As Kojo said, this is the shy person's guide to tech conferences, and this talk is dedicated

specifically to those without much conference going experience, or if you're coming from another country, maybe English isn't your first language, or if you're just starting your developer career, I hope this talk is going to offer a few useful things that

will encourage you to make the most out of the conference, DjangoCon specifically, and hopefully tech conferences in general. But before I start speaking about specifics, I want to share why I think this topic is important and particularly to me.

I'm a freelance web developer. I've been doing Django and contributing also to Meson and CMS, a Django-based content management system for about five years now, and I am what you'll call an introvert or a shy person. You'll find me usually taking the backseat in conversations, listening more than talking.

When I first heard there was a DjangoCon around two years ago, I was very excited to be around people who also love Django because as a freelancer, and I'm from El Salvador in Central America, I don't know much people who do Django, Python, or programming really, and I work by myself, so being around people who are also excited by Django and

Python was really exciting to me. So I came to Austin two years ago, and I was very looking forward to the technical details, and I wanted to see what the top-notch developers had to say, and listening to the Django core team speak and just soak in all the tech that was happening at the

conference, but I was surprised when what really stuck with me after that was the friends that I made and the relationships I built and just the cool people I met, and to me this raises one question, and that is tech conferences, what are they really about?

I would say that conferences in general, and even tech-focused ones, are about people. In the end, what we want to do is be together with folks that share the same interests

as we do. We gather here to share the same space, to share some time, and just to hang out together, and I go even further and say that technology itself is about people. Any technology is only useful if it provides value to a person's life, if it helps us

solve a problem, or if it improves our lives in some way, so technology only holds value as long as it serves human beings, so going back to that first conference, that first DjangoCon I attended, I was obsessed on checking out the guidebook app and trying

to figure out exactly which conference I was going to attend, which talks, and after this one I have to jump to the other room and be real quick, but I wanted to consider a situation. Let's say you are in a hallway just before a talk starts, and you're having a great

conversation with a friend or somebody you just met. Should you drop that conversation? Well, my proposal here is that you shouldn't. You can skip some talks, and it won't be a waste of time. It won't be a waste of your money. Now, to be clear, I'm not advocating missing talks.

The organizers have made a great job lining up a great set of speakers. I believe this is one of the years that has had the more proposals, so the talks that you're gonna see here are going to be the best of the best, right? So definitely make your best effort to attend all the talks.

But if you find that you are hanging out with somebody or having a great conversation or somewhere at a booth, feel free to skip that talk, because remember, you can always watch them later. I think the most important thing is what makes a conference unique. You can always watch, you can always read about the talks online later, but you cannot

talk or hang out with someone as you would in person. We know video chat, Slack, email, it's not the same as being with somebody in a room, right? So try to remember that uniqueness principle and favor the experiences that cannot be replicated

outside of the conference over those that can be read or watched online, right? But how do we apply then this principle? How do we really emphasize those things that are unique to a conference? Well, I would say talks are just the beginning. There's a secret conference schedule, and by that I mean don't obsess over the minute

by minute details of a conference. You can embrace the unexpected and build your ideal schedule and see how we can do that. The first thing is you don't have to go to a talk just because you should, right? It feels sometimes like when you're, because Django has two, DjangoCon has two tracks,

you always have to decide one talk over the other. So if you feel that you have to go to a talk because that's the topic, that's the hot topic, and everybody is talking about that, and I should go there, well, if it interests you and you feel you can get the most out of it, you should definitely

go. But even if you have to go alone to another talk, or it's what people usually call a soft skills talk, feel free to go if you feel it's going to improve or provide value to you. Remember we said that technology only serves us in the way that it solves problems or

improves our lives in some way. So feel free to go to talks also that you're not maybe too familiar with, try to avoid those that just rehash topics that you're already very knowledgeable about, and maybe start exploring new things and start going out of your comfort zone and learning something new.

And the second one is that all conferences offer a ton of extracurricular activities and those are in and out of schedule, so make sure you check those out as well. I don't know if you were aware, there's going to be a picnic tonight and we're all invited, so I hope you make the time to be there after all the talks are done

and just hang out with people at the park. There's also volunteering opportunities, that's a great way to meet speakers and to also meet organizers. You can help at the registration desk, you can help being the session chair or the session runner and Kojo I'm sure is going to share more of that later.

Also most nights people will get together and either grab something to eat, play games, board games, or just hang out. So make sure you are aware of the Twitter, the hashtag, the Slack channels, and just try to go out with people and mingle and explore the city together.

There's also sprints, those are the last two days of the conference, I know not anybody can stay, but it's a great way of hacking and contributing to Django itself or related projects while being together instead of just submitting issues through GitHub and

email and all that. Finally you can also, maybe after this conference you will be encouraged to participate in local meetups at your city, at where you live, and also related events like being, if you're new to Django you can participate in a Django Girls workshop or if you're already

more experienced, maybe you can coach at one and you can also contribute that way. So you might be saying, well that's all well and good, but that sounds like the kind of things that extroverts do, right? Like you're encouraged me to do things that I don't really feel comfortable with,

and that's how I felt for the longest time myself. But what I want to talk now is that not everyone is a natural, you can build up your own conference persona, and this is also very important to me and a lesson that I value

a lot now is that most of what we know we have learned, and that sounds very obvious, but it also applies to the social and the soft skills department, so to speak. None of us were born being an accomplished developer, but we built those skills by reading,

practicing, and sometimes even failing, right? So we can do the same when it comes to non-tech skills. It's not about being somebody you're not, it's not about being, you know, trying to phone it in or be a hypocrite. You can learn this skill just as you would any other. You know, you don't say, oh I'm not, I was not born knowing Python, so I guess

I'm never gonna learn it. You say, I don't know something, I'll investigate, I'll read, I'll have somebody teach me, and I'll learn it. So you can get also better at public speaking, at social skills, at many different things without betraying who you are, right?

So in general, try to follow the same steps you will when you are learning a new tech skill. So for example, one of the keys to learning is repetition. We only get good at things when we repeat them a lot. That's basically what experience is. So if you're exposing yourself repeatedly to situations you're not familiar or comfortable

with, you will get better at them. So don't use, I've never done that, as an excuse to not do something. That's how we all start. We don't do things, but we start doing them and we progressively get better at them. Then the second point is that failure is okay.

Think of each mistake you make, either, you know, in your tech skill set or your non-tech skills, think of each mistake as a step in an experience ladder. There's no way to move forward if you're not making mistakes. So sometimes you'll venture into a conversation and it's going to be awkward, right?

You're going to step in and awkward silence ensues. That's fine, right? Sometimes a conversation won't pay off, right? You thought, well, maybe I'm gonna hang out with this group of people and it really wasn't that great. That's fine too. And sometimes you might even be embarrassed, right? Feel really out of place, but that's all okay.

That's how we all learn. And the third point is you should always ask and learn. Think who do you follow in social media or the people that you look forward or upon when it comes to developer skills. Now you can also, I bet you can also find people who can inspire you, who you can

learn from in this non-tech department, so to speak, right? There's a lot of resources online now, a bunch of people who are willing to mentor even in these aspects as well. So in general, you will feel equipped to navigate this conference and other social situations with this mindset.

This is something you can learn. This is something that you can eventually master if you're intentional about it and if you are ready to put the time and the work in it. So okay, maybe you're now feeling more equipped to go out and enjoy the conference in ways

that maybe you didn't think about before, but I want to push you even further. Have you considered speaking at DjangoCon? Well, you might say, speaker me? Yeah, you can start your speaking career here. And I know it sounds intimidating, but I want to start by busting some myths related to

speaking. So I'm going to present four speaking myths and why I think they're false. The first one is, you know, all speakers are seasoned experts. So if you're going to take a stage, you better know what you're going to talk about

and you better be like the leading person in that field. Well, let me remind you that beginners can provide a perspective that experienced users cannot, and that is what it feels to be new at something. So why not give a talk on learning a new technology? What were your sampling blocks? What were the things that you liked? What were the things that caught your attention?

That's all the stuff that we forget as we get better with things. So you can provide that. Another option is, maybe you're working in a field that's very new or that not many people know. So you can also share that experience and say, you know, I basically don't know what

I'm doing, but here's what I've found. And maybe you can even find somebody else to share that or to build that thing you're doing with you. The second one is, shy people, you know, never give talks. Like, that's a thing for the extrovert. That's a thing for the people that just love the spotlight on them, right?

I'll never grab a microphone by myself. And again, as we learned before, you can learn to navigate this situation, and public speaking is a skill that you can build, that you can master, and that you can be intentional about. So again, you can start learning, you can start practicing. Lightning talks are a great way to start because you only have five minutes to present

a very defined, a very small scope topic. Then the third one is, only technical talks are worthwhile. You might be thinking, yeah, I don't have, like, that much technical knowledge, or I don't have enough knowledge to present a technical topic.

But remember, as we said before, well, first of all, that would mean these talks are pretty useless because it's not technical. But remember that we were saying that tech is only available to us if it provides value and if it solves a problem or improves our life in some way. So if you have a story of how tech in the most maybe unrelated way has improved your

life or the life of a group you care about, your friends, your family, an organization you work with, I think that's something valuable that can be shared and that people will find useful. Because remember, we are all people in the end. We're not just engineers or developers. We have many other interests and you can always contribute to that by giving a talk,

even a non-technical topic. And the last one is, nobody wants to hear my story or my experience, right? You might think, you know, I don't have anything special to share. But I would say that nobody wants to hear generic stuff or the same things that we

all heard. I think we can all offer a unique perspective. You can offer a unique perspective on a lot of things. Remember you have a unique experience, personality, education, cultural background, friends, and past events that make your life different from anyone else's, right?

So you can share that. And it's going to be your talk. It's going to be your thing, kind of like how this was my journey from seeing conferences in a very tech-only way to making it one of the best things that happen every year to me. So now maybe you're starting to feel interested in being a speaker.

But how do you even start? You might say, well, in the what to say department, similarly in how you shouldn't just give a talk or attend a talk because you should be there. You shouldn't give a talk because you should. Maybe you feel, I know about this topic, so I guess since this is what I know, this

is what I should share. But in reality, you should probably talk about something you're passionate about, something that you feel strongly about instead of just something that you know, something that you have in your knowledge domain. And even if you're not the most knowledgeable in a topic, I think you can always share about that. And the second thing is how you can say that.

Well, when it actually comes to putting the words in paper, focus on providing your unique experiences again. Because if you're just going to say something that we can find in any article online or it's very general advice, then there's no difference in you giving a talk over any other person.

So try to imprint your talks with what makes you you, what makes you unique, your unique journey through whatever topic you are sharing. So we've covered a lot today, but I just want to review together what we just went through. So going back to the beginning, I would say to make the most out of the conference,

focus on the unique experiences that you cannot get online. Try to embrace everything that makes a conference unique, everything that is unique about being together with people here that you cannot get via the internet later. Then take part of all the non-talk conference activities.

As we said, you know, sprints, volunteering opportunities, just hanging out with people after the talks. Try to make an effort to participate in all that. And then thirdly, be intentional in building your social skills. This is something that you can learn, you can master, see it as another like learning

a new programming language or learning pretty much anything. You can get better at it. And finally, try out your hand at public speaking. And again, I think lightning talks are going to be a great opportunity if you haven't considered a lightning talk, I encourage you to do so, to submit your idea and then just five minutes of the mic and share with everyone what you've been doing.

So I think we're going to skip this one. And I just want to say, as my public commitment to everyone here, if you see me around, just say hello, you know, and we can talk about a bunch of stuff. I would love to talk about tech, what you like or what you don't like in Django.

I like to talk about dogs. I have a dog and I like to share my dog story with you and your dog story with me. It's just fun sharing a dog pictures and stories. We can talk about El Salvador. That's where I come from and talk about where you come from. How's life at home for you?

We can talk about video games. I like that too. Travel, we can talk about faith and spirituality or whatever makes you passionate, whatever you're passionate about and anything you want. If you see me around, feel free to say hello. I'll be more than happy to have a great conversation with you and make new friends. So that's all from me.

And thank you very much. And I hope you have a great conference. And all the pictures you saw were actual pictures from last year's conference. So thanks. Yeah, so he asked about if I heard about the Pac-Man method when talking in a group. And yeah, I read about that a few weeks ago by Eric Holscher.

And he says, and I think this is a great advice, if you're talking in a circle, don't close the circle. Try to leave one or two people's spaces open. So from above, it kind of looks like a Pac-Man, because it's like a pie with a slice cut out. So always, when you're gathering in circles, try to leave a space open,

because that invites people to come in and participate in the conversation. Thank you, Ed. Have a round of applause for Ed.