Giving a tech talk for the first time: with Liliana Ziolek
Last week saw CodeNode open its doors to the Cloud community at 2018 CloudNative London. Three days of in-depth and collaborative talks have focused on six topics within the cloud:
Observability|Deployment| Security| Corporate Stories| Strategy|Serverless
Giving an insightful look at the bigger picture of cloud services, Liliana Ziolek stepped onto the tech talk scene for the very first time.
With over ten years as a software developer, primarily in the financial services industry, Liliana has watched closely while Cloud platforms have become an integral part of an organization’s ability to grow and how the breadth of Cloud services has rapidly expanded over the past decade.
Eager to share some insights that she believed had not had enough attention, Liliana signed up to both speak at 2018 CloudNative and take Jenny Martin’s ‘Engaging Technical Talks’ course at Skills Matter.
We sat down with her to see how she approached talking to a tech audience for the first time:
Thanks for speaking to us, Liliana. First of all, how did you find out about Jenny’s course?
Long story short — I ended up on the Skills Matter page with the call for proposals for CloudNative, and I remember it inviting first-time speakers and that they were going to support me and send me on a speaking course. I thought, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it.’ It was actually the first time when I felt I really had something that might be interesting for other people in tech to hear.
When we started working on the project that I’ve spoken about at CloudNative, it just felt like there was a lack of really basic information, such as, ‘Wait. Where do you even start?’ So I thought, ‘Okay if we couldn’t find it well maybe other people couldn’t either and would find my talk useful.’ So that’s why I submitted the proposal and the fact that the course was part of this bundle deal at Skills Matter definitely helped.
How did you find your talk? Have you done much public speaking before?
I’ve never done a single talk! It was my very first time, I jumped straight into deep water.
Did you notice anything particular about presenting to techies?
I’m glad that it was at Skills Matter because I think this community is really friendly. So I don’t think I could get much better for a first audience.
Your talk was very calm and natural —
Ok! Good, it means I managed to keep my poker face…
Did you apply anything directly from Jenny’s course?
I’m glad I did the course quite a long time prior to the talk. The very first steps I had made were immediately changed! I had three or four slides already, and then went to the course and was told that this was the last thing I would do. It was a major and simple thing to take away. Start from thinking about: what you are going to say; what’s the message; write roughly what you are going to say and how you are going to say it; measure how much content you can fit in a time limit. Do this long before the visuals. I’ve never done such a large talk but when I have done smaller presentations, I have always started with slides. This was a much better process.
Generally, knowing how to tackle public speaking is going to be a useful skill in the long term.
How did you take that step back when planning the talk, especially with organizing the areas you wanted to talk about?
I think if you’re an expert, giving this kind of intro level talk is very difficult as you have so much you want to say. Thankfully I and my team are still beginners in the Cloud journey. Stepping back was fairly easy for me because my team hadn’t gone too far down the Cloud journey so maybe if you want to give a talk for the first time, don’t leave it too late!
So now you can relax and enjoy the rest of CloudNative?
Yeah, the talks are really interesting and it is well run. The fact that you have people giving you a time indication up on stage helps because sometimes conferences have delays and everything gets out of sync. I’m always impressed by how well Skills Matter conferences are run.
And what attracted you to Cloud tech?
How can you not be! Honestly, if you don’t do it, you are putting your company at such a competitive disadvantage. I don’t understand those organizations who don’t embrace it.
Have you noticed a big shift in attitudes towards Cloud technologies?
Not so much in the enterprise world and not in financial services, but definitely so in the ‘disruptors market’. I’ve worked in finance for over ten years and it’s slowly moving but, generally speaking, it is an industry that is slow to adapt. It is moving but slower than other industries.
Cloud tech is now so much more than just containers. If you start looking into the data space, this is where the future is as well. It’s not just about, ‘Ok I can run code — nicely distributed and automatically scaled.’ That’s great but cloud tech’s relationship with data is the new direction. Add AI and machine learning to the mix, and it’s really hard to do it outside of the cloud. So-called ‘private clouds’ or ‘data centers’ simply do not address these needs.
I do feel that those really reluctant industries will struggle. You can already see the seeds of change with smaller players. For instance, in the financial industry, give it three to five years and I believe traditional banks will lose a lot of clients to smaller banks as fintech is growing. Larger companies keep falling further behind; they don’t act quickly enough. It’s also easier for the smaller players to attract talent. Technology is not a differentiator anymore but a necessity.
It’s hard to say what will happen for the larger companies. Despite making the right noises, I am worried they will just take their issues to the Cloud! Perhaps I have grown into a cynic, but I doubt whether a true change is possible for such big companies.
Now that you have done this talk, do you have any tips for those interested in speaking at a tech talk?
The first step would be signing up and putting yourself in a position where you can’t back out!
Check out Jenny Martin’s two-day workshop, ‘Giving Engaging Technical Talks at Conferences and Meetups’ and brush up on your public speaking skills.
