A month passed since the Plone conference in Arnhem and a lot of posts hit the blogosphere announcing to the world the technical progresses of our beloved CMS.
Being that I am missing so much the moments shared in that wonderful city with the people I met at the conference, I decided to write a post not about the software, but about our amazing community and how I had fun and in presenting my talk at the conference.
During the summer I felt myself a bit daring by submitting a talk to the conference, but I was not caring so much... I was quite confident it would not be accepted!
Instead I had the first surprise: not only my talk was accepted but I even had much more positive feedback than expected!
Wow! I was gifted with the opportunity to share my experience on the Plone stage!
The conference offers four parallel tracks, and when I knew that my talk was scheduled simultaneously with the ones by rockstars as Martin Aspeli, Steve McMahon and (most of all) Simone Simahawk Orsi, I was quite sure my destiny was to give a presentation to an empty room.
The morning of the conference I was at the same time scared and excited, but than something happened... When I went to the stage I was told to wait for people getting into the room.
I told to the few people there: "Come on! The rockstars are playing around, I do not think anybody else is gonna come!" and then started talking with my audience and discovered they were very friendly. This calmed me down and made me understand that I was not a stranger in strange land!
Then, suddenly, the chair told me to start and I realized the room was full of people, when did they arrive?! I was galvanized, I pushed the button and started my presentation and fell in to trance.
Can't tell you the story of how I did arrive to the "Questions?" slide, of coursethere is a video on youtube , but it happened and, listen everybody, nobody bit me!
So, young (and old) Plonistas that are afraid to submit a talk, be brave! You will find lots of people that are enthusistically waiting for you to share your experience and thoughts in the next Plone conference I bet you can do a great job and you will love Plone even more once you will touch with hand that a great part of Plone power comes from Plone people!
So... keep calm and Plone Conference 2013 in Brazil!
Credits
I would really like to thank Irene, Andrew, Massimo and Stefano and the never-too-much-thanked guys from Four digits!
Lead image taken from Maarten Bos' photostream