Presenting at Voxxed & the benefits of attending tech conferences

Presenting at Voxxed Days Thessaloniki.

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at Voxxed Days Thessaloniki, one of the biggest tech conferences in Greece. If the name reminds you of Devoxx (of which Expedia Group was a proud sponsor) this is because Voxxed Days is an initiative from the Devoxx community.

Voxxed Days Thessaloniki was a full 2-day conference with talks spanning from trendy technologies like Kubernetes and Istio, to ones that trigger discussions, such as remote working or the rights and responsibilities of a delivery team. Many big sponsors especially from the Greek tech scene were there and I was surprised by the growth and expansion of some of them.

A few indicative talks that I particularly liked were the following:

• Introduction to Istio Service Mesh: George Andrianakis from RedHat explained the need behind Service Mesh; so far we used to tackle the challenges of distributed systems (e.g. resilience, service discovery, observability) inside applications using external libraries, but recently and especially with the Cloud and Kubernetes, we realised this logic can and should be moved outside our apps and into platform. George went through the main concepts of Service Mesh and Istio in particular and covered a lot of its features.
• The ultimate introduction to Kubernetes: As you imagine, this talk was an introduction to Kubernetes. Although Pascal Naber focused more on Azure when it came to hosting Kubernetes on the cloud, he gave an extensive introduction of and the history behind the popular container-orchestration system, its main concepts (pods, services, ingresses, etc.), and hosted a live demo where he summarised helm charts and their main configs.

But also the ones about Automated Visual Testing: The Missing Part of your CI Pipeline?, F*ck Distributed Systems… Build Distributed Companies!!, and Staying Fresh and Avoiding Burnout. Oh, there was one about source code searching as well!

I could provide a summary of the conference but since talks are available online I’d focus on something else, which is the…

Benefits of attending tech conferences

It comes as a great disappointment when people refer to or think of conferences as a way to escape the daily job. Or even when someone’s trying to draw a line between the personal benefits and the ones that are company-specific. It should be clear that the first are tightly coupled to the second.

Instead, I’d split those into the ones related to knowledge sharing and the social ones.

A non-exhaustive list of benefits that lie in the first category, with personal examples from Voxxed, is the following:

1. Conferences can help you broaden your knowledge on new technologies or methodologies; a presentation about Istio or one about visually testing your website would definitely worth your time. This knowledge can then be shared and applied internally.
2. You might gain insights into how other companies are solving issues similar to the ones you or your company’s trying to solve. For example, I got useful feedback on how a popular betting company tackles cyber attacks, or even whether Istio can be leveraged for a specific use case we had internally (in fact it can’t at the moment and this saved us a lot of time…). Of course communication and feedback needs to be bidirectional, since knowledge needs to be shared.
3. Publicise your company’s or even your personal open-source projects and GitHub space, especially if you’re giving a presentation. In specific, part of my presentation was about a project we’ve recently open-sourced under Hotels.com’s GitHub space. First, I was amazed by the number of questions I got for this project. But also, many attendants were surprised by our GitHub space; “I thought you’re only selling hotels” a few of them said.
4. You get the big picture of the market. In most big conferences you have the opportunity to talk with sponsors and learn more about what they’re doing, how they’re planning to grow and so on. In that specific conference I was amazed by the expansion of 2–3 tech companies that used to be small start-ups until a few years ago.

Of course there’s the social aspect as well:

1. You get a break from your daily job. You change environments, talk with people, refresh your mind with new ideas.
2. You have the opportunity to grow your network.
3. You can advertise open roles, meet and refer people that are interested in these roles. In particular, there was a Job Openings section in the conference’s app where you could post open roles for free.
4. You visit new countries/cities (whenever this applies).

Cool, but then…

There are so many conferences, which ones would worth attending?

Indeed there are dozens of tech conferences and meetups and it’s not trivial to identify the ones that’d worth your time. There are conferences that focus on something (e.g. AWS re:Invent focuses on cloud technologies and AWS products) and others that are more generic (Voxxed Days usually lie in this category). If you have already been to a conference that you liked or have heard good feedback about from friends/colleagues then that’s a good candidate. Also, many organisers upload the talks online which can be helpful to get a rough idea on what to expect next year.

Or even…

I’d like to speak at a conference but I’m not sure if my topic is interesting enough plus not feeling quite confident in front of so many people!

First thing, talk about something that you know well and for which you’re passionate. As Chris Anderson (head of TED) said:

Your number-one mission as a speaker is to take something that matters deeply to you and to rebuild it inside the minds of your listeners.

Then, it’s always a good idea to practice or even give a similar presentation to a smaller audience. Internal presentations to your colleagues or meetups are great for this. You’ll also get feedback and you’ll be able to improve your presentation for the big event.

As regards stress, Simon Sinek, one of the most fabulous public speakers explained how he managed to tackle it in front of a large audience. “Whenever I was feeling stressed and my heart was beating fast before a talk, I was trying to convince myself it’s nothing else but excitement. They both feel the same!”. What stops you from doing the same?

The fear of public speaking.