Struggle to cope with public speaking? Pop up in DDD conference

Lovely experience talking at DDDSydney was!

There is an IT conference in Sydney called DDDSydney which is quite interesting for developers and very much affordable with a good range of topics.

The vibe is always quite friendly and warm and I met inspiring people there last year who made me feel comfortable enough thinking of giving a talk in this conference.  

I have done some talks a few times in the user groups and meet-ups before but I wanted to step up and experience a larger scale conference to talk in. However, it is not always easy to gain this experience.

Finally decision was made and my talk  "Fancy becoming a frontend developer? Get to know the tools and concepts first" was accepted. Fun just began and clock was ticking.

It was a topic which was pretty challenging in terms of simplification and putting details together. So I spent proper time to ensure the context is easy to grasp and the slides are engaging enough. Amazing is when you prepare a talk, you realise what knowledge you lack for and how mature your understanding about the topic is. Then you go and pick up what you need much quicker than usual. It is just a fabulous experience to go through.

DDD team's support was sensational. The heart-warming emails and the support they have offered was awesome. I reckon the junior track was also motivating enough for the first time speakers. Everything was well organised that you feel no pressure at all.

In terms of networking, I definitely made more connections this year since as a speaker you are exposed more and you have a great chance to talk to people, discuss various topics, hear more questions and receive lovely feedbacks.

The best achievement though is I feel less fear of public speaking now!  I am going to do it more often and share my knowledge and support my community even more than before which also helps me learning and progressing more.

I  recommend reading my QA about DDD conference in this blog so you will see why I encourage you to join and talk in DDDsydney next year 2019.

My slides and Github code are also available online. Hope to see you all there at DDD next year :)