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Pachi 🥑
Pachi 🥑

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at therelicans.com

Content Creation Series: Getting ready for your first talk

Hello and welcome!!!

Today I want to share with you something that I am currently hyped about: My first talk in a tech conference (in English).

2021 is officially the Pachi turns into a Speaker year! Haha

In March I talked on the Shine Conference about The power of giving up, and I talked on TDC(a Brazilian tech conference) about Developer Relations. All online of course.

Next week FutureStack 2021 is hapenning! A free, online conference that will bring together Data Nerds to learn, share, and get inspired about observability — while we have fun!

And this is where my first talk will happen.
happy dance gif

If you know me you know that I will be talking’ about CONTENT CREATION yey!

While I am working on my talk, I decided to write this post to help me get clear on what I want to share at the conference. So you my reader friends, get a first hand glimpse of Leveling up as a Developer with content creation.

Getting started putting your talk together

When applying for talks, we usually have to write abstracts. I started creating my talk based on the abstract and I asking myself: What do I want to teach to my audience?

This will help me to north my content to make sure by the end of the talk, my audience will know what I wanted to teach.

Gathering evidence

Next step is to collect any data that can make my talk stronger. It can be a research or graphics, projects I have worked on and live experiences that can add to my presentation. Depending on the topic, a nice personal story to tell to make it relatable and inspiring.

Structure

Structuring my talk is next. First I write a few bullet points about what I want to talk about, on notion. For the talk I am currently working on, I have something like this:

  • How and why I started creating content

  • How creating content can level up your Developer Hard and soft skills

  • Choosing what to talk about

  • A little challenge.

Now, I add the evidence I have in the right places within my bullet points.

For example, for this talk I talk about my journey in tech and how creating content was life changing for me. This will go under “How and why I started creating content”.

Note that I don’t write my talk down, just ideas that I would like to share within each bullet point.

Slide Deck

After I have my main points down, I like to get started with my slide deck, creating a slide for each bullet point.

About design, I choose something for free on Canva, and personalize it as I go. They have great presentation templates that don't need much work.
First slide of my talk

With this basic slide deck done, I run a practice talk and as I talk, I e add any extra info that my slide may need.

I repeat this process a few times until I am happy. A day before the actual presentation, I do it again, but this time I run it through a friend or two for feedback.

Final considerations

I now have my talk structured and my slides are ready. I also asked friends for Feedback that I will apply where it makes sense and I have practiced it a few times.

Do I feel confident? Not 100%, no. But I know I did the best I could at this moment of my life.

Am I nervous? Heck yeah haha But everyone says this is normal, so we gotta roll with it.

An invitation

Before I finish, I would like to invite you to watch my talk! Here is the Abstract

When we choose to purse a career in tech, especially as a developer, we have to accept that we will be learners forever. New languages,
frameworks, APIs... New jobs and challenges... There is always
something we want or need to learn.

We developers are always read to level up.

In this talk, I will tell you how you can use our "forever learning
nature" to teach others, give back to our communities and be better
professionals, all at the same time.

How, you ask? Creating great content.

I really hope you can come see my talk!
You can sign up here, and it is free!

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