Speaking at AltConf

A few days ago I gave a talk at AltConf in San Jose. Even though it’d been a while without giving a talk publicly, it went very well.

Seeing familiar faces in the crowd and talking about something that I’ve been working for a long time brought me a lot of confidence. I spoke relaxed, not feeling nervous at all, and I was even able to make some jokes and demo Tuist, the open source tool that I’m most proud of maintaining.

This reinforced something that I’m huge advocate of, sharing without having experienced is like teaching someone life lessons without having experienced them yourself. Learning is a long process. We can read many books on a topic but we’ll struggle to assimilate the knowledge if we don’t get our hands dirty.

I felt my hands were dirty, perhaps not as much as I could, but I believe enough to share some lessons and give the attendees some takeaways for their projects.

Moreover, it was great to meet people with whom I’d only talked over Slack or GitHub. It’s so much nicer to talk to people in person. That made me think that I should jump more into calls to see other developers’ faces and have spontaneous chat. I’m so grateful of having connected to those people thanks to open source projects.

I’m almost landing in Zurich after having flown from San Francisco. The WWDC break is over. I’m excited to seeing all the improvements that are landing to the Apple OS, although I’m not coding apps anymore. There’s been a fair amount of improvements that we’ll leverage at Shopify to make developers productive, and that’s exciting.

I wish you all a great weekend.