InfoShare 2019 - Talks that Inspired Me

This week I was attending the InfoShare conference. I want to share the most important bits of the conference - presentations, that inspired me to do next steps in my career development. Are they purely technical?

Venkat Subramaniam - Mixed Paradigms: The Method to Madness

I met Venkat a few years ago on Code for Life conference organised by Roche (that was a very good gig those days). I was astonished how he makes presentations fun, easy to understand and yet full of content. During InfoShare Venkat talked about two main programming paradigms: functional and object-oriented and mentioned procedural as well (so you Pascal programmers are not left in the darkness). These concepts are very different but it’s hard to apply one without another. He explained there is no such thing like purely object-oriented or functional programs, they have to be mixed with each other in order to take the optimal solution for solving specific problems. He told the audience that it’s the human responsibility to find this optimum which defines our role in software engineering - using right tools correctly. From my point of view, it was very refreshing comparing to many flame wars about proper paradigms that “solves all problem on Earth and only idiots are using another ones”. I will own that perspective, until someone else won’t convince me to another :).

Bryan Kramer - Learn to Speak, Market and Sell Human: #H2H

Bryan inspired me to think about people like people, not a segments or market buyers: even they represents companies, corporations or even governments, they are still people. We should not forget that, and create the content appropriately, including emotions and tolerate mistakes. We all are humans at the end of the day, aren’t we?

Kamil Bolek - 5 Myths About Gamers and 1 Phenomenon You Should Know

That was very interesting. Even as a software engineer I was thinking that gaming market is quite silly and based only on selling games, nerdy teenagers and nothing more. Kamil showed us there is way more than that, and we are underestimating the market because of that silly assumptions. It turns out that gaming market, especially in Poland, is very empty of sponsors and good quality marketing content. Moreover, there is many different features of gaming: watching gameplays and tournaments is as popular as just regular playing. This segment likes gamification and is very keen on experimenting - so it gives more CTA conversion than regular population. Kamil inspired me to do some more research about that and how we actually can benefit from integrating gaming into our marketing tools. Wish me luck then!

Mike Russel - Podcasting: How to reach a brand new audience

Have you ever considering doing podcasts? No? Me neither. I was thinking about myself like a lame voice no one would ever listen. Mike explained us that it’s not necessarily true, and the initial work is not that hard and yet podcasts contain more content than videos (so you are able to explain more complex things) and easier to digest than text/blogposts/books (as you don’t have to focus in 100%). Also, there are many people that actually are keen on listening podcasts so you can gather a brand new audience and it’s still cheaper to make than video. He inspired me to do the work and experiment with podcasts a little. Brace yourself, my beloved Reader! I don’t know what kind of theme I will use in the intro, but it will be definitely crazy and rememberable.

Ian Gray - How to Level up your Impact, Authority & Profit with Confident Live Video

Live video? From my home? No way! I mean my workplace is so messed up and dirty, you won’t be happy seeing that. It might be not true though. Ian explained that live streaming audience is not that sophisticated. The streamer has to be relaxed and be ready for making mistakes - it’s not the big deal and the audience actually likes being authentic. The only matter is to be confident (which is not the problematic part), get ready with the content and be prepared to answer few questions from your audience. You don’t have to buy an expensive camera at all! Ian’s presentation inspired me to do some live streaming with live coding for a few of my pet projects, and let’s see how this will go. YouTube is already crowded platform, so it’s maybe worth to explore LinkedIn Live.

Phil Pallen - Branding Is Your Secret Weapon

What do you think about the term “personal brand”? Probably you think about some fancy domain, or a professional photo session of your face? Nah. That’s not about making your personal brand at all. Phil explained that if you want to make yourself well-branded and publish your brand, you have to first explain what are you doing (not who you are, because that’s actually redundant), then spread the good content around the World - with multiple channels if possible. I didn’t expect this is so deep and very complex problem though. The first thing I thought after the presentation was: “I have to fix my website a bit” :).

Pawel Tkaczyk - Marketing in zero-click times - putting all eggs in one basket

That was the scariest presentation I have seen during the InfoShare. Paweł, as always, used the story telling to sell us a water mattress, and did it so good I was able to do the purchase right after the talk. Even in rush, Paweł has been very rushed because we were off the schedule but still the presentation strongly took my focus the whole time. During the mattress selling, he used many good marketing techniques, like curiosity gap, comparing to other items and repeating with the information to amplify the effect. This presentation makes me thinking I am loosing a lot of readers because not doing the proper story telling in my blog posts. It’s the time to change it!

Wrap up

I hope I will find the same amount of inspiring talks the next time on InfoShare. Many thanks for the whole InfoShare team to organise such meeting and connecting business people with tech geeks we all are :).