The year went exactly as intended with public speaking: I gave exactly and only one talk: Infrastructure, Common Goods, and the Future of Open Source Software, the opening keynote for LambdaConf 2025.1 Given it was a keynote, it took a lot of prep time: Any talk takes me many hours to prepare; a 50-minute long keynote all the more so. I also hoped I would be starting a new job (as indeed I did: more on this below) and expected — correctly — that I would be quite busy the rest of the year. I therefore chose not to submit to any other CFPs.

That keynote is the talk I am second proudest of in my career to date, after last year’s Seeing Like a Programmer: Resiliency, Limits, and Moral Hazards in Software Engineering. I am glad to have given it and proud of what I said! That said, I also learned something really important through the experience: I have a far easier time preparing a talk when I have something burning in me to say. I was so honored to be invited to give this keynote that I said “yes” basically without thinking about it — but then I struggled hard to come up with first the pitch and then the content of the talk. Honestly, I think it shows. This keynote was a solid talk, but it lacks both the punch and anything like the sophistication of the writing of “Seeing Like a Programmer”.

I have no regrets here — quite the contrary! — , but in the future I will certainly think harder about invited talks vs. pitched talks: not a thing I have ever had to consider before!

Notes

At which conference Curtis Yarvin, provocateur and fool, also spoke. I’ve been slowly working on an essay about shared stages ever since I found out he’d be there, which may (or may not) make its way to some publication including this one, at some point in the next year. It has been a rough year, though, and time for essay-writing has been limited. ↩︎