A detailed guide for developers: how to prepare a talk, submit a proposal and get on stage at a conference.
After reading this article, you will learn how a developer can prepare an engaging talk. What to read, listen to, and watch in order to deliver an impressive presentation. We will share valuable advice from a practicing speaker and, of course, talk about our own kt.team experience. Reading time: 15 min. Published: Jun 09, 2025
Among us there are more and more outgoing people who do not want to sit in a corner and code quietly. Sometimes they feel the urge to go out, see people, and be seen. Even a typical introvert can be motivated to speak by the following five reasons.
Self-actualization. Sharing knowledge means building a community of great professionals around you and making the world better through engineering culture. You feel like a hero through and through, even when talking about mistakes, because you are helping colleagues avoid repeating them.
Improving soft skills. Speakers learn how to make strong presentations, speak concisely and convincingly, and not fear the stage. After talks, there is usually networking, where small talk skills develop. Based on your presentation materials, you can write articles for blogs or industry resources. There are far fewer opportunities to build all these skills in regular work than when preparing a talk.
Improving hard skills. While preparing a talk, you immerse yourself in the topic completely: you do research, collect statistics, analyze, learn other experts' opinions, and look for new sources of information. Some developers deliberately challenge themselves: they choose a topic they only know superficially and study it inside out while preparing the talk.
Investing in the future. A strong personal brand brings a good reputation. It also opens up career opportunities, whether growing within the company or becoming an independent expert, as well as financial growth prospects. A well-known speaker can become an ambassador for the company or IT brand and an almost indispensable employee.
After all, it is simply interesting. Conferences, meetups, and similar IT events always bring a flood of emotions, new connections with interesting people, and new discoveries. They also mean travel. For example, in 2019 our colleagues from Tolyatti already visited Samara, Ulyanovsk, Innopolis, Krasnodar, and Moscow, and developers from across CIS saw their talks. And that is not the limit. These five things are probably what make us so happy after speaking.
Remember them often, especially in the moments when stage fright or self-doubt hits.
So, you have decided to become a speaker. You have internal motivation, but no action plan.
We recommend this approach: start by choosing the topic and speaking venue, then dig deeper into the subject, write the script and presentation, and rehearse the final version.
The second option, for those who prefer to play it safe, is to prepare the talk first and look for a venue afterward.
This approach has one advantage: it feels calmer if you are very afraid.
There are three downsides: it takes longer (you first need to prepare the talk, then submit an application, wait for approval, and then wait for the actual presentation); you also risk getting stuck for a long time perfecting the talk, even though the perfect version does not exist.
In that time, it is easy to get discouraged and give up altogether; it may happen that the organizers do not like your topic, and you will have wasted time and effort on preparation.
To give you the most practical advice, we interviewed Artyom Lisovsky.
Artyom is Head of Learning at kt.team, an IT company and development partner of Yandex Cloud, and an IT speaker with more than 10 years of speaking experience. kt.team: Artyom, where should beginner speakers look for venues, and where should they submit applications?
Should you be ambitious and aim for events on a national or global scale? Artem:
When choosing a speaking venue, it is better to start small and scale up, moving from team-only talks to company-wide talks and then on to conferences and meetups with larger audiences and more demanding listeners.
kt.team: What should be considered when choosing a topic? Artyom: First of all, the technical level of the audience matters.
Check with the organizers in advance who your target audience will be.
If you are going to a niche event for juniors, it makes sense to choose a simple topic. For seniors, team leads, and tech leads, something more advanced is better.
At large conferences, there are often several audience tracks with different levels of knowledge in different halls.
You can also have a mixed audience in one room.
Then you can choose the target audience for the talk yourself.
The main thing is not to forget to tell the organizers so they can write the announcement correctly. Second, you need to take the overall event theme into account.
Often, organizers outline in advance the topics they want talks on.
Not all of them will match your interests, but you can prepare a compelling talk even on the dullest topic.
The key is to use an unconventional approach and find an innovative solution.
A universal option: a Top 10 Mistakes talk.
In any audience, there will always be people who have made at least one of the typical mistakes, and people who knew only about nine of them, while you will open their eyes to the tenth. kt.team: Can you advise how a beginner speaker should choose a topic that will definitely resonate? Artyom: Everyone has topics that bother them. You think about a problem for a week, and then an insight comes: “This is solved like this.” Has that ever happened to you?
Most often, I build my talks around those insight-driven topics.
In my view, a good talk is based on a wow effect, when you deliver it as if you were presenting an idea or a case. It is not necessary for the audience to have faced the same problem as in the case; the main thing is to evoke some emotion in them, preferably positive, though not necessarily.
Another method is to take a typical task and look at it from an unconventional angle.
The pattern is this: familiar process - eureka - a turn in an unexpected direction. For example, how about the topic: “Building an app in 1C”
? Why not? Why yes? How is that possible? You need to unpack the beating heart of this topic, and it could become a great talk about how it does not matter what you code in today everything is possible, as long as the architecture is built right. Or maybe it turns into a talk about how “1C” has always been lousy and still is?
Those aha moments should constantly follow us, the developers.
We live in a fast-moving information stream, and we constantly have to do things no one has done before us.
There are plenty of interesting topics for talks everywhere.
kt.team: There is a common barrier when choosing a topic: “everyone already knows everything, I will not say anything new.” How can you make a topic interesting even for colleagues who are more experienced than you? Artyom: The main thing is to understand the problem from an unexpected angle and prove the novelty of your ideas. If you speak about HTML in general terms, nobody will be interested.
But this markup language is constantly evolving, so you can talk about new HTML features, unconventional uses, or technologies adjacent to HTML, such as AMP, the fast-loading Google pages that in fact also belong to HTML. “So many people use them that if you are not yet aware of this cool technology, you are missing something.” Marketing is also something that “everyone already knows everything about,” but hardly anyone has tested absolutely every marketing trick on their own business.
When someone tells you about a new approach to a familiar problem, you may first react skeptically. But tell me, would this case impress you? An IT company started hiring content managers and realized they had the same core competencies as accountants. But there are few content managers on the job market, and many accountants. So the HR team started inviting accountants and retraining them as content managers. An interesting case that would make a talk about HR in IT stronger, right? Any topic can be wrapped up nicely.
kt.team: Of course, there is a lot of information online, but far from all of it is detailed and comprehensive. Where can you get rare, valuable information that is not widely spread? Artyom: For inspiration, it is useful to look at sites where people share their opinions and discuss what concerns them. quora.com - people often give interesting advice, not only on IT topics, but also, for example, on how to get rich or how to grow a startup.
It is convenient that all answers are ranked by usefulness by other readers. thequestion.ru - there are fewer IT-related questions here than on quora.com, but there are questions on other topics that can also point you in the right direction. stackoverflow.com - if you need lines of code or a piece of a ready-made solution. toster.ru - can be useful. github.com - search really works for IT topics. There is a strong, thoughtful community there, and the more thoughtful the community, the easier it is to reach another level of abstraction.
Plus a couple of YouTube videos that cover half a book in six minutes. You can get more information by: searching in English rather than CIS while breaking the task down; using quotation marks in the search bar for deeply nested queries, for example "how to build a house with an excavator and a shovel," so Google does not rank sites with a superficial understanding of a complex topic.
YouTube
kt.team: How should the text and presentation be put together? Artyom: To keep the talk from becoming a tedious reading of a report, you need to remove everything boring, such as dry theory, and add more cases. It is better to turn the topic as much as possible into real-life situations and tell a story first, then talk about the technology second. In the audience in front of you may be people who know nothing about your topic, and also those who know it better than you.
Your task is to structure the talk so that it includes: a) an introduction, explaining why what you are discussing matters at all; the talk should be built around the problem, and from the introduction the audience should understand the problem and why it is relevant; b) the solution; c) conclusions. To support the conclusions with something substantial, show the pros and cons of your proposals. All knowledge that humanity has is already available. You only need to find reliable sources and study them. kt.team: Suppose we chose the topic “Memory Leaks in Vue.js.”
How should you structure the information around it, and how do you set up step-by-step work? Artem: First, I recommend going to YouTube and watching other talks on the same topic. When you enter a competitive field without knowing who has already covered what, where, and what questions they asked the speaker, it is hard to predict the audience’s reaction. You may even decide to change the topic if it is received too negatively. Once you have found enough information, write down the most compelling points.
From them, it will be easy to build a plan: where to start the talk and where to end it. The foundation of the talk should be a problem, and in our example that problem is a memory leak. How do you show its importance? Let us look at the numbers on a human scale. If a site has one million unique visitors per month and you speed it up by one second, you can save one million seconds, which is almost 12 days. These kinds of clear analogies work best. Once the problem is defined, it becomes much easier to move forward.
Start looking for unusual ways to solve the problem. Draw conclusions, and do not forget to back them up with evidence. It is convenient to structure the text as a tree-like mind map. In each paragraph, it is a good idea to highlight key phrases that will help you remember everything else. It is useful to prepare a stack of cards for the talk and write 2 to 3 key phrases on them; that helps a lot.
Next, you need to prepare the presentation. Artyom Malgin wrote an interesting piece about how to make effective presentations in the article “Genius Presentations Like Steve Jobs: Three Hacks.” Managing emotions is the main job of a presentation. Beginner speakers often worry about whether they can joke on stage. Think back, you have probably been to boring conferences where a boring person delivered a very boring talk. In moments like that, everyone really needs a hero who will say something funny and wake the room up.
Presentation excerpts from Dmitry Shesternin at the IT conference “Stachka-2019”, October
Topic: “A Product-Oriented Developer” An edutainment-style talk has a much better chance of pleasing the audience, and when emotions are added to knowledge, information is absorbed better. Do not be dull; a fresh, original solution will help you stand out, and people will remember you better. Excerpt from Alexey Pikulev's presentation at the IT conference “Stachka-2019”, October
Topic: “Building Trust in Teams” Humor comes in different degrees, and it is by no means necessary to joke on the edge. You can use popular memes or everyday stories that are close to everyone in the presentation. For example, for a talk about memory leaks in Vue.js, funny plumber pictures would fit well to show a leak literally. Excerpt from Anna Panfyoryova's presentation from her talk at “Stachka-2019”, October
Topic: “How Not to Kill Everything Human When Automating HR Processes” Useful links: 1) video on working with illustrations for texts (Maksim Ilyakhov, “Illustrations: Photos and Drawings”). A small but useful example from the Python article starts at 08:00.
Lee LeFever. “The Art of Explanation. How to Make It So People Understand You Instantly.”
kt.team: Artyom, how do you prepare for a talk so it goes smoothly? Artyom: Of course, you need to rehearse the talk several times. Before going on the main stage, be sure to run test rehearsals within your team, get feedback, discuss any questions that come up, and prepare to answer them in front of the audience. To stay within the time limit during the real talk, set aside extra time for questions and audience interaction based on the rehearsal.
It helps to attend meetups and conferences often, watch TED talks, and build your visual and presentation literacy. The most useful material on talk preparation that I have come across was probably in Radislav Gandapas's book Kama Sutra for a Speaker. I recommend the book, the training of the same name, and Radislav's YouTube channel. The author covers many important points about fear and how to project leadership on stage.
I took some insights from him: before a talk, it is useful to prepare cards with 2 to 3 key phrases for each slide of the presentation. Such cards are easy to flip through and use to recall the text from the key phrases; there are always people in the room who will not like something and will try to trip up the speaker. For those people, to lower the level of criticism, you should say after the talk: “Thank you, my talk is over.
"Please ask the toughest questions first"; you should yawn before speaking (the oxygen flow reduces trembling), and even experienced performers use this trick. In one TED talk I heard this rule: fake it till you make it. That means you should act confident until confidence truly comes to you. On stage, it is better to take up as much space as possible, for example by standing with your hands on your hips and your feet shoulder-width apart.
That way people will perceive you as a leader who has claimed the territory. If you are speaking on a stage where all speakers stand to the left of the projector, do something different: stand on the right side or move around. That will make you memorable and draw more attention. But do not do anything extreme, like going on stage naked, dyeing your hair red, and so on. It is better to stand out with your mind :)
kt.team: What should you do if the talk went badly? Artyom:
When things go wrong during a talk, which happens to almost everyone, you should learn from it rather than treat it as a disaster.
I have given many very different talks:
You just have to get through it. kt.team:
Should you collect feedback, ask whether the audience likes your talk, and run unusual interactive elements? Artyom:
I do not recommend collecting feedback during the talk itself. You also need to be very careful with interactive elements.
I once saw a bad example of interaction when the speaker asked the audience a question and promised a lollipop to the first person who answered.
The audience reacted badly, and the speaker ended up in an awkward position. kt.team:
What would you advise people who have never spoken before? Artyom:
Do not put off your first talk.
It is like wisdom teeth: the sooner you remove them, the easier it will be later. Be proactive.
Every person has a certain degree of awareness, responsibility, and initiative, and the higher it is, the closer they are to a leadership position.
So be proactive: suggest topics you can speak about yourself and try to do it as well as possible.
Be responsible and speak with dignity; do not act foolishly.
We host our own meetups and take part in external events.
Over the past four months, our speakers have spoken a lot: in August we hosted WebDev Meetup Frontend in our office, and Maksim Borodov spoke; in September Andrey
Putin gave a talk at Moscow Magento Meetup; in October Anna
Panfyoryva spoke at STACHKA 2019 in
Innopolis and at the Start IT conference in Samara; in November Artyom
Malgin was featured at Product Mindset Meetup in Tolyatti and the POTOK conference in Moscow.
First, our employees speak at internal micro-trainings to try themselves out and see how well the topic lands.
For example, recent sessions covered topics such as: “E2E Testing. Getting Started with Cypress”
; “Vue Storefront Unit Testing”; “Introduction to Vue Storefront Microservices”; “Multithreading in Node.js. Event Loop”; “AMQP Using RabbitMQ: How Do You ‘Cook the Rabbit’?” Those who have not yet decided to become speakers develop a sense of what is out there. In 2019, most of the team managed to attend one or more of these events: “RIT++”, “Stachka” in Innopolis and Ulyanovsk, “404 Festival”, BIG DATA, and Krasnodar Dev Conf. Most IT companies now understand that speakers need support and should be developed in every possible way.
It improves the company's image and creates extra value for employees.
kt.team example: how we can help our speakers make preparation easier
If needed, we will provide information for the talk. If an employee has an interesting idea but not enough cases for it, or needs advice from a more experienced expert, they can always ask colleagues for help. If a book or course is needed for preparation, the company will help purchase it.
We will help create the presentation. The company has a design department and, accordingly, designers who can help make the presentation if needed.
We give people enough time to prepare for a talk. Preparation time is logged as working time.
We will help run a rehearsal and gather constructive feedback. At any time, we can hold an internal meetup so colleagues can ask questions and share their views on the talk.
Let us add confidence on stage. A speaker does not go to festivals and conferences alone. We send several employees to such events at once and, accordingly, reimburse their participation fees. Besides the speaker, there are always colleagues in the room who will support them during the talk. Although tricky questions from them after the talk are just as likely as from any other audience member :) We plan to keep promoting our best speakers, helping them build their personal brand, and becoming ambassadors for the company.
We wish our fellow developer colleagues successful talks. We hope you found many useful tips in this article.