Posted by dylan beatty On 08 December 2025 • Permalink
I run a .NET user group here in London, and we host a lot of talks from people who are relatively inexperienced presenters. He has occasionally given presentations internally but has never spoken in front of a public audience. Sometimes they are developers who have been in theater or played in bands; People who have plenty of stage experience, but who have not presented on technical topics before – and sometimes have never given any kind of public presentation or performance. Our goal is to be a friendly, supportive crowd; Public speaking can be challenging, and one’s first talk can be one’s first public performance… Let’s just say that the presenter sometimes learns a lot more than the audience, and leave it at that.
But it can also be an extremely rewarding experience, and as an experienced technical presenter who has been doing this for a while, aspiring speakers often ask me for advice on how to take it to the next level.
Before we get into the specifics, there are two things to keep in mind.
A: Ask yourself why you want to do this. What does “next level” mean to you? Are you looking to promote your consultancy, or your training courses, or your software products? Do you want to become a professional speaker and actually get paid to give speeches? Are you doing this because you want to go places and meet people? Figure out what “success” looks like for you.
Two: Be realistic about how much work is involved. it took me seven years To go from my first user group, Lightning Talk, to my first international conference in 2008. If you think you can hack together some code, write a talk about it, stick it on Sessionify and three months later you can go to some major international event like NDC or YOW! Or Devox… well, no. It doesn’t work like that. lease in; It is a long journey.
Year 1: Be good
Write the thing. Write one thing that no one else can do; Tell a story that no one else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach it to them. Then assign it to the Local Users group. This could be great. This could be a train accident. Don’t worry. That’s one reason user groups exist. Learn from experience. Fix demo. Fix the slides. If it was too small? Write something else. If it was too long? Cut something. Assign it to another user group. do it again. do it again. Maybe write a second speech, get that also bought into some user groups.
If you can’t find a user group, look on meetup.com. Yes, it’s a terrible platform, but it works; Search by topic, search by region, find groups that match your content, and ask if they’re looking for speakers. They probably are.
Year 2: View
After user groups and meetings come community conferences. Typically small, one-day events, with few tracks, and usually free (or very cheap) to attend. For me, these were DDD events _(that’s DDD in Developers! Developers! Developers!, not to be confused with DDD in Domain Driven Design), _a series of one-day free developer events across the UK, organized by volunteers, usually on a Saturday so people don’t have to take time off work. They bring a good crowd, they’re a great way to get to know other presenters and people involved in technical events, and you’ll almost certainly meet some people who are on program committees for larger conferences.
Events like this are your chance to get noticed. Arrive a day early, attend pre-conference dinner and drinks, introduce yourself. Yes, it’s weird when you don’t know someone. There will be other people out there who don’t know anyone and will appreciate your effort. Have fun, but don’t take tequila shots at the karaoke bar at 3 in the morning. Not now. You are there to give a speech, remember?
Go to the event. Spend the whole day there, do your thing, watch other sessions. Communicate with the organizers. You don’t want their last impression of you to be half an hour of panic and missed calls because they’ve lost one of their speakers and no one knows where they are.
Figure out how to stay in touch with the people you met. Join a Signal or WhatsApp group chat; If there isn’t one, create one. Follow them on LinkedIn, or BlueSky – be prepared to go where the people are; Don’t expect people to join Mastodon just because you want to talk to them right here. It doesn’t work like that. If you don’t really want to play the social media game – and I can’t blame you – there’s always good old-fashioned email. A brief email a week later saying “Hey, thanks for having me” or “Hey, I enjoyed your session at DDD, let’s stay in touch” can pay off massively.
Finally, keep an eye on events that put video of their sessions online. Having a few YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciative audience can make a big difference when an event committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.
Year 3: Get Accepted
You have some conversation. You’ve done this enough times that you know they’re good *(and if they’re not good, make them good – or delete them and write new ones)*. You guys know. People know you. If someone asks, “Hey, do we know anyone who can do a good session on $topic”, your name comes up. You have a good network of connections – group chats, LinkedIn, email addresses.
Now, find all the conferences in your area with the Open Call for Papers (CFP), and start submitting. Dave Aronson at Codeasaur.us keeps a really useful list of CFPs that are closing soon. Check it regularly. Many programs will cover your travel and hotel costs, although this is not as prevalent as it was a few years ago due to reduced sponsorship budgets across the industry. If not, maybe you can convince your employer to pay for your travel – “Hey, boss, if I can get free tickets to this amazing conference with all these industry experts, do you think the company will pay for my airfare and hotel?”
Rely on your network. What are people presenting? What events should you keep an eye on? Which topics are getting a lot of attention (and which aren’t?)
Keep your content fresh. Write new things. Keep giving them out at user groups and community events.
Keep your submission focused. 2-3 talks per program; Don’t submit ten different abstracts to the same conference in the hope that one of them will be accepted. If we look at every selection committee I’ve been on, we assume the presenter hasn’t actually written *any* of them yet and they’re just throwing whatever they can think of into the mix and hoping one of them will be chosen. Not a great way to stand out. An open CFP at a large tech conference typically gets 20+ submissions for each available slot, meaning if you boil it down to a numbers game, you’re submitting 20 talks for each one that gets accepted. Keep track of the numbers and be objective about it.
Year 4: Getting bored.
It’s a lot of fun doing this for a while… but it can also be tiring. Some people work hard for a few years, do all the things, go to all the places, make lots of good friends and create happy memories, and then wake up one day and decide enough is enough. Some people have a few conversations, check it off their bucket list and decide that’s enough for them. Some people settle on a gentle routine of 3-4 events every year. And yes, some of us treat our calendars like a game of Tetris, juggling flights and trains and hotels and meetups and conferences and spending half the year on the road and the other half doing writing talks and workshops and all the other things that are hard to do when you’re in an airport.
That’s why you need to figure out ahead of time what “success” looks like. If you’re doing it for fun, remember to have fun – and if you find you’re not enjoying it anymore? to stop. If you are doing it as promotion or marketing? Track your leads. Make sure it’s really attracting attention and generating revenue. If you’re doing it for the money, be selfish: no pay, no play. Of course, not every incident is the same. In any given year I’ll have some events that are fun, some that are engaging, some that run with workshops or training programs. Just make sure you know which is which.
Finally: Respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty people at a community event, or five thousand people at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you’re here. They have sacrificed their time – and often large amounts of money – to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot every time. If you find yourself bored, fed up, tired, running conversations on autopilot or making mistakes because you don’t care? Now is the time to try something else – and remember, there are thousands of aspiring speakers out there who would love to take that spot in your place.
Now get out of there. Work hard, have fun, teach us amazing things, and if you ever want me to see any abstracts or slide decks, drop me a line – [email protected]I would be happy to help,
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