I’m not technical enough to give this talk

Brendan O’Leary: Today, I want to talk about the fact that I'm not technical enough to be giving the talk that I'm giving to you right now. And not only do I love meta things, but I figured I'd just make my talk meta as well. And most talks will start with a presenter introducing themselves and giving you a little mini version of their CV and the hopes that that will perk you up and have them listen to you. But I'm going to start my talk with the meta versions of my first suggestion for all of you when giving your first tech talk, which is to start with a story. And so let me tell the story of my first technical talk that I ever gave. So I'd worked in software my entire career. I've worked for healthcare companies, I've worked for government contractors. But when I came to GitLab, it was really my first VC backed startup, the first one in the developer tool space.

So that was the first time I was really introduced to the concept of Devra and this whole community. And I said, well, I'm going to go give a talk at my local DevOps days in Baltimore. I was trying to come up with all these great titles for my first talk, and I had a more senior person here at GitLab advising me. And I sent them a whole bunch of these titles, things that I thought were going to be great about how to use DevOps and CICD, and all these things that I love talking about and all of these things that I thought would make for a great technical talk. And I can't really use their words directly back to me in my own professional talk, but suffice it to say they told me that these titles were no good and that I really needed to tell a story, the thing that we're going to be getting people interested.

And so I scrapped any idea of having the generic tech talk title. And my first tech talk was called Black Mirror Season five DevOps. And I focused heavily on the story of Black Mirror, a thing that I love to watch.

This was obviously before the actual season five of Black Mirror came out, or as many say, season six, which we're just living inside of as a full experience right now today. And the slides of this talk we're focused on that story. I told the story of Black Mirror for those folks that may not have known it at the time. And for those of you that don't know it today, still A, you've got a lot of time on your hands maybe right now. I recommend watching Netflix's Black Mirror. I wouldn't necessarily start at the beginning. I'd start at the one with Bryce Dellis Howard in it.

It's called, oh, I can't remember the name of it, but it's a picture in the middle.

Find the one that looks like that. And I told these stories about how Black Mirror showed this relationship with technology that might not be ideal and how things we do today, like rating each other in two-way market apps or trying to control the environment in specific ways could really backfire on humanity. And I then applied those stories to the concept of how do we as DevOps professionals maybe either run the risk of making these kind of same mistakes, or how can we be a force for good in making sure that humanity doesn't make some of these horrible mistakes taking technology too far? And that allowed me to connect with an audience in a way that was a lot different than presenting a bunch of charts and graphs about DevOps, which later in this presentation, I did have charts and graphs about DevOps later.

But I was able to tell a story in the beginning. And that is really, if you get nothing else out of this talk, that's what I'd like you to get out, is that stories are how people connect to your ideas. And that's been true for a long time, and it's going to be true for the rest of humanity probably. So focus on the story first.

So after the story, we can talk about who I am. I'm b Brendan O'Leary and I'm a developer, evangelistic GitLab. But again, a lot of folks spend a lot of time thinking about who they are when they're giving a talk. So I might say that I'm at GitLab. It's a big deal. We're a successful venture backed startup currently. And so that adds more gravitas to what I'm saying just because I work at GitLab. But actually it's even better than that.

I'm a senior developer evangelist. Watch out the word seniors in my title. That must mean I know what I'm talking about. Or maybe I'm just the bestest developer evangelist ever. And GitLab is the most exciting place it's ever been. That might get you more interested in what I have to say, or maybe I'm going to add a cool picture too that kind of shows off that I'm quirky as well as being the bestest developer evangelist ever. But I'm really not those things. And so who am I not?

Well, I'm just kind of a regular person. I actually don't have a computer science degree. I don't have any formal software engineering training. I've never had a professional job writing code, and I wouldn't consider myself a major open source contributor, right? I'm no Evan UI didn't write view. Maybe I've contributed to some docs here and there, but I'm not a major open source contributor even though I work for an open source company, GitLab. And that's important because there are things that are more important than those qualifications. And adding those qualifications to a slide doesn't necessarily help me connect with my audience anymore.

Not everyone has a computer science degree, right? I'm a self-taught engineer. If I am one, if I can call myself one, I'd say that I'm know enough to be dangerous When it comes to coding, the only real formal coding class I ever took was I was a business major. And it's not something I normally admit in a tech talk, but you're lucky enough that I'm admitting it to you. I was a business major and I took a vb. net course. I guess that's formal computer science training, maybe I don't think so. Most of my computer science background is self-taught.

You don't have to have big tech experience, right? You don't have to work for a FANG company in order to have something important to say. You can tell a story and connect a lot better than just saying, oh, I work at Google, or I work at Facebook.

And you definitely don't need the traditional technical background in order to make what your experience and your passion about seem important or really be important to your audience. And so showing your passion, I think is much more critical than having that kind of traditional tech background. And again, stories are how we learn and inspire each other. And it's been that way ever since we weren't even able to write stories down in the oral traditions of our long lost ancestors. Storytelling is how we communicate with each other.

And Ben Horowitz, one of the most famous venture capitalists and Andreessen Horowitz said that storytelling is the most underrated skill. Not just underrated, but the most underrated skill. So here we have one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world in Silicon Valley telling us that storytelling is important and the most underrated skill. Yet I don't think those skills are taught in many software engineering classes.

Again, I didn't take a whole bunch of 'em, so maybe I'm wrong, but of the ones I've heard of, typically people talk about not storytelling, but about linear algebra or discreet structures or the elementary theory of computation. Those stories from those classes aren't nearly as heartwarming as many stories that we hear in our other day-to-Day Life, and some of my favourite tech speakers have very different backgrounds. They have backgrounds in theatre or in standup comedy or in the fine arts or other humanities. Those are some of the tech speakers that I've seen who are the most engaging, I feel like reach the largest audience and tell.

And it's because they the best stories. And so let's say you've convinced, hopefully I've convinced you that your story is worth telling regardless of your experience, and that you have something to say that is worth sharing with everyone else.

And so hopefully I've convinced you of that. If not, reach out to me afterwards. I'll keep trying to talk you into it. But let's say you are convinced you're in. You've got the plan. You say, Brendan, yes, I've got a story worth telling, but now what do I do?

Well, I just wanted to share a few where, when, why, and how's here first, where I think there's a lot of great places to give talks, right? Local meetups are one of them. And even during the pandemic, a lot of those local meetups are going virtual. And I've yet to see one that says, no, no, no. We have way too many people signed up to talk. They're always looking for folks that want to share their story and inspire others to do the same. Again, DevOps days are everywhere. Those have been maybe a little thrown off this year.

Some, again, are going virtual, some are postponing to next year, depends on where you live, but you can find one where you live probably. And then depending on the thing that you want to talk about, there is definitely a community out there that's super interested in it and would love to hear your story about their technology. So if that's JavaScript or if it's flutter or if it's just using a specific tool, there's a community out there that's going to be interested in hearing your story about how you've used their technology or their open source tool. And then so how do you give your first talk? Well, I wanted to make it three Rs, so I just kind of stretched it a little bit. So I think research, writing and recording yourself are the most critical things.

And what I'd really like to focus on here is research. So you don't necessarily need to be an expert in what you're going to give a talk about before you start writing the talk.

An example here is I, last year was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I had in my head, well, I kind of have this love of the Apollo programme. I loved Apollo 13 when I was growing up as a kid. The Apollo guidance computer, that green shiny output computer has always kind of interest me. So I'll go write a talk about that. Well come to find out when researching that talk that the story of the Apollo guidance computer is much bigger than I ever thought it could be because of one of the mothers of modern software engineering, Margaret Hamilton's involvement with it. And so actually that talk that was supposed to be about Apollo turned into a talk about Margaret Hamilton and all the amazing things she's done for our industry, including coining the term software engineering to begin with.

And so I would say that don't let the fact that you're not an expert in something.

I had no idea how much Margaret Hamilton had contributed to the Apollo programme when I started. Stop you from giving a talk on something that you're interested in. You'll learn a lot, and just your story about that learning can go a long way. The basic outline of that talk is, Hey, I wanted to do an Apol 11 talk, and I ended up with this talk about Margaret Hamilton and then writing the talk. I think trying to outline that story, every good storyteller will tell you that having that key narrative, and there's lots of different kinds of techniques you can use here. You can write about the situation and the complication and the question and the resolution. You can write about beginning to middle end of a story. There's obviously lots of different ways I gets to write a story, but I think writing it down and having either an outline or kind of a rough idea of what you're going to speak about is really helpful.

And then record yourself practising the talk. This is the hardest thing to do, I think, because watching yourself speak and listening to yourself speak can be really annoying and hard to do, but it's really important. It'll make you a better speaker. And of course, as you're doing all three of these things, you're going to be telling your story and showing your passion. Those are the things that are going to allow you to engage with the audience. And finally, why to give your first talk, again, if I haven't convinced you yet, I'd like to try one more time to convince you everyone's experiences are meaningful regardless of where you started in tech, where you're going, regardless of who you work for. If it's a big tech company or a small tech company, or a company that just happens to have some software involved but isn't really even a tech company at all, and we need your voice out there telling your story.

The more that we can get a diverse set of folks telling their story in tech, the more it will encourage more diverse set of folks to tell their story, and that will really help us make the best possible future for our industry that we can, and you should give it to help that next person give their first talk.

That's why I'm speaking to you today. I hope that I inspire all of you to give your first talk after today, and I think that that would be a huge success for me giving this talk and would be a huge success for you giving your first talk. So thank you so much for your time today. You can get these slides at labwork. dev/go/devcon. You can also reach out to me on Twitter at O'Leary Crew. Be happy to help anybody that's interested with their first talk.