About You

Once you’ve set the talk up, you talk about yourself. This one is slightly controversial, and there are a couple of points to make about what I mean by “talk about.”

Some professional speakers aren’t a fan of this section of talks but I think there’s good reason to add it in.

You’re not doing the life-story thing. You’re not telling people where you went to school, what your university major was, and so on, unless it’s directly relevant to the talk.

What you do want to do is explain why you’re here, what led you to this point, so people get a sense of your background and why you might know about this. That might be, “I’ve been looking into this at work for six months,” or, “I’ve worked in this field for X years and over that time got interested in this topic.” All you’re doing is tying the story to you.

You can also vary this depending on the confernce your speaking at, kind of like the biography you’ll have submitted to the CFP. My About me slide changes between Kubernetes events, and security events, and it focuses on the bits of my background that are most relevant to the talk I’m giving.