Hey {{first name | there}}. I've been talking about conferences for weeks now, and you've been reading them.
Enjoying them too, I hope 👀. But we skipped something. The basics.
In today’s career notes:
👉🏾 How to actually get talk ideas.
The AI conference worth attending
I walked past Rafay's booth at KubeCon NA 2025 expecting another Kubernetes pitch. I left thinking about margins.
The hard problem in AI infrastructure isn't provisioning GPUs. Everyone can do that.
It's serving them profitably. Metering by tenant, chargeback that works, turning expensive compute into a product customers actually consume.
Rafay is putting a room full of people who've cracked this in Barcelona, 8–10 September: neoclouds, telcos, NVIDIA Cloud Partners, sovereign AI teams.
It's invite-only. I've been invited, and I'm passing it to you.
Today’s Newsletter is Sponsored by Rafay.
Here is the thing I hear most on community calls:
"I'd love to speak, but I don't have anything worth talking about." 383+ conversations in.
I can tell you it's the most common reason people never take the stage and it's completely false.
None of the rest of this series matters if you're staring at a blank page convinced you have nothing to say.
So today is really Part 0. The idea. Before then, a quick recap:
Part 1: speaking isn't invite-only
Part 3: let the conference pay
🧗THE EDGE: You Already Have the Talk Idea
Here's the trap.
You think a conference talk has to be novel. A breakthrough. Something nobody's ever done.
It doesn't. A great talk is just a problem you solved, an experience you had, told well, for someone who hasn't solved it yet or been in that situation.
And you solve problems constantly.
You've just stopped noticing them because they're your Tuesday.
The curse of knowledge: once something is obvious to you, it's invisible to you.
But it is not obvious to the engineer two years behind you. To them, it's the exact talk they'd sit in the front row for.
You're not speaking to the experts in the room. You're speaking to past-you.
Divine Speaking About Data On Kubernetes in September 2024
Now this talk ☝🏾 I gave 2 years ago, I answered a few questions about PV and PVC in Kubernetes. That's pretty basic stuff, you may think, but I have been working on them for 2 years and wrote my first article on Data in Kubernetes in 2022.
The people who asked the questions are not beginners.
I believe you get my point now.
The AI conference worth attending
I walked past Rafay's booth at KubeCon NA 2025 expecting another Kubernetes pitch. I left thinking about margins.
The hard problem in AI infrastructure isn't provisioning GPUs. Everyone can do that.
It's serving them profitably. Metering by tenant, chargeback that works, turning expensive compute into a product customers actually consume.
Rafay is putting a room full of people who've cracked this in Barcelona, 8–10 September: neoclouds, telcos, NVIDIA Cloud Partners, sovereign AI teams.
It's invite-only. I've been invited, and I'm passing it to you.
Today’s Newsletter is Sponsored by Rafay.
The 6 places a talk is already hiding
Go looking here:
The incident. The 2 AM page, the postmortem, the outage that taught you something you'll never forget. War stories are the most-attended talks at any conference.
The undocumented thing. The problem where the docs didn't exist, were wrong, or were three versions out of date — so you figured it out the hard way. That path is the talk.
The migration you survived. Monolith to microservices. One cloud to another. A version bump that turned into a month. The scars are the content.
The tradeoff you made. You evaluated three tools and picked one. Why? That decision, with the reasoning, saves everyone else the evaluation.
The hill you die on. The opinion you keep repeating in Slack. The thing you believe about testing, on-call, or platform design that half your team disagrees with. Strong point of view = memorable talk.
If you did any of these in the last 90 days, you have a talk.
Your experience, your journey. In the image below you can see my friend Fabrizio Sgura sharing his “30 Year Journey With Linux”!! That’s a 1 of 1!!
My 30 Year Journey With Linux by Fabrizio Sgura
Now pressure-test it
Not every problem you solved is stage-ready. Run each idea through this:
Your Experience + An Audience Pain Point + Actionable Takeaways = a great talk
Then four quick gut-checks:
Have I actually done this — not just read about it?
Will someone leave able to implement it ASAP?
Is this a problem people have right now?
Can I tell a story around it, not just show slides?
If it clears those four, stop second-guessing. That's your CFP.
✅ACTION ITEMS FOR YOU
Your homework:
List 5 most exciting/technical/interesting projects you worked on
Based on the strategy you’ve learned, extract 1 talk idea from each
Every engineer can give an impactful conference talk!
🔭VISIBILITY STACK
This brings us to the end of our conference series for now!!
Check out “How to Speak at 6 Tech Conferences in 2026” to learn everything we’ve covered on conferences so far and more.
Stay sharp. Stay visible.
Divine Odazie