The document provides guidance on preparing a conference talk proposal and bio. It discusses how to choose a compelling talk title, write an engaging abstract that sells the value of the talk, and draft a bio that establishes relevant expertise. Examples are given of good and bad talk titles. The document also reviews how to identify and communicate one's unique expertise to write a strong proposal and bio.

1. CFP workshop

2. Agenda
Own and discover your expertise
Writing a proposal
Choosing a title
Writing a bio
Workshop

3. Own your expertise
“I have nothing to say” :(
You have your own perspective!

4. Discover your expertise
Recently, I ______
In my spare time, I ______
I’ve been ______ for ______ years
I organize ______
I lead ______
We built ______
We solved ______

5. There are many aspects of you that are interesting

6. What is a proposal, exactly?
It’s a sales pitch of your talk
Not a summary of your talk!
Attention seeker
Bottom line: Why should this talk be selected?

7. Why this talk?
- What is the topic
(be short, be specific)
- Concrete points you’ll make
- Take away (WIIFM)
“by the end of this talk you will…”
(is this worth an hour of my time?)

8. Writing a proposal (1 of 3)
Think about your topic and make 3 lists:
1. Why this topic is important
2. What things do you want to take away from it
3. What points do you plan to cover

9. Writing a proposal (2 of 3)
- None of the 3rd list is in the abstract
- We make it mostly to decide what to leave out
★ Don’t summarize your talk in your abstract
★ Sell your talk in your abstract
(but be honest about it)

10. Writing a proposal (3 of 3)
Formula:
[strong statement about why this topic is important at a macro level].
[specific points that tie your more narrow topic to this macro point].
This talk with cover [2-3 most important points], after which you will be able to
[concrete audience takeaway].

11. Let's talk about your salary / Iftach Bar
In an ideal world, developers would be paid according to what they are worth. If
you're better than another developer, you should be paid more.
Of course this is not the case. Developers who know how to negotiate better can
improve their salaries. A lot.
Luckily for you, it's not hard to get better at negotiating.
In this presentation we will understand how an employer decides on your salary;
what is the process on the other side of the table.
Then, we'll dive into more details of best practices for how to negotiate.
Example abstract

12. Types of talks
Paradigm break
Test case
Demystification
My interpretation of ______
Let me introduce you to ______

13. Choosing a title
Let’s learn by example and categorization

14. Titles - TV attribution
The fear factor - The 3 things that give developers nightmares
The Good, the Bad, and the Better
Serenity now!
Who’s Afraid of Front-End Databases?
The Secret Life of Side Projects
Pleasant Dreams in Elm Street
10 Things I hate about you BE developers (with love, FE)
Zen and the art of code deletion
not specific
question as a decoration

15. Titles - enumeration
Seven dangerous things to try with your team
3 Proven Ways to Optimize Conversion ... of Your Resume
10 Tips for Winning a Hackathon

16. Titles - teasing
You think you know testing?
‫בפריימריז‬ ‫גבאי‬ ‫לאבי‬ ‫עלה‬ ‫כמעט‬ ‫הקלפי‬ ‫של‬ ‫החניון‬ ‫של‬ ‫בשער‬ ‫באג‬ ‫איך‬
How Big Macs Increased Our Revenue by 15%
Monitoring 100K moving pieces and getting a full night sleep
"‫שקרנים‬ ‫"כולם‬
Beware of sleazy click baits

17. Titles - humor!
“bluegiraffeplaysball” (or Make Passwords Great Again Using "zxcvbn”)
(make ___ great again is deprecated)
I don't usually test my code, but when I do I test it in production

18. Titles - break paradigms
Get rid of those safety nets! Improving Software development by living
dangerously
Disk Is For Losers - Your Data Belongs in RAM

19. Titles - word games
All You Need is LAB
Reactive Brain Waves
REST in peace - implementations and benchmarks of gRPC, graphQL and REST
Migrating elephants
The price of cache

20. Titles - other (1)
Build Your Own Redux!
(alternative to “How to ___”)
I wish the next person I interview attends this talk
(unique style. Relevant topic)
1:1s For The Introverted Engineer Manager
(unique point of view)
No forks, One star. Now what?! — How I published my Kotlin Open-Source lib
(descriptive, concise, explicit, curious arouser)

21. Titles - other (2)
Is deep learning a security threat?
(question, curious arouser)
Money, ¢urrencies and developer$
(trick)
"Data" is a four letter word
(the abstract better be good…)
Saving up for technical debt - how to prepare so you don't go bankrupt
(metaphore)

22. Titles - big goals
Beating malaria with software
Migrating petabyte-scale Hadoop clusters with zero downtime
How to visualize 1GB of images on a single web page
Searching Billions of Documents with Redis

23. Titles - the don’t do (1 of 3)
- Capitalize everything:
DEVELOPING MICRO APPS ON THREE CONTINENTS
- Dull.
What is Web Assembly
(Also missing the question mark)
Building mixed Reality apps with Microsoft Hololens
Why You Should Contribute Code to GitLab (and How to Do It)

24. Titles - the don’t do (2 of 3)
- Not specific
It ain't necessarily so!
Black Boxes
Bringing TensorFlow to mobile - a war story
(this one was about building an acoustic recognition engine on mobile!)
- Offensive language
“f*ck”, “screwed”, “morons” may be humorous to you, but not necessarily perceived so
- Targeting a specific gender or group
“Let’s open source, guys”
- Clickbaits
This was a simple memory problem. You'd never believe how we solved it

25. Titles - the don’t do (3 of 3)
“Fancy titles considered harmful”
http://blog.sqisland.com/2015/05/fancy-titles-considered-harmful.html

26. Writing a bio
“Why you?”
Specific to your talk
“Why are you the relevant person give your talk?”
If you give a talk from personal experience, it becomes easy to do.

27. Writing a bio
Buddy up with a friend
Write bios for each other
----
Shamelessly copy from international speakers
Just for example,
https://devitconf.org/speakers/ingrid_epure/
https://2018.front-trends.com/speakers/

28. When you get to making the slides part...
Look at my slides / Uri Nativ
https://www.slideshare.net/LookAtMySlides

29. Attribution
Much of the content in these slides was taken from a workshop by Chiu-Ki Chan
and Cate Huston as part of their work on their newsletter Technically Speaking

30. Good luck!