Delivering My First International Talk in Vancouver
Here is my story of delivering the first international tech talk.
Hey readers, I am Shubham Kumar, currently working as SDE-2 with Expedia. I am an open-source enthusiast and wanderlust by heart. I have been attending open-source conferences since college time but I have always wanted to be a speaker and here is my story.
I have been applying as an attendee since 2021 but due to covid, the selection for a travel scholarship has been much tougher. So this year I took the step to apply as a speaker. While exploring the events, I came across Cdcon which had spinnaker as one of the sub-topics. And in Expedia, we heavily use Spinnaker for deployments and this year Expedia created progressive deployment (an advanced version of canary deployment). This was my idea and a great use case of the spinnaker to present in CdCon 2023. So I took the shot and waited for the results.
7 March 12:29 am, I got the acceptance email and that was the moment. 🤩🤩🤩
Here is the link to my session:
After this, I applied separately for a travel grant from Linux Foundation and got accepted for that too. As the travel grant was just enough for flights, I got partial sponsorship from Expedia and I am highly thankful to Expedia and my manager for making it possible.
Fast forward I landed on 8th May, hopping three flights and highly jetlagged. I will like to appreciate the smoothest migration check, I experienced at Vancouver Airport. The migration took almost 5 minutes or even less. Thanks to new automatic machines.
As I was jetlagged, I took a rest on 8 May and explored the city beaches and piers as sunset happens around 8:30 pm in summer.
The next day, after collecting best wishes from my friends I reached the Vancouver convention center. The convention center was full of people And it started.
You can watch the complete session here.
The session was really great with a lot of questions from people interested in Expedia rcp and progressive deployment. I also networked with people and had an amazing discussion on deployments.
In all, it was a great event and an awesome networking opportunity. I would like to thank The Linux Foundation And Expedia for making this trip possible.
I also explored the beautiful city with my friends from Sap. Shoutout to them for the fantastic city tour.
As a part of the trip I also visited Seattle since Seattle and Vancouver were quite near and visited the offices of Seattle, and met my Seattle team.
It was a fun trip after a gap of two years. Also promised myself to speak at more and more events this year. Also, make more and more trips. Thanks for reading the article. If you liked the article kindly follow. You can also connect me on:
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Wanted to start in open source: https://medium.com/@championpaddler/getting-started-with-open-source-part-1-fa43142eff71
Thanks Again And Keep Working Hard!!!
