Getting a speaker slot

A few months ago not-matthias mentioned in a discord server that they were looking for speakers at an event.

I got in contact with one of the organizers, Rainer, looking to get my feet wet with a talk. Someone else was selected for that specific talk, but I believe that was for the better as it was a rather large event and I don’t think I would’ve had such a great time speaking for the first time.

Luckily, he mentioned that they were looking for speakers at a smaller event in Linz, and I ended up taking the offer.

Said event being the 32nd Rust Linz Meetup on the 23rd of August 2023, a beginner-friendly rust-focused event of roughly 30 people at the Dynatrace HQ in Linz.

Preparing the talk and the journey to Linz

I had never been in Austria before, or any other country apart from the Netherlands and Germany.

I decided to take a train instead of a plane because I would have some time to spend purely on the slides. The train ride was supposed to be roughly 9 hours long.

The train was relatively punctual for DB’s standards, only about an hour and 30 minutes of my favorite type of delay: Unauthorized Persons are present on the rails. See video.

Since I’m rather tall, it is really uncomfortable to sit in a train or plane because the seats do not support my back at all. I also specifically got a ticket for a seat at a table. You can see said “table” in the video. Yeah, that’s their definition of a table.

Luckily, I had a long-time online friend in Linz who I could stay with during my time in Linz, saving me a few hundred of hotel costs.

We had a great time meeting irl for the first time, which neither of us really expected. But it’s welcome, for sure.

Actually preparing the talk and slides was harder than I thought, and it caught me a bit by surprise.

I had seen a lot of talks, but I had never held one or made slides. I watched back some of my favorite talks to try and get some inspiration.

I knew what I wanted to make, but I did not how to get there. I wanted a concise, interesting talk that I would have loved to have seen when I was starting out with Rust myself. (I had been using C++ for as long as I can remember and tried Rust upon a friend’s recommendation roughly 2 years ago).

However, after a rather long time sitting in the same uncomfortable seat for 7 hours, I decided to give the train’s onboard restaurant a shot. I had heard bad things about it in passing but I decided it couldn’t be that bad. Roughly 18€ and a trek through the entire train later, I stood corrected.

The fries (see video) were just absolutely horrid, tasted like nothing and had the consistency of freezer fries that hadn’t been fully thawed yet. The currywurst along with it was equally awful. My stomach also didn’t seem to like it, so in conclusion, bring your own food or wait it out (unless it’s water).

I kind of lacked direction with the slides as well, which cleared up about a day before the talk when I actually had some kind of idea of how I wanted to make the talk.

I was still struggling though, and I worked on the slides all the way from my train to Linz up until the last minute before my talk.

During the train ride I was frustrated that I just could not seem to think of anything properly, and so my girlfriend decided to give it a shot herself and made some slides for me. This really saved the talk, as I finally had the inspiration I needed to make proper slides. Her slides didn’t quite match my style, so none of them are in the final version, but it helped immensely and the talk would probably have been much worse without her help.

I also had to cut out some topics I wanted to cover, such as macros, and I just never got the slides quite the way I wanted them to be.

At the venue

When we arrived at the location, there were already quite a few people having a good time outside. We walked into the building and were greeted cheerfully by the organisers Rainer and Stefan. The hospitality was great, and we would have loved to network, but I had to finish my slides before my talk was on. I also sadly missed matthias’ talk (not not-matthias) because I didn’t wanna aggressively type on my keyboard while he was speaking.

I was really nervous about the talk, to the point where I was physically shaking minutes before it started. I was asked to set up the screenshare up front and everything went well.

Once the talk started, Rainer did an extremely good job keeping the mood up and cleverly maneuvering around any awkward silence by always having an ace up his sleeve in the form of a question for the speaker.

While giving the talk, I blanked out a lot and couldn’t put a lot of things into words like I would have liked, so I ended up just reading off the slides, which was suboptimal, but a solution over stammering for half an hour.

The question time was great, as I finally got relatively comfortable with the situation, which was a little too late, but I think everyone has to go through this kind of situation when publicly speaking for the first time. I believe my second talk will be orders of magnitude better now that I have it somewhat figured out.

After the talk

Once we finished, we decided to move the snacks we had in the speaking room into the main hall, so we could all go outside and socialize.

I took a moment to check my DMs and answer calls from my family. This took a bit, surprisingly a lot more people watched it than I had anticipated and it was really nice seeing that although I personally at that point thought it was a complete catastrophe, people seemed to have liked it and took some time out of their day to let me know. In the end, it did end up being a great time and a great learning experience either way, I won’t complain.

I was pleasantly surprised to see many people tell me they liked the talk and even learned something from it. I did not expect that at all, from my point of view the talk was not great at all, I absolutely did not have a good time at least during the first three quarters of the talk. But I won’t complain since the talk seems to have served it’s purpose.

My friend and I had a great time talking to the other attendees, and they were all really friendly.

One person there I recognized from somewhere, but I wasn’t able to figure out where from or who he was so I didn’t mention it. Funnily enough, he then mentioned it himself a few minutes later, saying he recognized me from somewhere. We did not come to a conclusion, as he had never went to Germany and I had never been to Austria before, either. He also mentioned he did not like to show his face online so there was no way for me to have seen him online, either. It doesn’t help neither of us recognized each other’s steam accounts.

I asked one of the organizers, Rainer, to take a photo of me and my friend as a souvenir. See the photo.

We ended up talking with the people there for about 2-3 hours or so after the talk before we went home.