How I Became an International Speaker

Lately people have asked me how to become a speaker themselves, and every time I feel a bit of cringe, because part of me thinks it’s fake.

It happened at the conferences I spoke at, and also online. That’s why I thought I’d write a blog post about it. I also want to reflect a bit on my journey. Hopefully it motivates other people to do the same, because becoming an international speaker was one of the best things I ever did in my life.

A little background#

When I was younger I often struggled with what you would now call “anxiety”. I was always afraid to talk to random people, and at school I hated having to give a presentation in front of a bigger audience.

I think two things changed that:

• starting boxing when I was younger
• finding something I really love, like coding, which motivated me to share my knowledge

How I started with writing blog posts#

I once read a book about career tips for software developers, and one point stuck with me: if you want to stand out as a dev, start writing a blog. So probably in my second year as a developer, I started writing blog posts on dev.to. dev.to is a really good platform to start on, because people see your blog post in their feed and can vote on it.

It’s the easiest way to start if you don’t have any audience yet. What I’d also recommend now is to create a real blog of your own and keep the canonical URL there.

Find a niche#

When you start writing technical blog posts, I think it’s worth concentrating on one thing. For me that was Vue. The advantage is that you quickly understand which topics aren’t covered yet.

The easiest way for a blog post to get views is to write about something that hasn’t been covered yet and that would be interesting for devs.

How to grow your blog post#

It’s not enough to only write about interesting things, people also need to know they exist. That’s especially hard if nobody knows your blog yet. How I did it:

• post on Reddit
• tell every newsletter that my blog post exists
• share it on my socials

Get good at content creation#

So now we know we need to be visible somehow. As I said, I chose blogging, but you could also start with YouTube. It all depends on your personality and how much time and effort you have. Time wise, blogging is definitely easier. Although once you have a good setup and don’t want to do fancy things, YouTube can be fast too. There are many books about how to write better, for example:

• Writing for Developers, I can highly recommend it
• Economical Writing, a good book, but to be honest, with AI I got a bit lazy

Use your Work for practice#

Most of my Expierence on preparing a Talk was from work itself. Most of the time there are always sessions where devs can share their knoledge use that and practice

Now apply apply apply#

Once you’re visible, and of course you can start this in parallel, apply for anything:

• find out which meetups in your city cover the topics you share
• use Sessionize to find conferences accepting talks

Here is the whole path in one picture, from the first blog post I was too scared to publish to the stage at Vue.js Amsterdam.