Write your conference bio

christine on September 28, 2022

So about 4 years, I found myself in need of writing a biography for speaking at a conference. I reached out to dev.to for ideas.

Since then, I have spoken at a couple more conference and have found myself tweaking that bio along the way. Just like talk descriptions, it always feels like there is room for improvement. You change. Your talk changes. Why shouldn’t you make sure that is reflected in your bios?

So here was a sample format that I started with (take from a comment on dev.to)

{Name} is from {City, State} where he/she works as an {Title} at {Company}. He/She has {#} years of experience with {Technology Name} with a focus on {Technology Focus}. In his/her spare time, {Name} enjoys {Personal Interest #1} and {Personal Interest #2}.

Ryan

And that did get me one of my first bios:
Christine is from Omaha, Nebraska where she works as a full stack Ruby on Rails engineer at Flywheel, WordPress hosting for creatives. She has 12 years experience as a Java software engineer with a focus on APIs and micro-services and took the plunge into Ruby just this May. In her spare time she is an avid long form reader, lover of all true-crime podcasts and is attempting to work through the primary Ashtanga yoga series.

Now my bio looks a bit like this:
Christine is a lifetime learner from Omaha, NE (in the middle of the USA), where she likes to read too much and eats food that probably took too long to prepare. Professionally she’s helping solve problems on the Identity team at WP Engine. She loves working with Ruby, showing people that long Git commits are impressive, and helping write secure, easy-to-read software that powers authorization and authentication at her company.

What changed from that time?
Well, the company I was at in 2018 was acquired. I have moved around teams 3-4 times and been to many more conferences.
To me, what you want to get out of a bio is, who is this person, and why should I listen to them? And it wouldn’t be wrong to see a bit of that person’s personality. I love whimsy and positivity and have tons of other interests that have nothing to do with why I do it for my career. My career is not my life. I want my bio to show that.

So let me introduce an updated conference bio template:

{Name} is from {Current Location} who enjoys {Personal Passion 1}, {Personal Passion 2}, and {Personal Passion 3} . {They/She/Him} professionally {verb ex. teach, code, design, architect, build…} {tech stack} at {company} and are passionate about {Technology/Professional focus} and have been involved in the field for {#} years. {the Last sentence ties back to your talk experience, ex. I talk about MFA, so I mention that I am involved with it professionally.}

Christine’s 2022 Technical Conference Speaker BIO Template

What do you think? Does this get you what you want to know about your conference speakers?

I gave my first conference talk

christine on April 8, 2019

And I survived! Right after Automating and before lunch I presented a talk on 2FA to Kernelcon in Omaha, NE. Kernelcon was a first ever information security conference in Omaha, and was also my first CFP I every submitted. The two days were a blur but let me breakdown 5 things I learned.

Thanks to my awesome co-worker Jen for helping me brainstorm a puntastic talk title
  1. The audience is rooting for you
    • They want you to give a good talk, because they are sitting through it. Something about your description talked to them and now they are excited and want to hear you speak. I was kind of nervous about speaking on security to a group of security professionals, but everyone I talked with was really excited to hear a different perspective. The conference attendees and organizers were kind and really wanted me to succeed. It was also great because I had a couple co-workers sit front and center so I had some friendly faces in the audience (in addition to my husband).
  2. Go pee before your talk
    • This is key, you are already nervous you don’t want to have to worry about your bladder too. This was some advice I was given before my talk (Thanks @jtu) and I made sure to keep it in mind. The time before my talk slipped away so quickly. It probably didn’t help that I was drawn into the CTF (Capture the Flag) event that was going on 😉.
  3. Don’t be afraid to take a sip of water during your talk
    • This was something that I didn’t even think of until after my talk. Tim, one of the organizers who also introduced me before my talk, came up afterwards to check if I was OK and mentioned I sounded like I had a frog in my throat. Ooops 😳! I hadn’t taken a sip of water the entire talk, and I was at the tail end of a cold, so I probably really, really needed to. Since I was concentrating so much on what I wanted to say, I kind of turned out how I was feeling and what I even sounded like. That was a mistake, you have to listen to your body and pause and take a drink when you need it. It will make you sound better, and help you take a moment, pause, and collect your thoughts too.
  4. You’re probably going to be miked, so you’re going to sound different
    • I knew mentally that I was going to be doing this talk in a larger room, with lots more people, but until they were clipping a mike onto my jacket, I guess it never clicked that I would need to wear a microphone. I hope I didn’t sound too bad, or breathing loudly, but I think this is something you just need to keep in mind might happen to you at a conference. Don’t forget to pay attention to when you have it on, because a lot of people can hear your then!
  5. People are going to walk out, but that doesn’t mean your talk is bad
    • People did walk out of my talk, not a ton but some. Was it because I was doing a bad job? Hopefully not, or at least everyone who attended my talk didn’t say that to me in person. There is a lot of reasons, it was close to lunch, they needed to hit the restroom, they had a workshop to get back to, or they just had a raging need to go pick a lock (seriously this was super fun to try out in the lockpick village). Whatever reason, don’t worry if they do walk out, and concentrate and make contact with your attendees at the talk. It was kind of fun to make eye contact with people, and see when they really agreed or just got a point that you were trying to make.
The best picture I could find of me speaking without making a funny face

I’m by no means an expert, heck I’ve only done this one time, but I think getting to present at a conference has been an amazing experience. It has made me really, really research a topic, become much more comfortable speaking in front of a group of people, and given me the opportunity to be part of the security community that I might have not have been without speaking there. If you have a chance to speak at a conference, I highly recommend giving it a try!

@tech_christine -> it me!

If you are attending a conference, don’t be afraid to go speak to the speaker afterwards. I know I loved all the feedback I got, and it helps me make my talk and my speaking experience better. Also make sure to shout out to the speaker on social media (if they are participating in that kind of thing), I loved hearing from audience members!

Shout out to Jennifer Wadalla and Zack Holman for making very helpful articles and material to help out conference speaker newbie’s like me!