Conference Story
This is a story about my conference journey, which started when I was in my third year of university. I was working on some hobby projects outside of school back then. Small but very useful ones that made me way more motivated than the homework I was getting at school.
Sanalkurs.net -is an online tech education website which publishes many IT video courses- they published tech e-journals at that time and I decided to write an article about one of my small projects. I wrote a step-by-step article about creating a to-do list application. It was kind of a small tutorial for very beginners. I love step-by-step tutorials when I work on my own. I believe it was quite useful. It was my very first publication. :)
After a while, I had the chance to speak with my professor at a conference organized by Sanalkurs.net. They organise seminars every year. It was my first seminar where I was going to speak in front of a crowd of people about a technical topic. It was an incredible experience! My professor and I talked about creating a blog engine step by step. After my professor’s introduction, I wrote the code of the blog engine live! I cannot explain how excited I was! As we were only two people, it was like a stand up show. We had a lot of fun and great feedback afterwards.
This was the first conference speaking story and how my journey started…
As you all know, I have graduated and for the past 9 months have been working for Ericsson, in Hungary as a Cloud system developer. Just a couple of months ago, I heard that an International Python Conference was going to be held in Bratislava, Slovakia. PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. As I am living in Budapest, I thought I should go to Bratislava for this conference and reserved my ticket as an attendee. When I was checking the website, I saw that they were also accepting talk proposals. That was the time that something lit up in my head. I thought “why not?” :)
By that time I had been working for 6 months at Ericsson, learning many things and trying them out, sometimes at home just to improve myself. I had a hobby project and I thought I would talk about it!
I prepared my talk proposal and sent it to them. I got the answer the day after I sent it, that I was accepted to be a speaker and that my talk sounded very interesting! For a moment, I could not believe that this was going to happen. I always try my best but without any expectation that it’ll come true; it is the greatest thing when it happens. :)
My topic was ‘how to automate big tasks with Ansible in the Cloud’ -very technical :P .It was my first international conference where I was speaking English in front of so many people from numerous different countries. So exciting! The conference was being streamed online so many people that could not be there, were able to watch it as well. The conference was held in two tracks. There were 2 halls, so you could say there was competition between the talks.
After my presentation, I had great feedback from most of the people there. I saw lots of tweets which were tweeted during my presentation such as “Awesome slides on Ansible and Hadoop by busrakoken”, “Great intro to Ansible talk by busrakoken” and so on.
After my presentation, one guy who was wearing a t-shirt with an Ansible logo came up to me and said “it was the best presentation about Ansible, I have been to so far.” I was notified after, that that person is quite good in this area. So, maybe that was the most important feedback! :)
People could ask many questions during the talk and could also vote on them to be answered. This was provided by Sli.do.
To be honest, this part was the most exciting one! :)
The organisers said that they were quite surprised because the live streaming of my hall was being watched by double the amount of people that had been watching events before. This was also great feedback for me to hear. There were a lot people who were watching me online. My friends from all around world. It was an incredible encouragement. No kidding, even some of my neighbours from the city that I used to live when I was studying at university watched me online! :)
I met really good people there. I am extremely happy about it overall.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my family, my friends, my professor from Turkey, my colleagues and my company for supporting me on my journey.
Stay tuned. I am going share another story related to this one very soon! There is a possibility that we can meet at PyCon which will be held in different counties in the future.
PS: Here is the video of my talk and the presentation.
Love,
Busra
