As I new developer, I find myself going through a lot of firsts. This past month my friend and I wrote our first abstract for a CFP. We submitted to Github Universe a talk about our bot that helps newbies contribute to open source for their first time. This project was actually our first contribution to open source. So many FIRSTS!
Answering a Call For Proposals is actually kind of scary. I had no idea where to start, how it should look, what it should say. So I did the thing I always do when I'm stuck: I asked Twitter! And Twitter came to the rescue.
Resources
I received a lot of great links to different resources on how to get started. These were my favorite.
vmbrasseur/Public_Speaking - An extremely thorough repo with links to all things about speaking at conferences. There's links on how to find a conference, what do with rejection, and how to write a proposal.
CFP's Made Easier by E. Dunham - Since I had very little idea of how a CFP worked, I really enjoyed how this post broke down what should be in abstract. I took each question the author asked and made sure I was able to answer it. This made for a long abstract at first, but it gave me a much clearer idea of what I wanted to say.
Speak at GitHub - And of course, I turned to GitHub's own blog post to make sure I was writing something they were looking for. I especially liked how the author shared examples of what some of their favorite talks were from last year.
Some other resources can be found here [0] [1] [2] [3]
How I Did It
First I created a Google doc and dumped all these new links and samples on there. I read through the articles, extracted what I thought was the most important bits, and pasted them on the doc. Then I linked back to the article so I knew where the info was coming from. I also copy pasted the GitHub Universe application on to the doc so I could brainstorm on there and be able to refer back to my notes. While reading all these resources, I specifically looked for prompts/questions that I could answer to get me started in the writing. First draft done! Then I turned to my most valuable resource...MENTORS.
I attended a wonderful and amazing event called "Own Your Expertise" by Write/Speak/Code. There I had the opportunity to sit one-on-one with a mentor (Shout out to Annie Flippo, an awesome Sr Data Scientist here in LA) and go through my abstract. The main point I took from her was that my abstract was lacking personality. Coming from a research background in college, I had written it like an abstract for a research paper, it was objective and distant. So for my second iteration I worked on injecting a little more of us into it. After the second draft was done, I shared it with out project mentor, the also awesome @gr2m. He's been guiding us through the project and been an amazing resource. Gregor helped us add more personality and narrow down the talk's goal and details.
Lessons
I received an email from Github Universe yesterday, we didn't get picked. But that's ok! We will reach out to local meet ups to try and show our project there. I also want to submit this talk to other CFPs and I will be writing blog posts about the actual project and my journey in contributing to open source.
My main take away from this is how invaluable a network and mentors are. If I would have done this by myself, I probably would not have even submitted. By reaching out to Twitter and meeting with mentors I was able to gain confidence, guidance, and motivation to keep trying.
You can check out our project's repo here: First Timers Only Bot. It's not live yet, but it will be very soon and it will be very exciting!
Top comments (3)
Great post! Will you be at the Write/Speak/Code conference later this month?
Thank you! Unfortunately I won't make it to the conference, but I'm attending the local meetups in LA.
Awesome.