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Why You Should Turn Your Conference Talk Into a Blog Post
If you’re a software engineer who has presented a conference talk, it’s definitely worth writing it up into a blog post and sharing it at a relevant Subreddit (like r/programming), DEV.to, and Hacker News.
You’ll certainly get your ideas in front of more people — on the Internet, text still travels faster than podcasts or YouTube (on average) — and can draw more people into the conference talk itself.
Outside of authoring Creative Doing, I’m also the editorial director of Wonder Shuttle, where my team and I have helped organizations like Shopify, Flipp, and Wealthsimple coach and collaborate with engineering teams on their writing at their engineering blogs. I’ve seen a blog post published at Medium get over 100x more views than the corresponding conference talk at YouTube.
If you want to DIY, here are some ways to speed up the writing process:
- If you recorded it, get your presentation transcribed and use the transcription as a first draft. Edit and rewrite it from there. (You’ll probably need to cut a lot of words!)
- If you didn’t record it, just take an hour and present it again and record yourself this time. (I prefer Otter. Or click this referral link if you want to support my work.) Present it to a rubber duck.
