Tech Talk: Karl L Hughes on Speaking and Conference Talks

CoRecursive: Coding Stories

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Adam talks to Karl Hughes about his path to becoming a conference speaker and the work he has done to make it easier for others to follow in his footsteps.

"I didn't start trying to speak at conferences until I was at least seven or eight years into my software development career. So. Just a couple of years ago and before that, I think what helped build confidence was speaking occasionally at meetups. I started talking occasionally at local code bootcamps, just kind of getting to be in front of a crowd and start to build up some like level of self-assuredness and eventually I think the next step was just obvious. I wanted to push myself to do something a little scarier and bigger, and that was like, get in front of people at a real conference. "

"And so it is scary. Partly also it's that, you know, because it was my first time, I didn't really know what to expect. I had only been to a couple of tech conferences before. I didn't know what the audiences were going to be like. If there was kind of be this like big tomato throwing thing at the end, they're all just bashed me or if it was going to be like a more of a friendly conversation."

Show notes:

• CFP Land
• Karl's Personal Site
• Washing Machine Guy Talk
• episode webpage