Autotrader life

How I imagine public speakers

I always imagined that people who deliver talks at big events are just superstars. They're witty, funny, confident, and have some otherworldly talent for dreaming up things nobody has ever thought of before and then talking about them, in front of a crowd full of experts, on a stage... behind a podium!

I, on the other hand, am one of those anxious sorts: a little bit neurodivergent, and don't play the social game very well. If you put me in one of those "stand around with a beer and talk to people" kind of parties, I'll be constantly thinking about whether now is ok to say my goodbyes and get the hell out of there.

But despite all that, I somehow toddled off down to London back in 2025, stood up on stage, and delivered a talk in front of a load of Android experts. What's more, people were interested in what I talked about! In this little blog I'm going to talk about how I got there.

I wanted to do a talk, but I can't

It all started by accident really. I was set to start my new job at Autotrader, and my soon-to-be line manager had invited me to come along to a tech meetup in Manchester, where he was delivering a lightning talk himself. I was sitting in the audience, fascinated by the subject matter, and watching him command the room as if it were second nature or something.

After the "standing in front of a podium and talking" part was finished, we got talking face to face. It was a talk about what I'd be working on which made it easier to break the ice. Alas, jittery with nerves, I wound up mentioning that I wish it was something I could do myself, but that I would never be able to - we drilled down a little bit deeper into that.

Now, for a bit of context, the way my brain tends to work is like this... If I've never done something before, I imagine myself in that situation, I dream up the worst things that could happen (within reason of course) and then try to see what can be done to avoid them.

With that in mind, what's the worst thing that can happen at a talk? Well, maybe it's just rubbish. Maybe someone spots I'm talking nonsense and challenges me on it, maybe everyone walks out because they're bored, maybe I forget what I wanted to talk say at a really crucial moment, maybe...

So how do you avoid all these maybes? By not doing a talk, that's how!

I do remember some advice my line manager gave me at the time though, which was that…

"When you're up there on stage, everyone wants you to succeed!"

A bee in my bonnet

One of the things that grinds my gears is unit tests that don't read well (or aren't even testing the thing they're supposed to). For those of you who don't write software, what do I mean? Well, suppose you want to test whether a car even runs or not, a quick check might go like:

• Given: The engine has started
• When: I accelerate
• Then: The car moves forward

It's simple, and it gets straight to the point - does the system (car) behave as it was meant to do. However, for this analogy, what I typically encounter are tests like this...

• Given: blah blah loads of highly specific data about the car, the car next to it...
• When: I apply a super specific amount of force to the right pedal
• Blah blah a few more details about the car (for good measure)...
• Then: The pedal resting position is not equal to its current position

Loads of pointless setup, full of important looking detail to keep us guessing which bits matter, no clear story, and it's not at all clear what's even being tested (it sure as hell isn't whether the car moves or not)

During my career I have seen these types of "test" time and time again, and I decided it would be a good idea during one of our retros (first retro actually) to put down in the 'to-improve' column that we need to be writing better tests. Anyway, one of the senior lead engineers present in the room read my statement, agreed with it, and mentioned someone needs to run a workshop... Thinking back to that time I still grimace at the "I'm looking at you, by the way!" part of that. So not even finished my probation period and I'm running a workshop now (which puts me in leader mode - not my strong suit).

Anyway, as best I could, I delivered that workshop; but over time less people would attend it. All that said, I think, despite my anxiety about stepping up, I delivered some value here (and given the context, it was probably good for me).

I enrolled on a training session

Not long after the workshop fizzled out, an email dropped into my inbox about a public speaking training course. It seemed like a useful exercise to raise my confidence a bit, so I signed up for it.

On the day of that training, having learned there was some homework I'd forgotten to do (I'd forgotten there was even training to be honest), I did the only thing that makes sense in this kind of situation - I emailed to say that I hadn't prepared anything, and I should bail out – the swift response to which being that I really, really should come along anyway! Not the perfect setup, but I did make the best of a bad situation. I took a lot of notes and chimed in with discussion. Though I didn't walk out of that room suddenly transformed into some sort of talk wizard, I did pick up a few tricks or two; most importantly, I had a peek inside the black box.

From then onwards, instead of just going to tech meetups and passively absorbing the slides, I found myself studying the speakers themselves. I watched how they stood, how they made it appear that they were talking to everyone in the audience (talk to the left side, talk to the right side, talk to the centre, and repeat …). I noted how they handled it when a slide didn't load, or when they stumbled over a word and had to recover. To this day I still do precisely the same thing.

I somehow volunteered for a talk

A couple of months down the line, as if by sheer coincidence, my line manager was trying to resurrect the three-monthly Android Manchester talks that died off the year before (bit like the testing workshops really), and he was scouting for volunteers. I didn't put my hand up at that time because, well ... I wasn't ready for a talk, and everyone else would do a better job anyway, and ... The following week, still with no volunteers he asked again if anyone was up for it. Now ... I mentioned I had a bee in my bonnet earlier, stupid thing must have been buzzing pretty loud that day (maybe I had to rewrite a load of tests or something, or a freak flash of bravery), I actually volunteered to give a talk - on writing maintainable and readable unit tests! I was committed to this thing now (and no, zero takebacks were offered).

I spent the next month or so building a toy application alongside assembling the talk itself - all in my spare time. I would regurgitate the content of this talk in my fortnightly catchups and then refine them some more. To be fair, it was an epic effort on my manager's part to keep me focused, prompt me into giving frequent dry runs, provide a steady stream of constructive feedback, and make sure the content was progressing in the right direction. Thanks for that, Jimmy!

At some point when "I'd finished" I realised if I was ever going to stand up in front of actual humans, I'd need some canaries. So, a month before the talk I subjected the wider team to a demo run. Upon finishing I was told I need to slow it right down, and that I would have to take twice the time we'd planned for. On the talk itself, I got some great feedback (the rewrite it all from scratch kind of feedback), which I then spent every moment of spare time working on, in some vain effort to not *totally* humiliate myself on the day.

Then came the night of the meetup itself.

I was petrified (a little bit excited... though much more petrified), and it was long beyond the point of backing out. My thought process went something like the following:

• Nobody was here to listen to *my* talk (only the other talks)
• I would deliver it really badly
• People will laugh at me, or try to snare me on the technical details
• I would exit the stage in shame
• None of my colleagues present at this talk would ever take me seriously again

However, that’s not actually what happened - you see, I did know my stuff, and once I'd started speaking, all those weeks of rehearsing kicked in. Those few tactical jokes I'd rehearsed, ad-infinitum, actually landed. People laughed where they were supposed to, they listened, and at the end they asked questions. Indeed some of them came up to me to say how much they enjoyed and resonated with it.

The inner sense of accomplishment (and relief) is difficult to do justice to really... I was buzzing!

Another talk

So that was it! My talk went well and it was full-on work mode again - converting a load of legacy UI to the new and shiny UI. Turns out, a good few months after merging it all in, and then forgetting all the problems we had solved, my line manager suggested we team up and submit a joint talk for Droidcon London 2025. I guess I still remembered how the last one, went because not with any great hesitation I agreed to do it (though like before, no takebacks).

Alas, this time there would be no safety from within the confines of our office, no easy supply of supportive colleagues. This was the real deal.

Rigging up the basic skeleton was itself a second full-time job. I spent a month digging deep into the framework details I had long since forgotten, just to make sure I actually knew what I was talking about. Then came another couple of months coordinating with Jimmy, wrangling slide decks, and relentlessly refining the structure so it felt like a cohesive story rather than some random back and forth about disconnected anecdotes, it actually went right down to the wire (so only a couple of days to rehearse)

Big day time did eventually come around, all the pros practicing in the same room as me, confidently tweaking irrelevant details, whilst I was erratically jumping back and forth between slides trying to lock those lines in (I'm lying there btw... we were all in the same boat - zero grandstanding from anyone). At our allotted time we stepped up to the podium and set to work (mercifully Jimmy did the first half). By the time it came round to me, muscle memory kicked in, and as best I could I told my side of the story. People asked some technical questions, and I even fielded one of them without crumbling. Turns out I'd called this one wrong again, people actually walked up to the podium afterward to ask for our insights. They were genuinely interested in the problems we'd solved and how they could apply some of that knowledge in their own projects. Difficult really to express how happy I felt at that moment, I'd done it!!

Looking back now

So... those "superstars" I used to watch from the audience aren't a different species. They don't possess some arcane talent, and they aren't completely fearless. They just care about something - enough that they want to convey that on to others, they have the (learned) mental blueprint of how to structure it, and maybe a manager willing to keep them focused.

For me, I think the key steps were mentioning I wanted to do it, homing in on something I really cared about, then not saying no to opportunity when it came my way.

One last thing I want to say, I started off this blog with an introduction, then I talked about the things I said in the introduction in more detail, finally I summarised it all again (which is exactly what those "superstar" speakers do, just like they told me in speaker training).

If I can do it, then anyone can really... is there anything you really care about?