The Road To Rails Conf 2024 | Cody Norman Personal Website
Sometime early last year, I decided I was going to start working on doing more public speaking and had the goal of being accepted to speak at a conference.
I don’t consider myself a sore loser. If I didn’t get picked or make the cut for something, it’s because I didn’t do a good enough job, plain and simple. That doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. I guess a good way to put this is I’m fine with losing, but I absolutely hate the feeling, especially when it’s something I’ve set my mind to.
Getting that first stinging rejection let me know I had to step my game up. I started reading any article I could find on preparing a good conference proposal. Here are some of the resources that were a big help for me.
During Rafael Franca’s keynote at Rails Conf 2023 he mentioned one way he started getting more comfortable with contributing to Rails was that he started reading over every single new commit.
I loved this and decided to try something similar with conference proposals. I read over every single Ruby proposal at least once, some of them multiple times. I started to get a much better idea of what a good (and accepted) proposal looks like.
