I’ve always enjoyed going to meetups, conferences and other tech events and lately I’ve wanted to give back to these communities by giving talks on things I found interested. The problem is, I always worried that what I found interesting other people would find boring. I would think of great talk ideas but always chicken out at the last-minute out of fear that people wouldn’t want to listen to what I had to say.
After thinking of this problem for a few days I came to a solution that I think works well. I’m going to create talks on the most popular content from this blog. Here are a few reasons why I’m going to do this.
People are Interested in it
If a specific post is getting thousands of visitors from different websites, links and searches I know that people are interested in the topic I wrote about. This solves the problem where I would second guess myself on whether the content was interesting. I now have specific metrics (visits and comments) to judge whether I should talk about a certain subject.
I’m Lazy
Because I’ve already spent the time researching for the post that I wrote I don’t have to spend this time on the talk. I’m still going to do more research and go into more detail with the talk than I could with a blog post but the base content has already been written.
I Don’t Have to Choose
Like I said before, I now have specific metrics to choose whether I should talk about a certain subject. I don’t have to base my decision off of what I think would be interesting. Any time I can limit the decisions I have to make I count that as a win.
Going forward I’m going to craft my talks on the most popular blog posts. I’ll see how this works out for me and report back soon.