25 Tips for New Developers: Advice from a (Mostly) Self-Taught Software Engineer

Finding Events

The next step is to find a conference you want to talk at. There are a couple resources that I use to find these. The first is PaperCall which lists open CFPs that you can submit to via their site. I also follow Mozilla Tech CFPs and CallbackWomen on Twitter to hear about local events. There are websites that I see from time to time listing upcoming conferencesFinally, I am a member of the Slack groups for my local tech community and see a lot of CFPs and people asking for meetup speakers there.
Once you submit to conferences, don't feel discouraged if you don't get accepted to everyone! Different conferences are looking for different things, and they have different audiences. In addition, there may be other people submitting similar proposals, so they can only pick one talk on a topic! I have gotten a lot of rejections and a lot of acceptances! I will also say in my experience it is harder to get beginner centric talks accepted because there are usually fewer new developers at tech conferences! You can submit more than one talk to a conference too, which I also normally do!
It won't happen again until February, but I attended Global Diversity CFP day this year, which was awesome! Put it on your calendar!

Developing your Talk

Now comes the hard part -- developing and practicing your talk. Each talk will take different steps to develop depending on the content, of course! I tend to start out with a markdown document and just outline my thoughts. I do the research that I need to do on technical topics -- I read articles, watch other conference talks, look through my own code and other people's. I put all the helpful links in one place so that I can come back to them afterward, and I write down any notes that I have as well.
Then, I add some structure to the talk -- I start to develop a timeline of what I want to talk about and when.
Usually, the best talks tell some sort of story and give a lesson to your audience. I love this talk by Saron Yitbarek about how to structure your tech talk.
After that, I write my slides. I have custom CSS for impress.js that I use for each presentation. I have a few web components I also use to make the slides act the way that I want them to. Getting it set up initially is kind of tough, but I personally think its worth it in the long run to have a setup that I really like.
I tend to use few words on my slides, and I like using a lot of images on them as well. Many people are visual learners, so having diagrams can really make concepts more clear. I link to the finished version of any code demos that I plan to use during the talk. I also usually have a lot of links to more resources so that

I tend to put my Twitter handle on the first slide so that people can tag me in things as I go, some people even put their handle on every slide! I also have all my links on the last slide so that people can get in touch with me if they want after.
I recommend practicing a lot -- you will probably be less nervous day of if you are prepared, and the timings and transitions will be smoother. If you are doing live coding, make sure you know the code in and out!
Make sure you pay attention to the length of your talk! Some conferences do 30-minute slots, others 45, some even hour and fifteen-minute slots! Check ahead of time to make sure that your talk has the appropriate amount of content for the time slot that you have.