Thoughts (ramblings) of a first time speaker in the Magento community
I recently gave gave my first talk at a Magento event (Mage Titans IT in Milan on June 9th) and wanted to share my thoughts on my experience, in the hope it helps others considering public speaking or wanting to become more involved in the Magento community (and also selfishly for a bit of internal reflection).
One of the main reasons for this is due to the fact I’m a self confessed introvert and I’m sure many others in our space are too, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to be involved or contribute. It does mean doing so is somewhat of a challenge however.
For example, when I was younger I was painfully shy, at my own wedding even, in front of family and friends I could only manage to mumble a few words before sinking my head back in my beer. So to get the point of getting up and presenting in front of 100+ developers and commerce experts was not a short journey.
So who’s this guy from that agency about Fish… 🐟
First off, if you don’t know me (I’ll assume most in the Magento community don’t) I’m John Hughes, Technical Director at Fisheye, a relatively small Magento Solutions Partner based in rural Shropshire in the West Midlands, UK.
I’m neither a relative newcomer to the world of Magento, nor a veteran of the pre 2010 era. My journey began back in mid 2012 with what was the relative comfort of CE 1.7, though comfort is certainly not a word I’d have used at the time!
Over the past 5 years I’ve worked almost 100% soley with Magento during my working days from development, devops, data and store config, through to solutions, architecture and even some project management.
Finding the community…
However, it wasn’t until November 2015 (just over a year and a half ago) I “found” the Magento community when attending Mage Titans in Manchester (thanks to my colleague Matt for suggesting we go) and on reflection I’m not sure how I got through those initial 3 and a half years without it and I may not still be doing this were it not for it either.
Since then I’ve been eagerly following along on the latest goings on, mainly via Twitter and the #RealMagento hashtag, but also podcasts such as MageTalk and the incredible number of articles and other content created by community members.
We have a team of around 15 developers at Fisheye and one of my main passions is ensuring developers have the tools and guidance to work efficiently, which is where my interest lies and I feel I have plenty of real world experience I can share. This led on to wanting to find a way to contribute.
Giving something back…
It doesn’t take long to see within the Magento community that it’s success is built on the willingness of almost all to share knowledge and collaborate as well as how friendly and welcoming everyone is.
After just a short amount of time it’s natural to want to give something back for all that you’ve received, but perhaps more selfishly to be accepted as a thought leader / key contributor or maybe even just to validate your assumed expertise.
Self doubt…
But that’s when the fear hits in, or at least it did for me. You start questioning everything:
- Why would these people listen to what I have to say?
- Everyone else is so talented, surely I’m not at that level?
- What if I say something wrong and make a fool of myself?
- What could I possibly have to add that people don’t already know?
And it goes on… essentially classic imposter syndrome. At this stage, talking wasn’t really on the radar, just considering replying to a tweet or thinking about writing a blog post had the above questions running through my mind, and more often than not I’d compose a response only to discard it.
Kicking the habit…
I won’t for a minute pretend I have all the answers for how you can tackle self belief in this area, I still had some lingering doubts myself just prior to getting on stage for the first time.
For me though it was small steps and meeting others at events. Firstly, taking a punt on getting involved in conversation on Twitter and elsewhere – each time you get some form of non negative feedback it goes a long way.
Secondly, I’m lucky enough in my role to get to attend a handful of Magento events each year and every time I’ve made more effort (and plucked up more courage) to connect with some of the brightest minds in our community.
Being able to validate your knowledge by discussing trending and complex topics with others was probably the single biggest factor for me in beginning to get comfortable entering debates or providing advice to others.
Equally attending talks and coming away finding I already knew a lot of the material / concepts helped as well and I made further effort to talk to speakers after their presentations.
Essentially validating you do actually know what you’re talking about (most of the time at least) is the moment it all fell into place for me.
Adventures in topics…
So at this point I was feeling more confident, but still hadn’t really made a meaningful contribution (in my eyes) back to community. The last big hurdle, which in reality I tackled in parallel with the self doubt for a decent period of time, was finding something to talk about.
I reflected back on my previous 12 months, which happened to coincide in our shift at Fisheye to learning and then launching our first Magento 2 projects. However, it still felt most of the key topics I’d probably want to discuss had already been covered by someone else, someone far more experienced (and well respected) in most cases.
However thinking about our heavy use of BlueFoot CMS at Fisheye, the recent acquisition by Magento and lack of anyone else discussing the topic meant I felt had something to go on.
My only advice here is to look for something you specialise in within your Magento work and how others could benefit for your experiences / outcomes. For me this meant providing an overview of how developers can extend BlueFoot to add new content types and in future I’d like to talk more about developer tools / efficiency.
To submit or not to submit…
So having now got an outline of what I wanted to talk about it was time to submit proposals to events.
Most speaker submissions ask for a bio, an outline of your topic and some validation on why you are right person to give the talk. There are many ways you could approach these, but I took the approach I take for most things in life: just be honest.
I clearly stated I was new to this, but backed it up with my professional experience, why I was passionate to give something back and my eagerness to be given a chance. I then added to this my talk outline and my experience of the topic.
I submitted my talk to 2 events and in hindsight the above approach was likely a decent contributor in me being accepted for one (Mage Titans Italy: a relaxed, developer focused event that encourages / supports newcomers) and declined for the other (Magento Live UK: a more professional, business oriented event).
I was obviously ecstatic to be accepted to speak, especially at the first time of asking and even more so at a Mage Titans event where my Magento community journey began 18 months prior.
Practice makes perfect (or near enough)…
Once I had an event lined up the real work began. You’ve probably heard people say how much effort goes into putting together a talk, but you don’t quite appreciate it until you experience it first hand. That said, I have a bit of a perfectionist approach, so I never help myself with these things!
You hopefully have a least an outline of the talk already from the proposal submission, but it likely needs further refinement.
Your slides, notes and other content will naturally vary massively on the type of talk you are giving. As I’m focusing on highly technical talk my advice is aimed towards this.
There are some generics I’d keep in mind though, such as ensuring your talk is broken down into clear, concise sections, humanising your content so it’s not too dry / boring and aiming to provide something tangible that your audience can take away (my talk involved the creation a module, which is openly available).
My next step was outlining my slides a step further followed by creating detailed notes on each and then beginning to refine the slide content from this. As I had over 60 slides this was a fairly lengthy process…
Therefore at this point I recommend to not over obsess about refinement as the key next is to ensure the content you’ve created is suitable for the length of time you’ve been allocated to talk, which means it’s time to practice!
The single best piece of advise I was given (thanks Kirsty) was to go through the painful and somewhat tortuous task of recording myself and listening back. Even better is if you can find some poor unwitting soul to listen and provide feedback (thanks to my wife for enduring through my horrendous monotonous / lifeless performances early on and steering me in the right direction).
This helps not only get the timings right but how you are delivering content. This process lasted almost the final 4 weeks up until my talk. I’d record, review (normally on my walk to work – it was no MageTalk replacement let me assure you) and then refine my slides / notes further to ensure it hit my 15 minute talk time and improve the content delivered.
Alongside this I also put time into the appearance of my slides, but this certainly isn’t a necessity, mainly just my OCD!
One key area for me in the last week or so was to lose reliance on the notes I’d created. Until almost the last week I was still reliant on ‘reading from a script’ and I knew it was affecting my delivery. I tackled this by breaking my talk into sections and practising them without my notes until comfortable and had made the connection between the slide and the content I wanted to discuss.
Finally, one other useful exercise if you have a willing audience is to actually do a full dry run of your talk. I was able to get our office to agree to lose 15 minutes of their time (they’d never get this back) for me to practice and provide feedback.
Lights, camera, action…
Finally the event rolled around and the whole journey over to Milan I was apprehensive about what I’d got myself in for. I’d gotten nervous presenting to my coworkers, surely this was going to be a hundred times worse…
Thankfully a pre-event get together for speakers had been arranged the night before and getting to catch up with old and new faces really helped me to relax (or it may have been the Italian red wine…)
The day of the event I actually felt less nervous than I thought I’d be and even after wasting 40 minutes heading to the wrong venue, thanks Apple Maps (yes I know), I arrived well before the event kicked off and had chance to chat further with fellow speakers and attendees.
I was up second on the day, not including the introduction, and not having too much time to dwell on my turn was definitely a blessing.
Getting up on stage, getting mic’ed up and setting up my presentation all flew by and as soon as I knew it I’d begun. I was far less nervous than I thought I’d be, I spoke with more confidence than I’d done it any of my practice runs and I dare say I actually enjoyed it. It felt natural to be up on stage talking geek about Magento, but as quick as it had begun, it was all over and the sense of relief that it went by without any major issues meant I could sit back, relax and enjoy the rest of the talks (plus the after party).
At this point I’m still somewhat unclear how it really went. I had some very kind feedback on Twitter and joined.in as well as from others on the day, but as the recordings have not yet been released I’ve not had chance to watch it back and I know I’m my own harshest critic. I’m also not niaive enough to think I won’t have anything to improve.
2 weeks later…
So I’ve had time to reflect some more since the event, I’ve been back in the thick of the daily Magento grind at work followed by currently being on a much needed weeks holiday writing what has now turned into a essay (sorry… and thanks if you’ve made it this far!)
I’m under no illusions, I’m still a relative unknown, I still have a hell of long way to go to make even anywhere near the level of the contribution that others have / do and I still have so much more to learn.
However, I am more content with all of this and that maybe I can add some value to the community (and hopefully have a bit of fun along the way). I’m also aware this is about collaboration and knowledge sharing, not a competition, but I do strive to be the best I can.
Regardless, I’m going to keep at it and I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be speaking again in September at Meet Magento Belgium.
Final observations…
- Almost everyone in the community is friendly and welcoming. Make the most of speaking to people at events or online, they don’t bite, honest!
- No one knows everything about Magento (or any other topic for that matter), so don’t be afraid of a lack of knowledge and get in the thick of the discussion. You may not be right about something, but you’ll generally get some useful feedback and find out it’s ok to not have all the answers
- If your doing a talk: practice, practice, practice.. and listen back to yourself, even though it hurts!
- A pre-event meet up is, in my opinion, incredibly valuable and really helps speakers relax and unwind before the event
- Having newcomers on early in the schedule really helps and means you can enjoy the rest of the event without worrying about your presentation
- 15 minute or shorter length talks are great for newcomers, though for highly technical talks it can be a challenge to get everything you want to cover within the time constraints
- Don’t trust Apple Maps with walking directions in Milan…
Special thanks…
- andra lungu, Alessandro Ronchi and the Bitbull / Mage Titans IT teams for the opportunity to speak. I likely told you how appreciative I was after a few beers at the after party… I was being sincere :)
- Jon Woodall, Tony Brown and the Space48ers for creating Mage Titans – they are truly special events. As alluded to earlier, they opened my eyes to the Magento community and reignited my passion for Magento
- My company Fisheye and especially our MD Dave, for supporting and enabling me to go on this journey as well as all the opportunities and experience gained with Magento over the past 5 years
- The #RealMagento community – you rock! 😎
