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Comment by CapacitorSet | Hacker News Reader

Are you asking how to find a suitable place for giving talks, or how to organize one? If the latter, I'm also interested as I'm in the process of writing my first talk.

For the former, it's rather easy really - there are plenty of minor events where you can offer to give a talk. I'll be giving my first one at a hacking/FOSS event a couple of hours away from where I live, but there are also chances to participate in smaller local events as long as your talk fits the theme. It's no big deal - you make up your mind about the topic of your talk, contact the organizers giving an overview of said topic, and wait for confirmation.

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> For the former, it's rather easy really - there are plenty of minor events where you can offer to give a talk.

Well, that's the part that I am finding difficult. I have some interesting topics to address; I have a decent amount of skill and experience at presenting; I have a lot of practice with internal audiences. But I am terrible at networking and this part you describe as "easy" is the stumbling block for me.

Do you have any specific pointers for finding events (even minor ones) which are local (I'm in the Philadelphia area, which is within driving distance of lots of east-coast places) and topical, and finding them EARLY enough to submit a speaking proposal?

> "Do you have any specific pointers for finding events (even minor ones) which are local (I'm in the Philadelphia area, which is within driving distance of lots of east-coast places) and topical"

You need to describe the subjects that you'd like to give talks about before anyone can suggest an event that might be suitable.

Well, for instance I currently have a talk mostly assembled which would cover the way in which our team architected a system to allow small components of a complex stateful system to be deployed independently with minimal risk to the other components of the system. This could be classified under "Devops" or "System Architecture".

Okay, so if you had to summarise the lessons learned from overcoming the challenges you faced, what would you say they were?

* Isolating the effects of one team's functionality from another team's is essential if each team is to be allowed to deploy independently.

* Doing so in a way that still allows your entire app to appear to be a coherent whole is tricky.

Thanks for your reply.

To be clear, to have a talk that makes an impact there should be general lessons that can be extracted from the specific experiences you went through. The title of your talk should address the general lessons rather than the specifics.

Based on what you've shared so far it sounds like a potential title for your talk is 'Coordinating Modular Development'. Is that the general idea behind the talk you had in mind?

I'm not sure that is the exact title I would use, but it is certainly a good description of the content I would put in this talk. (My only concern with the title is that the talk I am envisioning would cover the specific technical details of ONE solution to coordinating modular development, rather than an overview of many possible solutions.)

I do, however, understand and appreciate your point that the title of the talk should put the talk in a broader context, particularly addressing why the listener would be interested.

There are a ton of meetups around the Philadelphia area, especially around University city. What I would do is come up with a couple ideas for talks, then go to a meetup, chat with the organizer(s), tell them you're interested in giving talks and ask how many people they think would come to the topicsyou propose.

They vary in how far out they plan, e.g. the Java Users Group has a speaker list booked to the end of the year.

The part I struggle with is scheduling, since it takes a lot of time for me to write the actual talks.

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