This post was written by my friend Codrina Merigo, one of the speakers in the upcoming Global Diversity CFP Day in Milan, on January 18th.
I love to go to conferences! I search for them, subscribe to a lot of meetings, Twitter accounts, and Facebook groups.
In my career as a software engineer, I worked with a lot of technologies and different programming languages, and anytime that I had to do the ‘switch’, I looked for conferences or online courses on the subject. I am not personally inclined just to buy a book to learn something new, and I also prefer to look and listen to the experts, preferably with some demos that I can then re-write myself.
I am from Romania, and people there use to say ‘steal the job’ by merely looking at someone doing something, rather than studying how to do it. Maybe I am also lucky to have a pretty good photographic memory also applied to code snippets 😄.
In Italy, technical and IT conferences are most of the time held by top experts, usually men… I also have to admit that also the audience is most formed by men. Also universities or developers’ communities.
But the IT world should seek talent, regardless of everything else! Everyone is unique and has something to say, and there should be someone there for them. We were born to make noise! A conference is not and should never be a competition between speakers, nor have only top experts, men, very certified devs and engineers. It should leave some space to creative people, passionate people that love what they work on, and are very enthusiast, despite what programming theory might say.
And then be up to the one listening to the session to bring home the best of the conference! I know that no one is perfect at holding a session, and I have been part of some not so good session, held by too theoretical experts, and didn’t leave me anything out of it…
So dear conference organizer, please be more open-minded when choosing the speakers for your conference, seek someone that can bring a difference to your conference and dear future call-for-paper applicant, be yourself and show everyone your talent in IT by just being yourself!
