Conference

My Tech Conferences Speaking Engagements

Jayesh Kawli

Sep 20, 2018 • 10 min read

This year, in 2018 I made a resolution to come out of my comfort zone and start doing tech talks. My experience so far has really been great and I am looking forward to many more talks in the future if I could find a good subject to talk about.

While we're waiting on that, I have compiled a list of past talks in this post which can be used as a reference and fixed resource. Hopefully they will act as ideal source if anyone is willing to explore tech speaking space as well. I will make further additions as things change in the future.

CocoaHeads Boston - iOS Speech Recognition API

This talk carries a special significance, as I presented it before starting my role as a tech speaker in front of the people outside my work. I presented this talk titled as "iOS Speech Recognition API" on February 8th, 2018 at MIT.

In this presentation, I spoke about Speech recognition APIs that were made available to iOS developers in iOS 10. I talked about the basics of API, how to use it, and caveats to pay attention to while using it in the production grade iOS applications.

The presentation was accompanied by a speech recognition demo application. The application used Speech recognition API to convert audio into the text string and then used a third party service to convert English text into the Spanish version. It was more convenient since I was already taking some Spanish lessons in my spare time for about a year.

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The presentation slides are available publicly and can be downloaded from the direct link. Organizers of CocoaHeads Boston were helpful to facilitate the recording of this session. The YouTube video can be found below -

WeAreDevelopers Conference Vienna: Code Reviews - Establishing a Quality Culture

I will have to write a separate blog post if I want to talk about my whole experience at this conference. But for now, just few paragraphs are enough.

This was my first "The Big" conference ever since I ventured into public speakers' circuit. It was held in the historic city of Vienna and I presented the topic which is near and dear to my heart - "Code reviews and how to establish a quality culture"

WeAreDevelopers conference a.k.a “Woodstock of Developers” is one of the biggest developer conferences in Europe and I was honored to be a part of it. Another nice thing about is that our crew from Wayfair accompanied me there and it was a great motivational factor.

Everything went well and I received a positive feedback by the end of the talk. I also spent a couple of more days in Vienna visiting castles, museums, gardens, and other historic places.

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The video of presentation can be found below,

SwiftFest iOS developers conference

After speaking at the local Meetup and other big conferences, I became more confident to be able to speak at more conferences. It was my third time doing public speaking, and I would like to thank Jeff O'Leary for supporting and coaching me for the talk.

I presented a similar topic about Code reviews that I did in my previous presentation in Vienna. It was more comfortable experience, since I already practiced it several times before and having done it before gave the extra boost in my confidence.

SwiftFest Conference was fantastically organized in the city of Boston from June 18–19, 2018. They had a wide range of talks both from well-known and first-time speakers. I admire conference organizers who are willing to give chance to first-time speakers. This is important, as by giving this chance you're letting them be a part of the larger community and making sure they feel comfortable standing in front of the large crowd and sharing their knowledge with rest of the tech society.

Later, we also went on the Cruise in Boston harbor. Had good food and drinks and socialized with other attendees. The event was professionally organized and everyone felt welcome at the venue.

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iOSDevUK Conference

This conference has a special place in my heart. It was the first conference where I got accepted as a speaker. It took place in a nice picturesque town of Aberystwyth, around 235 Miles away from London.

It's organized by a couple of professors from Aberystwyth University and is one of the most prestigious technical UK conferences. They have a good mixture of technical talks and promote inclusivity and diversity.

Here, I spoke about "Speech recognition in iOS applications". My talk was scheduled on the first day of the conference (Excluding workshop day). I also had a pleasure of attending some other great talks from extraordinary speakers such as Paul Hudson and Joachim Kurz.

Besides informational talks, we also had a great dinner night, a steam train ride to "Devil's Fall", delicious food, conversations with fellow attendees, and chance to explore the lovely area around Aberystwyth. All talks and interaction were thoroughly enjoyed during 4 days of the conference. I left Aberystwyth on the 7th of September to continue my journey towards London.

The presentation video can be viewed on this YouTube link,

Northeast PHP - 2018 Web Development And UX Conference

This was my last conference of 2018. I was back from the UK for this conference. But having spent 10 days in the UK just took out all my practice I did before. However, I did rehearsal 7 more times before final presentation and that paid off well.

The conference was held from 19-21st September 2018. The team at Northeast PHP seek to pair web design, career and development disciplines in an uncommon conference format. Conference tracks covered a broad selection of topics relevant to web professionals. The PHP talks ranged from a beginner's first docker installation to an advanced look at the language internals. The User Experience program was designed to address the complex challenges facing UX practitioners today.

I gave my talk on last day on 21st September early in the morning at 9:00 AM. The topic was Effective Mentorship. Since I worked as both mentor and mentee in the past, I thought it would be a good topic to share my experiences with conferences attendees. It was great, and I am thankful to all the people who attended this talk.

Appdevcon 2019

The very first conference of 2019 and the first one in Netherlands. I have travelled through Amsterdam few times as a part of layover, but never actually entered inside the country. I was quite excited when I received an email about acceptance to speak at the conference. Interesting thing that one of my colleagues also got invited to speak at this conference, so it was quite cool to have a company. Appdevcon already has a great collection of talks from previous years and I realized that they must be working really hard to select and invite speakers with such a quality content.

My company - Wayfair, was one of the sponsors for this conference and my travel and tickets were paid by them. It was a 4-day conference. First 2 days were reserved as training days for soft/technical skills development. 3rd day was for technical workshop and full 4th day was reserved for the conference.

It was my first time visting Netherlands and I loved Amsterdam. It was great meeting smart, nice and helpful people who taught me so much to enhance my tech and soft skills. I also came to know about Amazing Appril festival, so please check out their website to know more about it. They have a great concept to bring employers and developers together and make everyone happy and find what they're looking for.

Everything was perfectly planned and organized and I learned a lot about event management from their team. In my opinion, the whole point of going to conference is not just attend talks, but mingle with other people from the community, get to know what work they're doing, and even if you are knowledgable about the technology they are working on, it's good to know and discuss things from both perspectives. Eventually when I come back from the conference, I have lot more friends than I had before!

And finally, here are some of the pictures,

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!!Con 2019 - New York City

I presented the talk "Computing geolocation from object shadows" at Con 2019 in New York.

DutchPHP 2019 in Amsterdam

I attended DutchPHP conference as a speaker between June 6th - 8th 2019. The first day was full of workshops, second and third days were reserved for regular talks. This was also my first and the only conference where I delivered two talks in two days. Quite adventurous - Something I wouldn't hesitate to repeat in the future if given the chance!

Although conference had PHP in its name, it didn't mean people from other fields could not attend it. They had a great combination of Core PHP, general tech and soft skills talks. This is something not a lot of conference do as they keep focusing on core technology which may prevent people from other disciplines from attending the conference.

I am not going to use lot of space here, but I loved this conference so much that I thought they deserved a separate blog post to let rest of the community know how amazing the talks, organizers, and planning was. You can find the detailed post here which outlines major things I loved about this conference from start to finish.

Opening Remarks

Keynote by Kevlin Henney

Just few minutes to go.....

Finally, here are the links to my talks,

Becoming a tech lead - Lessons learned

Effective Mentorship

THAT Conference at Kalahari Resort, Wisconsin Dells

This was my second time submitting talk at THAT conference. I first submitted an application to speak at this conference. Unfortunately, submission didn't get accepted. However, I ended up writing two blog posts under THAT conference - Why I blog and why you should, too and What a developer needs to write great code. When I submitted my proposal, I had the intention to share my knowledge and things I learned over years with other people. I was glad that even though my submission wasn't selected, I was given the opportunity to share my stories through other means.

This year was my first year to attend and speak at THAT conference. It was organized at amazing Kalahari Desert themed Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells. It was the biggest tech conference I ever attended with almost 1700 attendees. It was also a wide event in terms of number of parallel sessions sometimes ranging between 20-25 which made it extremely difficult in terms of selection. Although some of them were going to be recorded so even if you miss them, it was easier to catch up with them later on.

I had a really nice time at the conference. Everyone was so friendly and inclusive. With talks ranging so much on different topics, it was a great place to meet people from diverse technological background. One distinguishing feature I saw here and would like to see at other conferences is how it made kids feel part of the conference by organizing various play sessions, tents, themes all around the venue. Even some of the talks were categorized as family sessions which means they were organized by one of the Geeklings and could be attended by attendees of any age.

Due to scheduling preferences, my talk wasn't recorded but here are some of the amazing photos I clicked during my 3 days at the conference.