Liar Liar Pants on Fire

I have to come clean. Speaking at APIWorld this past week wasn’t actually my first talk acceptance. I had a talk accepted a few years ago, but the conference itself was ultimately cancelled due to the lack of sponsors. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a slight bit relieved at the time. I was prepared to deliver the best talk I could regardless of the circumstance but I battled so heavily with belonging that the thought of getting on stage to share my opinion terrified me. Fast forward to two days ago, I finally took the stage after mainly speaking at and hosting company meetups over the years. This time was different. To me, it wasn’t about belonging. That wasn’t the headliner in my mind. It wasn’t about feeling worthy either. It was about sharing about this thing I built and how it helped me see the correlation between two approaches to deploying AI into production. Two approaches that are more complimentary to each other than I think a lot of folks realize. But the stage wasn’t the preparation, it was the fruit of everything that happened off stage. The months building the project, writing bad CFPs, getting feedback (thanks Nnenna Ndukwe), going back to the drawing board, and writing a CFP for a session I, myself would actually want to attend. Here’s a few things I learned from delivering my first talk: 1. Your talk can be innovative without being inauthentic. There will be so much temptation to find a trend and build a CFP or talk around it, but that wasn’t working for me. The goal of conferences is to bring curious minds together from far and wide to strategize on where we’re going, being honest about where we are, and using where we’ve been to inform the others. With that said, it is far greater to speak about what you’re excited about and if it just so happens to align with an industry great, but don’t force it. Which leads to the next point, do study trends and build with tools and technologies like MCP, agentic best practices, etc. So trends becom