My job requires me to speak at conferences. Despite the current situation, this hasn’t changed much. At the time of this writing, I submitted 439 different proposals to 215 unique conferences in 2020. I already wrote some advice for junior conference speakers. As a follow-up, I’d like to offer my view on the organization of conferences, from my speaker’s point-of-view. While the online and the on-site experiences are quite different, most of my feedback applies to both.

Some years ago, I started my journey on the conference circuit. I did that on my own, in my free time. Without mentorship on how to do that, and with my gut feeling as the only guidance, I made plenty of mistakes…​ and I still regularly do. However, I now have a couple of hard-earned experience years behind me. Note that conferences are IMHO just a subset of public speaking in general. Meetups are another form, with a different set of constraints and challenges.

This week was my last conference of 2017, Voxxed Day Thessaloniki organized by my good friend Patroklos. I started going to conferences some years ago. Going to a conference is an investment, whether in time or in money - or in both. You should me make sure to get the most out of that investment. In this post, I’d like to write down what I do to achieve that. Plan ahead The first thing to do is to get the list of available talks ahead.