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

Picking a Topic

The first thing that you have to do in order to give a talk is to think through what you want to give that talk about. I would pick something that you can tell a good story about, that you are passionate about, and that you feel comfortable talking about for an hour or so. You do not need to be an expert in the topic, in fact talking about your learning process or hearing about something from a newbie's perspective can sometimes lead to the best talks. Also, your talk doesn't need to be crazy technical -- some of my favorite talks barely even talk about code! I usually convert my blog posts into talks because I am already part of the way there!
Some of the talks that I have given are:

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  Learning CSS Through Creating Art
  
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  Web Ready Augmented Reality
  
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  Web Development for Data Scientists
  
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  Intro to Web Frameworks
  
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  Building a Progressive Web Application with Gatsby
  
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  Web-Ready Data Visualizations in Python with Bokeh
  
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  Programming 001
  
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  Building Art with Code
  
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  Teaching Code
  

I tend to lean towards giving workshops and more code-heavy talks since I teach code full time, so that feels the most natural for me.

The Call for Papers Process

The first step in giving most talks is the call for papers process, where you apply to give your talk. Different conferences have different requirements for the CFP, but normally there are two main parts: a short abstract that summarizes your talk that the conference will use to market it if it is accepted. Then, there is a longer description of your talk where you can provide an outline of what you will talk about and why.
Be succinct and catchy in your abstract -- think of this as your sales pitch and your summary for your talk. These normally have a character limit, so you really have to think about each word and pitch your talk as well as possible here!
My 300 character limited abstract for my "Web Ready Augmented Reality" talk is as follows:
Augmented reality is becoming more popular for both its artistic and business applications. This talk will explore the frameworks and tools that make AR more developer friendly, including adding live masks to a webcam image in 47 lines of JavaScript!
There are a lot of directions that you can take your full description in; however, the formula I normally go with is as follows:

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  The Learning Objectives for the Talk. I normally give three to four bullet points on what I want attendees to learn during my talks.
  
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  A description of the talk and the technologies used in it. I write a few paragraphs about why I want to give the talk, the context for it, why it will fit in well at the conference, and the "stack" used in the talk if relevant.
  
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  An agenda for the talk. I give a rough breakdown of what the time breakdown will be for the talk. Ex. 5-minute intro, 10 minutes of demos, 10 minutes live code, 15 minutes Q&A etc.
  
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  What attendees will leave with. I try to think about why people should come to my talk, and what they will get from my talk. I love giving workshops, so in that case, the answer is normally demos and their own mini-projects. For shorter talks, this can be a renewed enthusiasm for a technology or a new knowledge about a library.
  
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  Links to existing materials. Again, I normally base my talks on my blog posts, so I will attach those. If I've given the talk before, I will also attach the slides that I used.
  

Here and here are where I keep my CFPs if you want to read through them! The second one is a really cool co-talk with my friend that I would love to give this fall if anyone is looking for speakers!