3 Years of Virtual Conferences are finally coming to an end

I received a request from a 3rd party media company shortly after speaking at DeveloperWeek Management in May 2022 to review the conference and comment on virtual vs. physical conferences etc - unfortunately with the acquisition of Instaclustr by NetApp occurring at the same time I forgot to submit my observations, so I tracked down my notes again and “interviewed” myself instead!

Hi Paul - can you introduce yourself, and why do you talk at conferences?

Sure, I’m Paul Brebner, I’m the Open Source Technology Evangelist at Instaclustr. I learn new open source technologies, build interesting realistic demo applications, write blogs and also give talks. Previously I was in R&D of distributed systems, performance engineering, cloud computing, etc. Coming from a computer science background prepared me for this role because I did lots of hacking (prototyping), wrote lots of papers, and presented results at academic and industry conferences, but I also communicated complex technical topics to a variety of non-technical audiences.

What was the last conference you spoke at and what did you talk about?

I last spoke on “Scaling Open Source Big Data Cloud Applications is Easy/Hard” at DeveloperWeek Management in May - which was a USA based conference but run virtually this year, like just about all the conferences since 2019.? This talk was about how it’s sometimes too easy to scale with modern Big Data technologies such as Apache Cassandra and Kafka purely by increasing the cluster sizes, so you also need to consider how to tune and configure the software to get the most efficient use of your hardware resources.?

Ah, a virtual conference - what was the last in-person conference you spoke at?

That would have been ApacheCon Berlin in October 2019 - that feels like a long time ago, but I’ve spoken at many virtual conferences since then.

Could you mention some of them?

Sure, FOSSASIA, ApacheCon, All Things Open, Open Source 101, Percona, PosgreSQL Asia, HotCloudPerf/ICPE, Cassandra Day APAC -? I probably forget some - and lots of Meetups as well. Oh, and ApacheCon Asia (this week!) and APIDays Hong Kong (next month).

Are you speaking at an in-person conference any time soon?

Luckily yes - it will be almost exactly 3 years from ApacheCon Berlin in 2019 until I speak at ApacheCon USA in New Orleans in October of this year.? Assuming Covid-19, airports, airlines, etc don’t cause any last-minute hiccups that is.?

That sounds like an exotic location - did you speak any many different locations prior to the pandemic constraints??

Yes, that was one of the benefits of being part of the R&D community, international academic conferences are pretty much mandatory if you are going to keep up and maintain visibility and contacts in specialised fields, and in computer science, conferences are actually more important than academic journals for publishing. Some of the countries I visited were NZ, Australia, USA, Germany, France, UK, Spain, Italy, Greece, Singapore, Malaysia.?

Can you remember your first conference? Where was it?

It was the Australasian Philosophy Conference, held in NZ in 1985 where I presented a paper on my just completed MSc research into machine learning.

Was there anything good about presenting at virtual conferences over the last 3 years?

Oh yes plenty! From a speaker's point of view, I probably spoke at more and different events to normal. The audiences were often a lot bigger (x10 in some cases) than at comparable physical events - I guess there were fewer constraints with physical venues, having to travel to a specific location, and people being able to listen across multiple time-zones. This also increased the diversity of audiences which is obviously a good thing. Travel from Australia to international conferences is always a long, complex and expensive process as well - Canberra (the capital of Australia), where I live, only got an international airport a few months before the Covid-19 lockdown, and we are back to not having one again now (how many capital cities only have a domestic airport in the world?!). And avoiding extended jet lag was definitely a plus for me.? I really enjoyed speaking at the live virtual conferences in nearby time-zones!

Anything that was challenging??

Time-zones were tricky. Some conferences were still run as live events, others had pre-recorded talks. So for the live events getting up at 3am to present a talk wasn’t much fun - it was tricky to work out whether to stay up late or get up early. For pre-recorded talks there was often several weeks of effort to prepare and record talks, often including learning and testing a new conference platform?as well. For live events there were often last minute hiccups in presenting that were stressful. Some of the better run conferences had people to help with practice and testing sessions, and a chair person and technical person during the talks which often helped things go smoother.?

Are you looking forward to physical conferences again?

Yes, definitely. Conferences are all about “I/O” - For speakers, virtual conferences are ok for the “O” = output part - i.e. speaking, and probably ok to for the audience doing the “I” = Input (listening) part. But they are very poor for interactive combined “I/O” = Input and Output.? Some of the main benefits of conferences are the two-way interactions and networking for example, which I found hard to achieve in virtual events. I also missed out on listening to talks too, particularly for conferences in a different time zone where you had to wait a week or more for videos to be available online. I rely on conferences a lot to understand new technology trends, what’s hot and what’s not, learn new things, understand the drivers and constraints that are customers have with adopting new technologies, and meet new people etc. I also rely on attending conferences before I speak to pick on the vibe of the audience and make adjustments and insert references in my talks to previous talks and relevant use cases etc - it’s really important to understand your audience as a speaker -? this just wasn’t possible with the virtual events. Conferences are also all about the community - I’m looking forward to the Community Leadership Summit at All Things Open in October this year to.

What’s your typical process for preparing and delivering a talk?

All of my talks are based on my blogs, so I often finish a blog series and then think “how am I going to turn this into a presentation?” - this actually takes at least a few weeks to do as I have to decide what the “story” is, select relevant blog material and then turn it into a presentation, typically with the help of our wonderful graphics design people (thanks Jill and others!). I use images extensively in my blogs but there are often missing parts of the story that need last minute visualisation including diagrams, animations, etc.? I enjoy presenting the results of my blogs at conferences because it enables me to complete a project - so there’s a real sense of completion and then I can start thinking about the next project. In terms of delivering a talk, I’m not a natural speaker I don’t think (being an introvert or possibly an ambivert!). For both virtual and physical events I have to psych myself up for a few hours before the talk, during the talk I’m buzzing, and then I spend the rest of the day recovering. So I can’t multi-task a talk with anything else on the same day, or give 2 presentations on the same day.

Can you offer people new to presenting at conferences any tips?

Sure! Submit abstracts to lots of conferences - you won’t hear back from some of them, but the more professional conferences will let you know if you haven’t been accepted. This is sort of excusable as some conferences receive 1000s of submissions for < 100 speaking slots. Speaking about a topic you are interested in, excited about, expert about, which solves an interesting problem, or has a suprise/twist are some good starting points - try to make your abstract interesting, not too long, and with a catchy title.? Conferences often like topics such as “Using technologies X and Y to solve problem Z” (E.g. “Kafka, Cassandra and Kubernetes at Scale - Real-time Anomaly detection on 19 billion events a day”). But most all, try and have fun :-)