IT Social Hour: Life on the IBM Power Speaking Circuit
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Andy Wig: Hey everyone, welcome to IT Social Hour. We have made it to episode three. I have a fancy banner behind me now, so I guess it’s official. I’m Andy, Andy Wig. I’m the senior editor of TechChannel. And today we’re going to be talking about talking, speaking about speaking, because really, I mean we’re talking about IT here, information technology, it’s really about transmitting information back and forth, isn’t it? Whether it’s from a technical standpoint or kind of a professional community standpoint. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, is just what goes into these people that are on the speaking circuit. You see ’em at all these conferences, these user group conferences like POWERUp and they’re sharing all this vital information. But really what goes into that, that’s what I was curious about. So that’s what we’re going to learn about today, just how these people got on this path, maybe some challenges that maybe overcame along the way.
I imagine there’s all sorts of different obstacles they face in putting these important presentations together. And with that, let me introduce my guests. First off, we’ve got Charlie Guarino of Central Park Data Systems, Liam Barry Allan; he’s a software engineer with IBM. And then we have Dawn May of Dawn May Consulting. And with that, I’ll pretty much shut up and let these distinguished guests provide their insights, and we’ll get to know them a little bit better. And we’ll start with the first question and we’ll throw that to Charlie. And that is really just tell us a little bit about what your current work is now, and then going back, just curious about how you got on this path to being just a regular on the speaking circuit and really kind of a thought leader in the IBM power space. And I know you’re all on the IBM Power side, so that’s, we’ll kind of be focusing on that. But Charlie, tell us what do you do and how did you get to this point?
Charlie: Thanks, Andy. I appreciate this opportunity and I’m thrilled to be here with Liam and Dawn too. Two good friends, and it speaks to the community as a whole, how friendly we are and we all, it’s a love fest as we say. How did I, so my company is Central Park Data Systems. It’s an IT consulting company. We provide ERP support for many clients across the United States and some in Europe. Actually I should say, I started out speaking, let me go back all the way back. This is a joke. Lemme go back all the way to third grade when I took the lead of the class play and that’s how I got my first taste of it. I mean, I’m joking, but I’m not joking because I think in many people that I know who speak, you get a taste of being a presenter and it becomes a life’s passion. So that’s kind of how I got started. But more recently I attribute a lot of my speaking at COMMON and a lot of the other groups to my local user group, which hopefully we’ll talk about a little bit. My local user group on Long Island, the Long Island System User Group, LISUG, where I became the dinner A & a host for many, many years. And that’s what started me on path to taking that as my jumping off point going into the larger IBM i community as a whole.
Wig: Alright, Liam, how’d you end up being a regular speaker on the circuit?
Liam Barry Allan: Probably by pure luck, mostly because about nine years ago now. No, no, no. Nine is too, yeah, nine years ago, that was basically when I started on IBM i. Right. And I ended up, I really only attending POWERUp. It wasn’t called POWERUp at the time, but really only attended POWERUp because I won an award basically while I was in college and met some people who thought it might be interested to keep speaking and really start doing it by the interest of other people and then being interested in things that I was working on. And that still leads the same today. So really I get to speak about things that I work on directly, which is incredible, honestly. So pure,
Wig: You won an award and no good deed goes unpunished, so you got to give a speech after you won the award. And here you are. I guess I didn’t really ask, I’m sure the things you talk about are directly related to what you do for work. You want to tell us just a little bit about what your focus is as a developer? Yeah.
Allan: Most people know me as the VS Code person, which is totally fine. But during my day job, I also do more than just VS Code related stuff. I am working on some AI tooling. I’m working on our internal developer tooling at IBM as well. And of course I still maintain a bunch of the VS Code stuff, which is how I probably am still speaking to this day. And it allows me to have that connection to customers. So it’s a magnitude of mostly developer tooling related things.
Wig: Okay, great. And how about you, Dawn? Why Dawn’t you tell us a little bit about what you do professionally here with IBM I, and also how you got on this path to public speaking?
May: So I’m going to start with the latter first, and similar to Liam. At the time I started speaking, I worked for IBM and I was able to attend the COMMON conferences to share the things that I’d been working on in the enhancements I’d made. The very first time I went to a POWERup or COMMON was in the late 90s San Antonio huge event talking about communications, air recovery. And so it’s just been a journey along the way. I really got involved with speaking regularly though, when the 6 release came out because I did a lot of work in the 6.1 release on the performance tools. So that got me engaged as a regular speaker. And I’ve been to every common event since 2008 going forward, as well as other events as well. Along the way, I left IBM and that’s where I ended up where I am today. In 2018, I chose to retire from IBM, I start my own consulting company. And I just like to help people solve problems and teach and educate along the way. So a big part of what I do when I work with customers is, yes, we try to troubleshoot and solve your problems, but let’s also teach you what I’m doing and how I do it so you can then do it on your own. So my speaking is a combination of speaking and teaching.
Wig: Excellent. And so all of you, I think you’re probably pretty comfortable with speaking in front of a crowd at this point, maybe you always were, but I know for a lot of people, public speaking is really kind of one of the, I think you see these surveys, it’s one of the most feared things in the world, basically. And so that’s one challenge that I can imagine some people have to overcome when they kind of get on this path. But yeah, I’m just curious about you all and what challenges you had to overcome to get to this point. Or maybe there’s just regular challenges that you face on a regular basis. Maybe every presentation you give, there’s some sort of challenge you have to overcome. Maybe it’s just figuring out what to talk about. I Dawn’t know. But for that question, Liam, what do you have to say about that? Anything stick in your mind as far as challenges and things you had to overcome?
Allan: I mean, the biggest problem that I’m still facing today is giving myself enough time to actually build the content. That’s a problem that, a challenge that I’m still facing today. I always submit new presentations and I mean this probably goes for everybody, right? It’s actually dedicating time to actually build the content up. Most of my presentations are not slides, they are demos. And that also adds to the mix of needing to allot time before the presentation even happens to make sure everything works. And that’s a problem I’m still trying to overcome, actually dedicating time to do it. Okay.
Wig: And you’re kind of on your own there. You Dawn’t have someone behind the scenes helping you throw it all together, or is it kind of a solo effort?
Allan: Well, yeah, my Jesse is never in the office, so he doesn’t really do any work for me, even though he’s paid to basically build all my slides for me. But yeah, I, I’m still figuring it out on my own, I’m afraid.
Wig: Gotcha, gotcha. How about you Dawn? Do you face any, maybe it’s been a totally smooth road. I Dawn’t know, but—
Dawn May: My story is a little bit different. So I mentioned earlier the very first common conference I went to was in late 90s, early 2000s, a big event in San Antonio. And my personality type is a very strong introvert. And at the time I was also very, very shy. And so I was extremely nervous and sweaty, palms, shaky voice. And overcoming the nerves was my biggest challenge. And the thing that I think sends a great message about our IBM i community is after one of my very first sessions, I presented, a member from the audience caught up with me after my session and he says, there’s no need to be nervous. He says, your content, you did a great job. You Dawn’t need to be nervous and just keep doing it. And that was the best thing that ever happened, getting that good solid advice from somebody sitting in front of you. And then you realize this community that we’re speaking to is the nicest of the nice, the audience is a friendly audience and all these things over the years, the nerves come and go sometimes, but I can hide that pretty well anymore. And you just know that you’re speaking to a friendly group and that kind of makes all those little butterflies go away.
Wig: Sure. I mean, they’re all at these sessions or webinar, whatever it is, they’re trying to get something out of it, and for them to get something out of it, the presenter has to do a good job. So they’re rooting for you. I mean, aside from the fact that they just want, they’re rooting for you anyway. So Charlie, it sounded like you were kind of a natural maybe with the public speaking thing, so maybe that wasn’t one of the challenges you had to overcome, but I imagine there’s been something,
Guarino: Well, there’s always something. It doesn’t matter whether you have a passion for public speaking or not, when you’re speaking on very technical topics, it still remains to this day that many people I speak to who are considering getting into speaking, if you will, is this notion of imposter syndrome. And I’m going to be found out, they’re going to really find out that I am not an expert in this industry, and we all are. And I say it all the time, anybody in a given room, we’re all equals. And I look at it from that perspective. I’m just the guy at the front of the room. I’m the guy that likes to talk, but we’re all equals and we’re all smart, and I’m not any smarter than anybody else in the room, but I went through a certain experience to get to a certain point, to learn a new topic, for example.
And I want to share that. And I think what’s important for people who are considering sharing knowledge as a speaker is that it’s perfectly fine and very welcome, in fact to share your mistakes because it’s a journey to get to a certain destination in technology. And sharing those mistakes is equally as vital, if not maybe more important to somebody who’s now behind you trying to follow your steps. Because there are so many rabbit holes you can go down. And by showing them some of the minefields ahead of time and how you got out of them, that’s very valuable information to share.
Wig: Yeah, I think it’s helpful. Yeah, when someone’s teaching something to see that they went through their trial and error process, just like maybe you are, I think that can help the learning process. So I get what you’re saying. And we talked a little bit about this already, but the next thing I was curious about is just what goes into these speaking engagements. We go to these conferences and we look at the schedule and we try to figure out what’s going to be most pertinent to what we’re doing, and we go to those sessions and that’s pretty much it. But for you guys, I mean, I imagine it’s kind of an iceberg situation where what we see is just a little bit the final product, but I imagine there’s a lot more work that goes in behind the scenes just getting ready for these things and looking at the schedule. Sometimes you all have four or 5, 6, 7 presentations in the span of a few days. So I imagine you’re pretty busy, but I’ll start with you on this one. Dawn, do you want to give us a little peek into just kind of what goes into preparing for a speaking engagement?
May: So of course it starts off with, for example, power up the call for presentations and how do you decide what you’re going to submit? And some of them are tried and true presentations where you want to share the same message to hopefully new audiences. But then there’s the opportunity when you can create new content. And every year I try to do some of both, balance it out with existing things so you Don’t have to build everything from scratch. But I also like to make sure that there’s something new. And coming up with new topics is sometimes a challenge because the technology, the IBM i releases, if they’re three years apart, what’s the new stuff that I need to cover? But what’s even more important for me is making sure everything I present is current and accurate. So I do some basics on performance tools. For example, well, IBM has been changing the Navigator interface.
And so when you do these sessions, you want to make sure they’re current. Well, in the handouts where you have screen captures, you have to go through and update these every single time. And so it’s really a matter of making the time to do the updates, plan the sessions, as well as making sure that everything is current, doing a thorough review. And it just takes time. And the final thought I’m going to leave is one of the problems I always have is too much content in a session because I like to go into certain levels of detail and it’s like, well, I can’t talk about everything I know because it doesn’t fit. And being able to scope it so you don’t end up taking too long, because I always want to be very cognizant of time and start on time, end on time. And so it’s a balancing act. So all of those things come together to make it challenging, but when you deliver something that you’re happy with, it’s very satisfying.
Andy: Yeah, a lot of the things you’re saying, mirroring the writing process that I experience on a regular basis, figuring out what people want to learn about and then how deep do you go? Right? I imagine that’s just kind of a constant challenge and keeping it in a nice little package and all that. So Charlie, how about you? What goes into your presentations?
Guarino: Yeah. One is a hundred percent correct. We talk about this call for presentations and every conference has that. And even smaller user groups, they don’t have necessarily a call for person, but they’ll contact you and say, we want you to fill two hours of content, whatever the case is. But in the case of a larger conference, like a COMMON, for example, you look at the grid from previous conferences and you look at the people who are speaking on these topics and you say to yourself, every topic has been taken already. What can I possibly add to that that is so different? And I tell people all the time, it doesn’t matter. Even if you speak on the same exact topic, there’s always your perspective, which is going to be different than the person in the front of the room. I even go as far as saying that if two or three speakers shared the same slide deck to different audiences, they would get different presentations using the same slide deck because they’re adding the real value is their experience that they’re breathing life into this presentation. That’s the real, but the challenge is trying to find a topic and really trying to stay ahead of the technology, because that’s what people are coming to conferences for. They want to take the current technology and see how they can deploy it in their shops and exploit it and use it in different creative ways.
Wig: That’s really interesting what you said about the personal side of it is being almost just as big as maybe the content, actual content where, I mean, a lot stuff, a lot of this information people can probably get, maybe they get in various sources online, but it seems like there’s certain magic happens when you put the personality behind it and maybe something clicks that maybe otherwise wouldn’t.
Guarino: There’s almost, there’s practically nothing that we speak about that people can’t find on their own at any of the day. But it’s really our responsibility as a speaker to distill that information and present in usable format. Because think about it, I can go right now and search and find on anything that the three of us are speaking about or anybody I can find information about it. The question is pulling out the nuggets and putting ’em in a proper sequence so people can understand it best.
May: And I’d like to add to that is that we all have our stories, and that’s one of the things I like to do is interweave a story. So you might be talking about this thing, this feature, but let me tell a story about how a customer used this or something bad that happened that how we solved this problem. And those personal experiences in those stories can bring a lot more depth and understanding to technical content.
Wig: Power of storytelling. It’s a big one. Well, alright, the last question we had lined up here, and it’s kind of the big question. I think the big question is, always boils down to why am I doing this in the first place? So the question is, what value do you see in doing these presentations? Being on the speaking circuit, I imagine there’s some career benefits, but also there’s the way it benefits the professional community, which I guess does tie back to your career because that’s vital. But going back to Charlie, why don’t you tell us, just when you boil it all down, why do you do this? I mean, you certainly don’t have to, I imagine.
Guarino: No, it is completely volunteer. We’re all volunteers in this. And it’s not just speaking as a volunteer. Anybody who’s involved with a user group, every facet of that is volunteer. So there’s got to be something more in it than just offering your time. Me personally, it’s a real adrenaline rush to be able to, the preparation is the hard part. To me, the presenting is the release and that’s the fun part, but it’s all the preparation, but it’s that same preparation that keeps me in the top of my game. That’s where I really become an expert in something because in trying to stay ahead and trying to present the most recent incarnation of any particular technology I have to know it in and out or as best as I can, I should really say it allows me to stay very current on any given topic. And by the way, that’s one more point I want to make out is what should I talk about? Things that you are passionate about, how you become bulletproof in front of a room when it’s something that you’re passionate about, you can’t be thrown. Trust me, there are many opportunities when you can be thrown but the topic and know the content well, you’re golden.
Wig: I love it. Yeah. And Liam, how about you? Why do you do this?
Allan: It’s for the people. I mean, at a professional level, yeah, it’s helpful. But I mean for me, if I didn’t enjoy it on a personal level, then I probably wouldn’t bother to do it. Anyone that knows me knows that I keep it professional, but mostly I do it just to connect with people, even in a professional sense, I like to connect with people and understand what their problems are, especially because I work on open-source software, so it’s easy for people to get feedback. And doing that in person obviously is incredible. But at the end of the day, I enjoy it because I enjoy seeing Dawn and I enjoy seeing Charlie, and meeting people is always a fabulous experience for me. So as a socialite, I mean that’s why I like it so much. So yeah, I guess that’s a pretty straightforward reason, but it’s the only one for me.
Wig: So it’s not so much, not so much the rush like Charlie, but it’s the relationships, which I’m sure is the relationships for Charlie too. But yeah, it’s interesting to hear just the feelings people get when they’re on stage and how they ended up there in the first place. Yeah. And Dawn, how about you? What’s your motivation for putting yourself out there like this?
May: So I am very unlike Charlie. I do not have any sort of rush from speaking. In fact, about the five minutes before I go on, I’m like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? It’s my introverted nature that you got to get up there. But the reason I do this and what I like is I like to teach. I like to help people learn things so that they can do better in their careers. And when I have someone that comes back and said, you know what? You taught me in that session, I’m now doing this and I figured this out. That’s what I get is the real positive feedback. And I love it when I hear people come back to me and I’ve learned to do this on my own and I’m doing better in my job because I do that. That’s what makes it good for me and that’s why I do it, is helping people do their jobs teaching.
Wig: So that’s your rush, is the feeling you get from knowing you taught something and helped something out there.
May: Absolutely.
Wig: Excellent. Well, this has been really great just to hear about, it’s always great to kind of get a peek behind the curtain and learn a little bit about what makes you folks tick and why you do what you do. So I just appreciate you all being here. I don’t know if anybody has any parting comments, but if not, we will end things. I just want to let everybody know that you can find all the latest things on all things tech by visiting tech channel.com/subscribe. That’s where this little podcast web series will be posted on there. You can find all our latest content. That’s a really great way to stay up to date on what TechChannel offers. And again, thanks to our guests for taking the time out of their busy schedules to join us and just shed light a little bit about what it’s like to be one of these thought leaders out there, putting themselves out there on the scene and really helping push the community forward. And thanks to our audience, you made it to episode number three. Stay tuned for the next one. I’m going to try to keep pumping these out and it’s been great. Thanks to everyone and see you next time. Bye.
Guarino: Thank you everybody. Thank you, Andrew.