We did our first tech talk — Here’s what we learnt from it
Tech talks are a great way to share your knowledge and put your work in front of talented engineers, but what makes a great talk?
Here at Plum Guide, we’re growing at a rapid pace, which brings some interesting and exciting technical challenges such as scalability and resilience, particularly when it comes to working with the frontend.
To help us grow, we’ve been expanding our team and looking for some talented engineers to join us, but as a relatively new start-up, not a lot of engineers have heard of us before.
We realised that tech talks are a great way to share your work and experience with the community. So we decided to take one of our previous posts (Tiago Morais’ post on Modernising and Scaling the frontend) and talk about it in more detail. Our aim was to share with others how we have approached the problem, what we have learnt along the way, and hopefully, get people excited about what we are doing.
This was our first tech talk, so we thought it would be good to share some of our thoughts and what we learnt from it.
Have a relevant and relatable subject
Due to the rapid evolution of the front end landscape, there has been a lot of interest in how to scale and modernise a growing front end architecture. Last year, we began exploring how we could decouple the frontend from the backend and begin moving away from the monolithic architecture that we initially started with.
We wanted to ensure it was scalable and future proof, but we need to do so in an iterative manner so that we didn’t stall and can continue to support our hyper-growth. One of the more popular approaches is to use “compositional micro-frontends”, but we decided to take a “vertical micro-frontend” approach instead as we felt it worked better for what we were trying to achieve.
Not many people may be aware of this kind of approach, so we wanted to share our experience with others.
(You don’t) know your audience
There is always a level of uncertainty as to whether people will actually find your talk enjoyable and learn something from it. There was a variety of people at the meetup: juniors, lead engineers, and even some recruiters.
It’s easy to get carried away and go into lots of technical detail, but if it’s not easy to follow, the audience might lose interest. So we tried to keep the talk as a high-level overview of the challenges we faced and how we approached them but provided enough detail to be engaging and practical at the same time.
The general feedback many gave us was that the presentation had just the right mix of content to keep them engaged, wasn’t too technical for them, and that they had learnt something new and interesting from it. As a result, a few people approached us after the talk to thank us and to find out more about what we are doing at Plum Guide, and it was great to hear that we inspired a few junior developers too.
Practice and keep an eye on the time
We felt that practising our talk multiple times helped us ensure we stayed within the allotted time, but also ensure the pace was right and engaging. Each time we practised, we tweaked the content ever so slightly to ensure it had a natural progression through each slide and kept the cadence of our talk even.
The practice also helped us memorise as much of it as possible so that we could talk more directly to the audience instead of just reading from our slide notes. By talking to the audience, they are more likely to stay engaged, and by scanning the room we could gauge whether we should dive a little deeper into some of the slides.
Don’t rely on the internet
During our presentation, we had a small video clip to demonstrate how our hybrid approach to lazy loading worked in practice. Sadly, we forgot to connect to the internet as we thought that it wasn’t required… but as we found out, the video couldn’t play without the internet.
Luckily it was only a short 3-second clip on a loop, and although we weren’t able to play the clip, we explained what the video was trying to show and moved on to the next slide. This highlights the importance of practise, as it will better you to deal with the unexpected and move on without losing pace. In hindsight, we could have created a GIF instead of any videos shorter than 5 seconds. Plus, it would have automatically looped the video for us!
🥡 The biggest takeaway — TL;DR
If there is anything you can learn from this post:
- Have a relevant subject matter that resonates well with others and ensure everyone in the audience can learn something from it
- Be transparent and share your exploration to help others understand why you’ve taken a particular approach
- Practise often to ensure the talk feels much more natural, and talk directly to the audience to keep them engaged.
🍿 You can watch our talk below!
We intend on doing more talks in the future as we continue exploring new things, so if you have any tips on what makes a great tech talk, let us know!
If you’re like us and love to share your work with your peers and interested in challenging problems and scalability, we are hiring!
We recently closed our Series B round and are looking for talented people to help us grow and give more talks about our exciting work.
