Several years ago, if I had been asked what I would have liked to do when I grew up, I think I would never have thought of making the list that you will see below.
I have been a developer for more than 12 years, doing Front, back, devops, big data and a period as lead developer.
I am passionate about my work and I like to share with others. This thirst for sharing and mutual help made me immerse myself in associative work and communities of developers and meetups.
Over the years of experience, in addition to my work developer / lead dev, I discovered the wonderful world of meetups / community developers, I am also one of Duchess France Leader, an association to promote women working in the tech, in the program commitee (CFP) of the conference EclipseCon France, one of the organizers of french tech conference DevFest Toulouse …
In parallel I was part of the jury of a competition to recruit developers for the french Senate, I managed a blog, wrote technical articles for blogs and magazine paper (Programmez!), been editor-in-chief of an issue of a magazine computer paper (Programmez!), been reviewer of a tech book Mastering Hibernate and I started a few years ago to prepare a talk that I gave at the occasion of a meetup on data science, TDS (Toulouse Data Science).
Truce of blah, here is the checklist with the objectives that I gave myself, containing the things that I would like to do and accomplish.
When I grow up, I would like:
- give a talk / be a speaker at a meetup (✅)
- give a talk in a medium conference event (✅)
- give a talk in a big conference event (✅)
- give a talk in an International conference event (✅)
- write a tech book
It was not an easy decision to give a talk in public, to start as a “speaker”. When you are asked repeatedly why you will not go, despite the hundreds of arguments that I had to never speak in public, this benevolence in the team of organizers of the TDS (special dedication and thanks to Leonardo Noleto and Alexia Audevart) made me answer yes and I started.
The subject I had, few people spoke in France of this technology, it was an opportunity to share my knowledge and experience on this subject. I like to share, to communicate, so why did not I do it yet? The impostor syndrome? Not feeling legitimate? Yes, these two friends were there, but it’s more stuttering that put me in a brake for years. When you have trouble aligning three words correctly, you tell yourself that writing articles you can do, but speaking at conferences was not even imaginable and conceivable. Yes it’s even harder than the others I think to prepare and talk at a conference, but it’s super rewarding and we get out growing (not in size ^^) by the comments of the participants.
I do not give myself a deadline to accomplish the objectives that I gave myself. I’m just going, as usual, to try to give me the means, it will depend on the proposals, opportunities also.
I still have a long way to go to really consider myself a speaker, I hope to be able to do so in the future.
I’ll meet you in a few years when my first technical book will be published? I hope!
And you, are you given goals? Have you already done them? 🙂