So you want to speak at software conferences?

This can absolutely be made to work very well. When Josh Long did this at Goto, it was an absolute masterclass. He used timed zooms to almost turn it into comedy. The rehearsal involved must have been considerable.

It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.

The audience can quickly tell if someone is there because they want to talk about the topic they're presenting, and having a receptive audience makes it much easier to get on stage to talk about it. If the audience knows you're there because you want another line on your resume or because you're trying to sell them something the atmosphere can turn quite cold and that is a world of pain for a speaker.

I really want to show some code. Like 4-5 lines to give a gist.

Which should go without saying…

One time, I didn't have an extra talk with me, but I volunteered anyway and asked for a whiteboard and markers. Frankly, it was the best talk I ever gave. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But it sure was fun! (I simply asked the audience what they wanted me to talk about.)

Some introverts can use a long solo car trip to wind themselves up to deal with people or decompress afterward so they don’t take it out on their family. Others find it all too stressful and just makes it worse. But that’s like 20 minutes for me. I can’t imagine two hours. We didn’t drive that long to get to grandma’s house.

Or a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.

One minor tangent (aiming for helpfulness, not pedantry), "I have few" reads as "I don't have many" (emphasizes the low number), whereas "I have a few" emphasizes the fact there's more than one -- which from context was clearly your intent. HTH!

Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.

It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.

Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.

The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.

And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.

I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.

Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful

Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see

You might want to spend time on some niche topic and there might be people who don’t have time to dabble in that topic but would be happy if someone did it for them.

I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?

Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?

There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.

If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".

Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.

I deployed my pelican on a bicycle benchmark as a STAR moment last year and it was really effective: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/

At PyCon a couple of years ago I used a vibe-coded counter of the number of times I said "AI" out loud: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/#pycon-2024.043....

The real experts never stop learning.

Some of them go to conferences because that's one of the few times in the year they can hang out with each other, and find out what their community is up to.

same for giving presentations. you give presentations to promote an idea or work, to share something you have learned, to contribute to the community, and again, for networking.

fomo? not at all. personal development? that's a bonus, but not the motivation.