Finding Your Talk

Tech conference speaking still has a veil of mystery around it for many developers, but the process is more accessible than it appears. My own path started with a curious first conference in 2014, a lighting talk at React Europe in 2017, and eventually regular speaking slots a few times a year. Here's how the sausage gets made, from idea to delivery.

The hardest part is often simply deciding what to talk about. My approach is to look for the intersection between what I'm passionate about, what I know well, and what the audience hasn't heard a hundred times already.

For my 2018 React Rally talk, “Explorable Explanations with React,” that sweet spot was explorable explanations — projects that combine data visualization, journalism, education, and game design to create interactive learning experiences. I'd built my own explorable about waveforms after months of work, and the response was overwhelming. Audio students, self-taught learners, and even professors wrote to say it had helped them. I realized React developers already have the tools to build this kind of content — they just don't know it's an option.

More broadly, look for intersections between disparate fields. Creative coding is underrepresented at programming conferences, and so are user-centric concerns like accessibility, internationalization, and performance. If you're stuck for ideas, focus on what you're passionate about; we tend to assume everyone knows what we know, but that's rarely true for the topics we care about most.

Once you have an idea, finding the right venue matters as much as the idea itself. Resources like confs.tech and CSS-Tricks' conference list are good starting points; language-specific communities (like React's official list) also aggregate relevant events. But not every talk fits every conference. Watch recordings of previous years' talks to get a feel for the event's tone and technical depth. And factor in travel logistics — not every speaker has the passport privileges I enjoy as a Canadian.

Getting Accepted

Most community-run conferences fill their lineup through a CFP — “Call for Proposals.” Proposals open months in advance and typically require both a short public-facing blurb and a more detailed outline for organizers. Submissions tend to cluster in a spring “CFP season,” though conferences accept proposals year-round.

Here's an open secret: many speakers submit proposals for ideas that are barely formed. For technical talks, it's common to pitch a hypothesis and figure out the engineering afterward. Dan Abramov famously applied to React Europe 2015 by pitching a new take on Flux with hot-reloading and time-traveling debugging — that became Redux, but he hadn't even gotten it working when his proposal was accepted.

That strategy carries risk. Hard deadlines add stress, and you might burn out your enthusiasm for the subject before you even give the talk. Only take that path if you're comfortable with uncertainty.

Getting your first slot takes more than a good pitch, but there are ways in:

  • Lightning talks are easier to land than full-length slots, though many conferences don't cover travel for short talks — a limitation that can make them inaccessible without employer support or personal budget.
  • Local meetups are often desperate for speakers and rarely have formal approval processes. They give you a recording, which dramatically improves your CFP chances elsewhere.
  • Seek out conferences with a “blind round” of evaluation, where proposals are judged purely on merit without speaker identity or experience. The playing field is much more level.
  • Don't hesitate to ask an experienced speaker to review your proposal — editors help a lot.

And prepare for rejection. Conferences receive more proposals than slots; accepting just 5% is common. Even with consistent success, I still get rejected roughly 75% of the time. If you believe in your talk, don't let rejection stop you — record it yourself at home and share it publicly.

Building the Talk

Acceptance brings a brief high, followed by the sinking realization that you actually have to deliver.

Your first draft will likely be bad. Mine almost always is. The fix is distance — step away for a few days and return with fresh eyes. When I realized my React Rally talk was structured backwards (starting with the most complex code instead of building up to it), I barely had time to restructure before the conference — but the rewrite made it dramatically better.

Feedback is equally important. Find someone whose criticism you trust, and give a practice run at a local meetup if you can. You can't predict what will land with an audience — there's nothing worse than silence where you expected laughter. I gave a practice version of my React Europe talk a month early and asked everyone afterward. The dominant feedback was that I had too much code in the middle, too much detail in tangents. I marked spots in my notes with ✂️ where I could skip the line-by-line code review, freeing room for the concepts that mattered.

Finally, study other speakers. Watch conference videos critically, note what works, and steal ruthlessly. I moved my intro slide (“My name is Josh…”) five minutes into my React Europe talk after seeing the effect in Gary Bernhardt's The Birth and Death of JavaScript. For structure and delivery techniques, Saron Yitbarek's article on transitions and Ben Orenstein's talk on talking to developers are both worth your time.

Speaker Life at the Event

Once the conference arrives, your experience differs from a regular attendee’s in a few notable ways. Most events offer a pre-conference “speaker dinner,” which is an excellent chance to meet fellow presenters in a relaxed setting. There is also typically a “speaker’s lounge”—a quiet, reserved space. While this might seem like it isolates speakers from attendees, in practice, speakers rarely spend much time there. It mainly serves as a calm spot to review notes or steal a moment of solitude, something many introverts appreciate. Organizers usually also provide a “speaker gift”—a collection of swag and personalized items as a token of thanks.

The event itself is often more stressful than relaxing. Many speakers, myself included, find themselves making last-minute tweaks right up until they take the stage. This is generally poor advice for a few strong reasons: you risk breaking a live demo, you miss the chance to watch the talks before yours and tailor your opening remarks, and your stress or lack of sleep makes it hard to judge if a change is actually an improvement. After years of practice, I do occasionally dip in for small adjustments, but I wouldn’t recommend it for newcomers.

On Stage

Public speaking is a common fear, and it never fully disappears. People often tell me I don’t *look* nervous, which is surprising because I absolutely am. The trick, it seems, is learning to manage the anxiety rather than eliminate it. One method I relied on for years was to rehearse so thoroughly that I could deliver the talk in my sleep. I never used a script because I wanted to sound authentic, but I practiced enough to hit the same points consistently, with the exact wording varying each time. The downside is that you *will* forget things—every talk I’ve given has had moments I meant to mention but didn’t. Also, time on stage moves absurdly fast; thirty minutes can feel like thirty seconds.

Calculating the Cost

The effort required is massive. My 2018 React Europe talk consumed over 150 hours of preparation. At the median US software engineering salary of roughly $104,000 a year, that’s about $7,500 worth of your time. The process is also emotionally taxing, with stressful nights, weekend work, and moments of doubt about your topic or delivery. And the reach is surprisingly limited—most talks are seen live by a few hundred people, maybe a thousand more via recording. My blog posts receive more views with far less effort.

Despite that math, the rewards make it worthwhile:

  • A well-crafted talk is a highly impactful way to deliver a message. It can inspire action in ways a tweet or post cannot—CodeSandbox creator Ives Van Hoorne has directly credited React Europe with motivating him to build it.
  • You get to spend time with other speakers, often the very authors of tools you use daily or whose work has inspired you for years.
  • It’s a prolific way to make new friends with shared interests; expect engaged follow-up conversations after your session.
  • Speaking lends you an air of authority—a “Real Expert™” aura—that benefits your career long after the event.
  • The experience itself is a lasting memory, with a recording you can revisit for the rest of your life.

Additional Lessons

Two years after originally writing this, a few more points are worth adding:

  • Limit your commitments. My sweet spot is preparing one conference talk per year, presented two to four times. Preparing multiple talks in a single year is simply too time-consuming.
  • Reuse your content. A conference talk can be repurposed into an excellent blog post or tutorial. That research and those demos have more value to give.
  • Vet the conferences. Research the organizers before applying. Look for a track record of fairness and diversity efforts. As a speaker, you represent the event, so it should be an organization you’re comfortable associating with.

Conferences in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything about live events. Some conferences postponed, others canceled entirely, and many pivoted to virtual formats. Early results indicate online events *increase* reach:

  • React Summit peaked at about 4.2k concurrent live viewers—more than double the combined live and in-room crowd from the prior year.
  • MagnoliaJS saw roughly 2,700 total viewers, with around 400 at its peak, compared to about 200 in-person attendees the year before.
  • Women of React drew 12.5k live viewers, with likely more after recordings were published.

Anecdotally, I’ve received more speaking invitations since lockdowns began, and fellow speakers report the same. This likely stems from fewer established speakers willing to put in the effort without the travel perks, and from remote talks being less intimidating than standing on a physical stage. Some conferences even allow pre-recording your session to enable live Q&A afterward. If you’re interested in speaking, there’s no need to pause those ambitions during the pandemic; the community has adapted. Of course, these are turbulent times and skipping this entirely is absolutely fine—but for some, it remains a welcome distraction.