also, you've got to figure it out for you. You've got to figure out what you like and what you don't like. That's just a personal question, something to consider. One thing I thought was kind of interesting is what if you decide it isn't? You just hate public speaking or

maybe you live in an area that doesn't have much of this stuff or it's just not much opportunity. What can you do instead? Just a quick list. You can always write stuff or it's just not much opportunity. What can you do instead? And so just a quick list. You can always write a blog. You can make a video. You can make a project. You can make a code project. You can kind of go out and participate in these communities.

You don't have to do any sort of speaking. So I just wanted to kind of throw it out there. It's totally fine to say no. It's not worth it for you. And I mean, you don't have to do any of these things. You can go out for a bike ride. There's all sorts of ways to enjoy your life. And so I think it's important to consider whether it's valuable and worth it for you.

But by no means is it required. Yep. And hey, you have participated in Communities Zone here. And I'm going to call it out again. I did earlier. If you wanted to get into a conference for free, you can volunteer a great way. If you are somebody that has anxiety about talking to people at meetups or conferences or whatever, a great way to break that ice and sort of a natural way is to volunteer to help. And then you automatically are talking to the people involved without trying to feel like you're nudging your way into a conversation, right?

Because you're there to help and you're there to be a part of it. And it is a, it's sort of more of a natural way to do it. So you can get a lot out of it in terms of just, you know, the networking that you want to do and then also, you know, participating in the community. So that is a really good way that's sort of understated to do that. Yeah. And with all that anxiety, you know, you might, you know, lose a pound or two, which would be great, you know, especially like pandemic, you know, pandemic special there.

You know, I burned 2000 calories today. I didn't do it by giving a presentation. I just did it by leaving my food in the oven for too long. But, you know, hey, I'm sure if I did give a presentation, I would probably be so anxious that I wouldn't be able to eat. So, yeah. You know, benefits. Maybe that's what you want to get out of it.

I don't know. For those who don't know, Outlaw is an absolute ball of nerves when it comes to things like that. I got butterflies right now. What are you talking about? And it's so funny. If you see him at Atlanta Code Camp, which will be passed by the time you hear this,

but you would never think that. Right. Ever. No, because he's a social butterfly until you're like, hey, we need you to do this talk. Huh? What?

No. Hey, you want to do a podcast? I can't do that. What? Yeah. yeah well let's let's bash michael section of the show and uh no we'll have some resources we like and uh you know with that we'll head it let's i know i cut joe joe off you had one more but i, but we're going to call it quits there. And we're going to head into Alan's favorite portion of the show.

It's the tip of the week. All right. It looks like I'm going first here. So what I want to mention is a tip I picked up from MadVikingGod when I saw his computer. I was like, what is that in your corner? Stop the meeting. What is that in your corner what is stop the meeting what is that and uh he showed me an app called next meeting which is a free mac os app app that keeps the status message up in the top

right of your screen so you know when your next meeting is and it'll kind of count down so it'll say like um you know scrum in 15 minutes 14 minutes 13 minutes and so at any given time i can kind of look up without going to basically look at my calendar and a specific app to see what's coming up next. And it's also got other nice things. You can click down and it'll show you like your whole day. There's other options that you can kind of set in there. And sometimes you can even click there if it's a virtual conference and like it'll take

you into the app or whatever. So you don't have to kind of interact with the calendar. I love it because I'm forever like going to you know going to make some lunch or something and forgetting to look at my calendar and coming back you know minutes later just constantly having that calendar anxiety where i'm constantly looking at the calendar trying to remember what my next meeting is because i forgot if it's soon or later in the afternoon or getting my a's mixed up so just having it there so i can kind of like casually look in the corner has been really nice you know what's funny dude all the people who use outlook are laughing at you right now i know but if you are using g suite or something like that this is a must check out yeah and you

know like i'll get the pop-ups and stuff from like calendar apps and everything but if it shows me a pop-up even in 10 minutes sometimes i'll kind of close it and forget about it or what's worse, it'd be like, I won't think I have a meeting for some reason. I'll be confused. So I'll go and make lunch, come back 33 minutes later.

And Oh, I'm three minutes late for a meeting. And I look like I haven't been working all day because I, you know, was heating up some ravioli or whatever. Yep. Yeah. I can't,

I can't send the notifications in G G suite. Like I, I miss so many of them. Yeah, I turn them off on my phone, and then on my computer I'm constantly missing them or shutting them down because I can't stand to have them just sitting there hovering for 10 minutes or whatever. Yeah, covering up part of your screen.

Now, the one downside, though, because i haven't tried this but looking at the screenshots that i've seen of it though it looks like like literally whatever the message title is is what goes into your your um the the toolbar at the top of mac os right yep so when i say that as maybe a negative depending on like your mileage may vary, right? Yeah. But if you already have a bunch of stuff in your toolbar, then you might not have room for this thing. Like I would not. I have way too many icons.

What do you have up there? I'll send you some screenshot or I'll show you. I'll send you some screenshots. But, well, number one is, and this is one we've talked about for years now, is the Django iStats. Or is it Bajango iStats? iStats Menu, yeah. Yeah, iStats Menu.

I love that application. And so I have stats up there for, like, what the temperature is for the computer, what the network utilization is, battery utilization, like plus with subsequent versions of Mac OS, they keep adding in things that are taking up more space or that I find useful. So like I already have a lot of space taken up just for that,

that if when I'm on just the mac uh laptop itself i already depending on what program i'm in it'll like clip and not show me everything because there's too many things already up there so i you know so for normal mac users right yes but well like i said like you know even if you are like a super mac user you know that that might prove just fine for you because you don't you know have an insane number of uh things up in the the toolbar um you know and one that we i don't know that we've ever talked about. Uh, shoot. Now I'll have to find it. Um, okay. I'll come back to that idea. But, um, so what I had for, uh, I have a couple of tips of the week. So one was, I thought, you know, Alan, uh, this one might be a good one for you was in iOS, uh, back in in iOS 13, I believe it was, Apple introduced this ability to preview things.

So you could do force touches or a long press of something and do a preview of it. So like a link, for example, or an email or whatever it might be, and it'll pop up a little preview thing. And, but the downside to that is if the thing that you want, you are clicking on is a link, maybe in an email that you're not sure about, then, you know, you can't, you can't just see what the URL is because it's going to load it up. And if that, uh, you know, if there's any kind of like tracking pixels or whatnot being sent back and forth, then, okay, boom, they, they might have you then. Right. And that's just on, you know, assuming that everything's on the up and up and that there

aren't any, um, you know, zero days that have been taken advantage of, or, you know, uh, whatever. So, or, or maybe not even a zero-day bug, but just one that you haven't updated to. So that would be a nightmare situation to think of. So we'll stay happy thought and pretend that that's not it. You can, in iOS, disable the preview capability if you wanted to for those links.

So what you can do is you could go to a known good link and then do the preview of that and in the top right there is a little bit of text that says hide preview and if you tap that then it'll show you the url instead and it'll maintain that and then when you if you wanted to re-enable previews, the text would change to show previews. So there you go, Alan. I thought you might appreciate that one. That was just for you. Did that one burn you? That one hurt. I mean, what he's talking

about is we got a phishing email that was a purposeful phishing email. And I knew it was a phishing email. But on my iOS device, I did a long click on it to see what the URL was because I was just curious. And it popped up the preview. And they were like, hey, moron, you're not supposed to click that kind of link. And I was like, I didn't click it. So, yeah, not real happy about that. I didn't click it when I clicked it.

I tapped it. I long tapped it because I didn't want to see it. I wanted to see the URL, but you wouldn't show me the URL. So, yeah, whatever, man. I hate iOS sometimes. Yeah. So there's that. And then related to last time, Jay-Z, you gave away some music-related, several music-related tips of the week. So I want to introduce you to your new favorite YouTube channel if you haven't already discovered this.

And I wouldn't be surprised if you said like, oh, I already know about that because this guy has over two and a half million subscribers. So chances are you have heard of him, but his name is Rick Beato. You can find him on YouTube. I'll share a link to him, but I have watched this guy's videos for so long now and just so many of them. But he'll have great music related videos you know, music related videos. It'd be like the 20 greatest acoustic intros of all time or, uh, you know, or the electric, uh, ones or, or sometimes he'll dig into a particular song. And so he has this whole series of what,

what makes this song so great. And these songs will be all over the map. It'll go from Boston to Tool to Steely Dan to Van Halen to Nirvana to Led Zeppelin. There's all over the place. And you'll think like, okay, well, Michael, I've probably seen like a thousand types of videos like this. What makes this one so special? The thing is, though, is this guy is actually in the know. He's in the business. He's the real deal.

Right. This guy was an actual music or well, that came out kind of wrong. He's an actual musician. Touring musician was successful with as as a musician in the band and did a lot of work, you know, on the producing and mixing and that kind of production side of the house. And people that he was working with her say like, Oh man, you should start a YouTube channel. And he knowing nothing about it,

started a YouTube channel going into the things about like what, uh, you know, about the technical aspects of, of songs and whatnot. And so when he's putting together these lists, he's coming at it from different points of view. Or he might have like, what are the 10 greatest drop D songs? Or something like that.

He'll get specific about it. And often a lot of the music that you hear in it, you'll actually watch and hear him playing it. And he'll say, like, this is why this song is so great. And then you'll hear him play it. So he really knows his stuff super well. And when you see his studio in the background, you will be in awe of what he's doing. And by the way, shout out to our local boy because he's an Atlanta guy. Oh, cool. I have not heard of this guy. I will go check him out.

Well, you will and you will be in love. And I promise. Excellent. All right. So I've got two after having a lack of any last time. I think I only had one little one. But so I learned this one from MadVikingGod also. He had put together a script, and I saw the script, and I was like, what is this mess that he's got here? So if you see a dollar sign question mark in Linux, did either of you guys know this? Did you know this, Outlaw? You did? Jay-Z didn't. Okay. I bet I know the script that you saw it in because I was working on it with him. Oh, okay. All right. So maybe you knew it because of that.

So if you see a dollar question mark in a Linux shell script or in a bash script, we'll say, basically what that's doing is that's saying, hey, give me the result of the last run command that ran in the foreground, in the foreground pipeline. So what I was doing is I was trying to get the result of a Docker run command because I wanted to do a build of a Java application in a Docker container. And I wanted to get the result of that thing. Well, the way you can do it is on the next line, you can set a variable that says, hey, status equal and then dollar question mark.

And then that'll tell you, Hey, did that give you a zero return code? If it did, everything was good. If it was not zero, then you know, something went wrong in it. So that is a great way to be able to handle that. And it'll work for, I believe just about anything in a bash script or a shell script for the previous run command in the foreground, right? Like if something off running in a background thread, I don't know what happens there, but specifically for foreground. So that's really cool.

It allows you to do some automated things in a nice way. And just so you know, Jay-Z had mentioned Scaffold earlier. I was actually doing it in a custom build script in Scaffold so that I could see multiple steps and make sure that at the end of it, if everything succeeded, then publish the image. So that's that. Now, the next thing that I ran into while I was trying to do this presentation is, did you guys know that homebrew can be installed on Linux? No, no, no. Amazing. So I was looking to install canines the way i went about this because i

love canines now because jay-z turned me on to this is i went to install canines so that i could do some things easily and see some things easily on my local kubernetes and wsl2 on windows and canines like okay well here's the brew thing. And I'm like, oh man, really? I'm not on a Mac. I can't do this. And sure enough, you can. Now, granted, they have to have the brew formula or whatever available for your platform, but you install it just like you would on Mac or anything else. put that thing on Linux and you can brew install just the same exact way that you do on Mac. So absolutely fantastic. Highly recommend it. If you're on Linux, if you live in a Mac world and you're doing things on Linux and you want to be,

be able to do it in a similar way. I was able to brew install canines. I was able to brew install mini cube, um, several other things. So definitely worth checking out. I got one more for you. So that, that tool that I was talking about for the Mac OS that I said I would find while you were giving your tip. I don't know that we've talked about this one before,

but it's called hot. So this is one of the many, uh, things that I have up in that, uh, toolbar in Mac OS. So what this does is the beauty of this one is that, you know, like I stat menus, for example, can give you the temperature of, uh, all the various touch points in the, in the points inside your Mac. And in fact, it's actually quite impressive just how many different temperature sensors there are within the Mac.

And like with iStat menus, you can see all of them. But the thing that Hot provides in addition to being able to see the temperature is it'll show you what your CPU speed limit has been throttled to based on thermal issues. So the Mac, when you remember when the i9s first came out for the Mac, there were a lot of complaints about people not being able to take full advantage of the i9 because it would heat up and perform perform worse than their i7s were performing at the time and uh you know that's just an example of you know the mac throttling down the cpu because of the heat. And you can actually see that with this,

uh, this utility. So I'll have a link to that as well. Um, there's both a GitHub and a, uh, company page for it. And I'll have,

did you see the difference on Apple Silicon? They said, along with the CPU temperature, hot will display the system's thermal pressure what in the world is that yeah that's pretty cool thermal pressure is nominal okay

what does that even mean alright I have to do some research now I don't know we should probably get some of those new laptops and see I don't know. How's that for an answer? We should probably get some of those new laptops and see. Yeah, let's do that. Let's just do that.

Apple has another event coming up pretty soon where they're supposed to... The rumors are that they're going to be giving out... Or not giving out, but giving the specs of what they're going to be releasing soon. You know, related to the Mac laptop. So, yeah, it's going to be fun. We'll see what happens. Otherwise, we hope you've enjoyed the show.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, dear listener. And so we hope you've enjoyed this episode of coding blocks. Uh, we hope you enjoyed all the episodes of coding blocks and you would find it in your heart to subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app and be sure to find some, uh, you can find some helpful links to leave us a review. If you haven't already, we would greatly appreciate it at www.codingbox.net slash review. And while you're up there at codingbox.net, check out all our show notes, examples,

discussions, and more, and send your feedback, questions, and rants to our Slack channel. Snap into the Slack channel. I'm thinking, I'm thinking how to do this I don't know

you gotta top it you gotta top it what are you gonna do bring it be sure to follow us on twitter I don't know that's all I got I don't even know what I was channeling there you're like evangelizing uh coding blocks I like it yeah yeah that's something like that

I don't know but we are on twitter who's voice am I doing here coding blocks. I like it. Yeah, something like that. I don't know. We all on Twitter. Who's voice am I doing here? I don't know, man. You're doing Alan's? Hey! Hey! It's Abraham Lincoln.

Totally. That was my next guess. I've got a bunch of his CDs. Did you talk about a cherry tree? Yeah. I don't know whose voice I'm doing. Anyway, I'm doing it poorly. But if you go to recodebox.net, you can find all the social links at the top of the page.