My Adventures of My First Year of Conference Speaking

This post was originally written on Medium.

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I gave my first talk on March 20, 2015. It’s nearly a year later and I figured it’d be great to recap my first year and to tell what I’ve learned from my experiences.

Submitting for the First Time

It was December 2013. Several of my local friends were talking about a software developer conference called Nebraska.Code() Conference. NCC was doing a call for speakers, and they were really pushing for women speakers. They got some bad publicity the previous year for not really reaching out, and wanted to do better. They were also trying to get more than just .Net languages at the conference.

“Hey Sarah, why don’t you give a talk?”

Uh… on what? I really had no idea.

I was still wrapping up my final year at my university after I went back to finish my degree. I had been teaching a C++ lab for 2 years, even while a student. I was teaching the C++ lecture that semester, and by this point I was comfortable talking to smaller groups pretty easily. I’ve been told I’m a fairly good teacher, and that I have a good way of explaining even technical stuff to non-technical people. So I was sure I could give a talk, just had no idea on what. I was a student. What could I speak on that professional developers would want to learn about?

Read more of the zany store on the full Medium post.