Confessions of a First Time Speaker

Last week I had the opportunity to give a talk at EuRuKo about Inch & Inch CI. It was the first time I attended a developer conference and what can I say? It was an amazing, overwhelming and - in the end - breath-taking experience (literally, since I lost my voice during the final minutes of the presentation).

I’ve been developing Inch for one and a half years now and have always been satisfied with the responses it evoked on Twitter and GitHub. There have been fruitful discussions whether or not this was a useful tool or an utterly stupid waste of everyone’s time. I’ve blogged about being thankful to all the contributors, users and critics before, but I want to emphazise their part again: You changed my life.

This little side-project let to me having dinner with Matz & Koichi, and the other speakers as well as giving my first talk in front of other developers the next day. Getting the opportunity to show over 600 people how Inch came to be was a truly remarkable experience: Nervousness, excitement, relief when people laugh at your jokes and - in the end - some old-fashioned pride of going through with it.

Then there’s the sensation that we all experienced this together and that Matz was in the audience and even stood on the very same stage hours earlier … It’s hard to find words describing the experience; this was both the proudest and most humble moment of my life, all in one.

I hope everyone attending found something in this EuRuKo. These two days will always stay with me. It was nothing like I imagined.