TL;DR

This is a post about what I can give you and take out when I join your conference. The inspiration for this post, was initiated by attending the first AgileTD Open Air in Cologne (Germany). Over the last two years, I got very critical about me joining conferences. Am I going to conferences to be cool? What can I actually take away from conferences? What can I learn from being away from work and the stuff I love to learn and experiment with at home? What are the benefits and trade offs?

Questioning myself

Questioning myself brings me a lot of new insights what I really care about and what less or not at all. In general I am a person who loves when someone is going deep in their topic they present. Of course this is not always possible due the limited time we as speakers get. But I prefer topics that are narrowed down and explain why and how someone solved a specifc challenge they faced. There are plenty of talks that will tell you: You should do this and this, and this depends on your context. I have enough of scratching the surface - also I need to get away from it.

What can I give you?

In my sessions (talks or workshops) at your conference, I'll give the audience a unique learning experience. What I like most is giving full or half day workshops. Less time is not optimal and not such a deep enough learning experience for the attendees. So please make sure you give enough room and space so that people can grow.

What can I take out?

What you can give my is a network of interesting people, a new location I haven't been before and a cultural experience. If I engange with people, having discussions and learning with them, is out of your hands. If everything goes well, then there are also some interesting sessions which spark my interest. What I can get out of them is not in your hands. So what can I then get out? Well, speaking at your conference will give me the opportunity to challenge myself in front of other human beings. I can make experiments, learn from my mistakes and see if a topic is intriguing to people. People can challenge me by asking questions. I am not perfect and so are also my talks and workshops not perfect. But I got better at it in the last couple of years 😉

Twitterverse impressions

TBD

Conclusion

Speaking at the beach, the wind among you and the sand just lying by, is pretty cool. So this was a whole new speaking experience for me. At the beach I also met some wonderful human beings which I have had some great conversations with. Also having the opportunity to finally doing Lisi's and my workshop in person and gain some great new insights and feedbacks from the participants, showed me where I/we can improve on in the future. These three things, were for me the most incredible and valuable thing I got away from these two and a half conference days. So all in all, it was cool and the conference location was, I have to admit, very nice.

• Clare Norman
• Guna
• Vera Bäumchen
• Ina Hölzel
• Anastasia Chicu
• Uwe Gelfer
• Bart Knaack
• Samuel Nitsche
• Joâo Proença
• Vernon Richards

Thank you!

A special thank you goes to:

• Lisi Hocke for all the hard work and the countless hours we have spent during our online sessions in the last 2.5 years for creating such a powerfull and engaging workshop on the timeless topic of pairing.
• Jan Eumann for the 5G mobile access point which saved our asses during the workshop.
• Marie Drake and Michael Kutz for burning some calories by running in the area of the blackfoot beach.

This was my first and at the same time also the last in-person conference for this year - now I need a rest and want to focus on other things which I deeply care about and want to work on.

Learn, share, challenge and smile 🙂