My talk at ETH Zürich

I had never delivered a talk before.

You know, the kind of thing where you are supposed to write a long-ish speech, create many slides and, in general, practise enough to not appear a complete idiot in front of your audience.

Smart people start from local venues: a computer group, a small conference, maybe they push themselves a bit more and deliver a presentation online or, more often than not, they do it at the company they work for.

Idiots like me, choose the computer science department of one of the hardest, most selective and prestigious technical universities in the world.

It started as a joke. My employer, sent an e-mail around about the usual talk it hosts at ETH, two or three times a year, asking for volunteers to be speakers at the event. The classic: "would you like to deliver a talk to a bunch of smart students?" thing. You send a proposal evaluated, in the end, by a committee formed by the ETH students and they say "yes", or "no".

Idiots like me, send in their talk proposal, made-up on the fly, without a second thought. "No way they will take me seriously. I made it up just now!".

Of course, my proposal was selected for the talk. The only reason I can think of as a justification for their choice, is because nobody else, literally, showed up and I was the only candidate. Really, there is no other possible reason, in this universe, where another candidate could have done a worse job than me, inventing a title and an abstract for a speech, the same moment I was writing the proposal e-mail for it.

The rest, is history.

=> Me, trying to be funny to the students. This picture doesn't give it justice. "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

To be completely honest, my brief experience as a zabbix trainer, probably helped. Nonetheless, I've never written an hour-long talk in my life, never prepared the related slides, and I wasn't even sure how to prepare myself to be able to deliver an hour-long speech.

Talking about what it means to manage an open source project when you are alone, in front of 50 smart kids, was such a wonderful experience that, let me tell you:

I'll try my best to do it again in the future.

The students were curious, engaged and landed really smart questions. In general, it was just great to discuss with them also once the talk ended; we reached the point where the organizers threatened us to leave the room because it was late!

I can call myself proud for the fact that the audience considered my talk even "great", to my huge surprise. Apart from the personal satisfaction for the good job I was able to do, considering how hard I worked to prepare this talk, the biggest reward for me, is the fact that I was able to do something good for a new generation of computer scientists, and programmers at ETH (the house of Niklaus Wirth nonetheless!).

That place has such a great vibe once you are there, but more than anything else, and this is a really, really important thing: I have a cup with the students association's mascotte printed on it now!

=> I'll defend this cup until the day I'll die. Too great of a gift!

Thank you ETH, and thank you VIS. I'm looking forward to deliver a new talk at that great place that is ETH.