Venkat's conference topics

I play with ideas, sometimes for six months or even a year. I may decide to give a talk about something relatively new, but usually I've worked on something similar to it before and I can see the application in that area.

I tend to pick topics based on whether I have a story to tell. This is really the underlying theme. As an example, I was playing with Kotlin for quite a while. I knew that other people were also giving talks on Kotlin, so I thought, "You know what? I don't think I have any interest in giving a talk on Kotlin."

Then, I started struggling to understand a particular concept with Kotlin. I was able to write code to use it and I had read the documentation, but there was this dissatisfaction in my mind. I didn't really connect with it. Suddenly, I realized that the concept was similar to this other language. I switched over and played with it in that other language. Then, I came back and wrote the code in Kotlin...