Commit Porto 2016 - Fábio Gives the Low Down on Presenting!

We’re so proud of the work our Engineering team here at GetYourGuide do, and recently our iOS Engineer Fábio Oliveira spoke at Commit Porto 2016, making us even more impressed! Commit Porto is a tech conference which covers the latest trends and challenges in the tech world today. Fabio flew in to the conference to share his knowledge with a large audience of tech savvies, many among them also colleagues from during his University years!

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We grabbed Fábio during a rare quiet moment, to ask him to share his experience of presenting at the conference, as well as all the excitement preceding the event - check out his honest and refreshing response below!

“Hi, my name is Fábio Oliveira and I’m an iOS Engineer at GetYourGuide. On July 2nd I gave a talk at Commit Porto 2016 about why we keep our apps on a tight release schedule.

Giving talks is something promoted at GetYourGuide both internally and externally (see on our blog), although for me it always felt like something hard to do. Not because of having to present in front of many people, but the challenge was always to find the right topic to discuss with a given audience. Of course I have shareable knowledge, but for me, once I master something, I’m guilty of viewing my learned knowledge as trivial and forgetting that others might still benefit from my experience!

I strongly believe that a primary reason for giving talks is that communication is a very important skill for Developers. You communicate when writing code, when writing documentation, on your dailies, when commenting pull requests, when pair-programming. You also communicate with your colleagues, your manager, your rubber duck or even, occasionally, your future self!

When delivering a message or knowledge, you need to make sure that communication is effective, which often requires you to research more on a given topic. Who hasn’t spent extra time proofreading to make sure the StackOverflow question you are posting is clear? And who hasn’t invested in double checking facts before giving an answer on similar developer forums? As a result, you yourself learn more, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that some developers answer questions related to the areas where they want to develop.

The idea to talk at Commit Porto 2016 came in my mind at the end of May during my attendance at UIKonf 2016. As a result of watching so many great people delivering such interesting talks, I became aware of my aforementioned bias in my knowledge. Therefore, I decided that I should do something to change it! I checked with my manager who thought it was a great idea and even proposed to sponsor the event. That killed all thoughts of not giving the talk. Now I needed a topic!

In order to find the best topic, I researched which kind of audience I wanted to reach as well as the type of knowledge I wanted to share. I checked back on previous talks, the preliminary lineup, contacted the event's organizers and discussed it within my team.

After all the research, I decided to talk about our approach of Scheduling Releases in our apps team! Pulling everything together took time and I had quite some drafts before I felt happy with the final presentation. It’s one thing to gather the correct content, but quite another thing to deliver it orally in a smooth and connected way!

I’m now glad to say it went super well! The day was filled with really interesting talks and speakers and everybody was curious about GetYourGuide and our product. Plus, it has been also a good opportunity to get in touch with some old friends and colleagues from Porto.

In the end, the event was very successful thanks to the inspiring speakers and to the great job of the staff from the Commit team and FEUP.”

Curious about the talk? Check it out Here!

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