Tech Leader Summit and ArchConf 2019
Before we start the actual post, today is the blog’s 1st birthday! <3 (Our first post.) Thanks to anyone who has been reading, or anyone who will read in the future. We blog because we love it, and we appreciate…well, everything related to it.
Last month, we spoke at Tech Leader Summit and ArchConf, which are conferences from the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. We also spoke this summer at UberConf, which is on the same tour. We had an AMAZING time, and we wanted to record and share some of it for posterity.
First, some pictures!
Florida was beautiful this year. Do yourself a favor and look through these:
Here are some of us speaking, interacting, and being on panels with other speakers:
Tech Leader Summit and ArchConf is in Clearwater Beach, Florida every year, at the Opal Sands Resort. The resort is ON the Gulf of Mexico, and every room in the resort faces the Gulf of Mexico, which is how most of those amazing sunset pictures came to be.
Yeahhhh. That’s just ONE reason it was incredible.
The Talks
We wrote this summer about speaking at UberConf, and how we got there, and all of the associated feels. The talks we referenced in that post didn’t exactly happen as we’d planned – three of them were swapped out for new, different talks the week before. That was bracing. We also didn’t end up speaking at OSCON. But we had an amazing, if very nervous, time at UberConf.
For Tech Leader Summit this year, we gave another new talk – Solving Software Delivery Pain: What Hurts and Why it Matters. For ArchConf, we gave six talks:
- How to Technology Good: Tips for Implementation at Scale (we did this one at UberConf 2019 as well)
- The Business Agility Treasure Map: Charting a Course to Continuous Delivery (new!)
- To Hug or to Strangle: Tips for Dealing with Monolith Pain (new!)
- Kubernetes Platform Security: A framework to think about it and some practical advice (new, but adapted from a talk we gave at the West Michigan, Detroit, and Cleveland Red Hat User Groups this past fall)
- One of Us – the Importance of Community in Culture Change (also at UberConf 2019)
- But I Don’t WANNA – Protecting Your Resources as a Skilled Knowledge Worker (also at UberConf 2019)
One of the reasons we work on content together is because it lets us generate a lot of content. And it’s also way more fun than working on any of this alone. For ArchConf, we had three talks one day (back to back) and then the other three talks two days later (1, and then later in the day 2 back to back) and we were wiped out. Neither of us has any idea how people give singleton talks, especially back to back like that. For us, being able to present together means that above all else that we can have each others’ backs – but pair talks are difficult to do successfully. We were reminded of that from several people asking us about the mechanics of how we pair-talk. We’re going to work on a blog post with presentation tips and tricks, we’ll include what we told them in that post as well!
Community
When we first spoke to the guy who runs the NFJS tour, he said that the idea is that speakers stick around for the entire conference and mingle with the attendees. This year, we hung out at the hotel bar for dinner and ended up having dinner with a guy who had come to our talks earlier in the day. At UberConf, we made a different friend at the hotel bar who we hung out with outside of the conference while we were there.
The people who attend and speak at these conferences are all kind of…our people. We don’t mean people who look like us, or people who agree with every thing we say. We mean people who care, a tremendous amount – about IT, or about the people in their IT divisions, or about how to make IT successful. And the format of the NFJS tour lets us interact with all of them, and get to know them as people after we’ve shared the ways that we care via our talks. It’s hands-down the best thing about these conferences and this tour.
Up Next
- We submitted nine (!) talks to both Red Hat Summit and IBM THINK. We’ll know over the next month or two if any of them were accepted.
- We’ll be at the Twin Cities Software Symposium in March (our talks)!
- We will definitely be at UberConf 2020, including doing a workshop on workshop day!! Zero percent excited…
- We’re talking about the other regional No Fluff Just Stuff shows, especially the ones that are in the Midwest – these are tricky because they’re over a weekend and we travel a ton.
- We’ll also definitely be at ArchConf 2020 (no link yet) assuming they let us come back. 😀 Please let us come back?
- You can keep an eye on titles, descriptions, and categories for our talks on the Talk Catalog page, which is new! Link is and will continue to be on the right, under Navigation.