From the audience to the stage: how a backend engineer learnt to give talks

Last Tuesday I gave a talk at the Elastic user group in Chicago. When I sat down afterwards and listed all my talks, that one came out as the eleventh since 2020. Eleven! Six years ago I was the guy in the audience, taking notes.

I’ve always been a backend and platform person, way more at home in services and databases than on slides. So here’s the whole run, in order, starting with the meetups I sat through, then a talk nobody outside my company saw, then everything since late 2023.

2019: the year I sat in the audience

In 2019 I moved to Bengaluru for a new job, and I spent a good part of that year at meetups. Bengaluru has a LOT of them.

In June I went to Golang meetup #45 and, like a good student, mailed my notes to myself. A couple of weeks later I was at the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar Summit, where Martin Fowler gave “A Decade of the Radar”. My tweet that morning was just “@martinfowler in the house!!”, which tells you how calm I was about it.

Tech Radar Summit, Bengaluru, June 2019. I was a long way from that stage.

Later that morning another speaker was giving his first ever tech talk, and I tweeted that he was killing it.

In July it was a GDG Bangalore Flutter session (“Flutter ain’t easy, but it’s sure fun”). In September I went to DevFest 2019 at the Infosys campus, checked in “just in time”, and spent the day in other people’s talks. The two I tweeted about were a “less is more” talk from a Gojek engineer and a very energetic one on designing high growth products.

The DevFest 2019 kit. Note the word “Attendee”.

2020: a talk on Zoom

The first talk on my list wasn’t on a stage at all. In April 2020, ten days into the lockdown, I gave a 40 minute talk to colleagues over Zoom about my homelab, where every machine has a Lord of the Rings name. The deck alone took me a few weeks. I wrote it up as my Lord of the Rings homelab talk.

After that, nothing for a few years. Life happened. When someone asked me in August 2023 how to grow a network as an engineer, my answer was “Dev meetups, community charters etc.” A month later I started taking my own advice.

Late 2023: four talks in four months

Atlassian Tech and Product Connect, Bengaluru (September 2023)

In September 2023 we hosted Atlassian Tech and Product Connect in Bengaluru, an invite-only forum for 100+ people from across the industry. A colleague and I gave a talk on “Multi-Region Cloud Architecture And Data Residency”, about the challenges of designing cloud products for enterprise scale when customers care where their data lives. The long version became this post on our multi-region journey.

Tech and Product Connect: a big screen, a full room and two of us sharing it.

At the networking session afterwards, the conversations kept landing on the same few things: migration strategies, datastores, horizontal vs vertical vs “diagonal” scaling, and of course AI.

GDG DevFest New Delhi (October 2023)

Eleven days later I announced I’d be speaking in the Cloud track at DevFest 2023 New Delhi. Four years after wearing an “Attendee” badge at DevFest Bengaluru, I was on the speaker list for one. I got there by answering the CFP.

My slot was 11:05 AM on 7 October, and the talk was “Data Portability in Enterprise Cloud”. At the end I put up a bonus problem: zero downtime migration, moving data, applications and services from one environment to another without any disruption to users. The rules were to think through the solution at a high level, DM me before 4 PM, and the best answer would win a cool goodie.

The venue, and the bonus problem I posted again on X right after the talk.

Six people sent in some really interesting ideas, and it came down to two entries in the final. They were tied, so we settled it the only fair way: best of three, stone, paper, scissors! The winner got the goodie.

The next day I tweeted my annual reminder: “There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer!” I stand by it.

FOSSConf’23 at IIIT Delhi (November 2023)

On 26 November I gave a keynote at FOSSConf’23, organised by FOSSCU in the main hall at IIIT Delhi. The title was “Elevate Your Code // Practical Insights for 10X Impact”. After my session I stayed for a Women in Tech panel where the panelists talked about how they got started in their careers. Super inspiring.

FOSSConf’23 was at IIIT Delhi.

FOSS United Delhi meetup (December 2023)

This one had the most fun title of the lot: “The Coder’s Guide to Job Security: Mastering the Art of Confusing Code!”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek guide to writing code nobody else can maintain, with a Python example for every rule: bad names, magic numbers, redundant code, needless complexity and more. The source material is Roedy Green’s 1997 essay on unmaintainable code, which I credit in the repo.

I submitted it to the FOSS United Delhi December meetup on 4 December, it was accepted on 14 December, and I gave it on 16 December. The slides weren’t PowerPoint. They’re a Markdown file you run in the terminal with mdp. Code and slides are all in the repo on GitHub.

Early 2024: campuses, Redis and cells

A session on cloud, web and AI (January 2024)

In January I did a session on where cloud and web development are heading, the latest trends, and what AI is doing to software engineering. It turned into a very interactive one, and I put the deck up on my site afterwards.

Quark 2024, BITS Goa (February 2024)

In February I went to BITS Goa for Quark 2024 to talk about “c0de_to_cl0ud”. Over the two days I mentored two live demos, each with an end-to-end integration and some good discussion before it. One of them was a Flask app with a decimal to base62 function, which is the core of any URL shortener.

One of the live demos at Quark. Faces and the database credentials on the projector are blurred.

FOSS Delhi 2.0 at IIT Delhi (March 2024)

This one went through a selection: in late February I got to announce that my talk had been picked for FOSS Delhi 2.0. On 9 March I gave the first session of the day at IIT Delhi, “The Redis Paradox: Beyond the Cache Horizon”, about everything Redis can do beyond being a cache. It came with a Driver<>Rider matching simulator that people could run on their own machines. The night before, I tweeted “So, it’s time to build the slides!” and then admitted I was kidding. I’d been telling people Redis isn’t just a cache since early 2023, and that talk has a post of its own.

The Redis Paradox at IIT Delhi.

APOGEE 2024, BITS Pilani (April 2024)

A month later it was BITS Pilani for APOGEE 2024, and a different format again: a live three-hour workshop on building apps with Forge, Atlassian’s app platform. We kept the trainer to attendee ratio conservative on purpose, so we could actually pay attention to the students and help them build. The weather was rainy and lovely!

Rainy APOGEE, BITS Pilani.

Atlassian x EPAM Innovation Day (May 2024)

In May I spoke at the Atlassian x EPAM Innovation Day at our Bengaluru office, on “AI enabled auto-scaling using CELL based architecture”. The deck and recording were internal, so two days later I wrote a public thread on cell-based architecture for anyone who wanted the concepts: what a cell is, how cells isolate failures, how they scale, and the trade-offs.

My slot on the agenda. The co-speaker’s details and the room are blurred.

Chicago: starting over, and the eleventh talk

In August 2024 I moved to Chicago, and in a way I was back in 2019: a new city, and back in the audience at meetups. When I joined the Chicago Elastic User Group on Meetup, I ticked the box saying I’d be interested in presenting.

In October, Elastic’s developer relations team emailed to ask if I’d like to present. I replied at the end of November and offered a talk on how we used Elasticsearch back when I was at Uber. The date moved around my travel a couple of times before it landed on 25 February 2025.

The talk was “Cracking the Code of Customer Happiness: Real-Time Insights at Uber Scale”, in the 6:05 PM slot at Improving’s office in Chicago. It’s about the customer obsession side of Uber, where feedback comes in from social media, support tickets and in-app help, far too much to read by hand, and how Elastic helped spot emerging issues in real time. The deck goes problem, solution, architecture (the slide just says “Some Boxes & Arrows”) and impact.

Elastic Chicago, 25 February 2025, and the loot.

My one mishap: I showed up early, like a responsible speaker, and got stuck in the lobby. So did the other speaker. (: Turns out being early only helps if you can get past the front desk.

What I noticed along the way

When	Where	Format
Apr 2020	Colleagues, on Zoom	Homelab talk
Sep 2023	Atlassian Tech and Product Connect, Bengaluru	Co-presented talk
Oct 2023	GDG DevFest New Delhi	Cloud track talk + bonus problem
Nov 2023	FOSSConf’23, IIIT Delhi	Keynote
Dec 2023	FOSS United Delhi meetup	Talk with terminal slides and code
Jan 2024	Cloud, web and AI session	Interactive session
Feb 2024	Quark 2024, BITS Goa	Talk + mentoring live demos
Mar 2024	FOSS Delhi 2.0, IIT Delhi	Talk
Apr 2024	APOGEE 2024, BITS Pilani	Three-hour workshop
May 2024	Atlassian x EPAM Innovation Day	Internal talk + public thread
Feb 2025	Elastic user group, Chicago	Meetup talk

Getting picked can be surprisingly simple. The FOSS United talk went from proposal to stage in twelve days, and the Elastic one started with a checkbox on a Meetup form. Both were community events looking for speakers, and I put my hand up with a topic I’d actually worked on.

Most of these talks also left something behind after the hour was up. The bonus problem went up on X, the confusing-code examples are on GitHub, the decks are on my site, and when a deck couldn’t leave the building I wrote a thread instead. People who missed the talk can still use it.

Several of them also gave the room a job. At DevFest that was a bonus problem with a prize, at Quark the students ran their own demos, and at APOGEE the workshop was small enough that we could help people one at a time.

And the format kept changing. Zoom, a big stage shared with a colleague, a keynote, slides in a terminal, a three-hour workshop and an evening meetup in Chicago are all different jobs. The topics, though, always came from my own work, my homelab or code I’d written.

The guy taking notes at the Golang meetup in 2019 would be pretty surprised by this list. If you’re in that seat right now, put your hand up the next time a meetup asks for speakers! Worst case, you get a good story out of it, and maybe a stone, paper, scissors final to referee.