Recent Appearances

The last month has seen me take the stage in three countries and two languages, which is always fun. What is more fun is that only one of those appearances had prepared slides, and even then, I was sharing the stage with another presenter, with whom I had not had the opportunity to do a full dry run.

London

First up was Gartner Data & Analytics in London.

This was the one where I was co-presenting with a customer, which is always a fine dance. Luckily both of us are pros, nobody had to cover for anybody, and the audience came along with us for the journey. It’s always good when they take pictures of the slides, and even better when they laugh at the right moments.

I wrote up a full report for the work blog if you want to know more about the actual content.

Doing events at the ExCel is always a mixed bag. On the one side you are in the middle of nowhere, and with not even a decent selection of pubs and restaurants nearby for an after-event meal or drink. On the other hand, it has the signal advantage that you can walk over to London City airport and get out of there pretty quickly at the end of the event.

Deauville

Next up was Deauville, a lovely beach resort on the coast of Normandy, and not the sort of place that a job in IT would normally take me! However, I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at CRiP’s annual event, which brings together about 400 IT decision makers from across France. This one was an interview format, and in French, no less!

It was also an extremely French event. For a start, the evening keynote speaker was an actual philosopher, who proceeded to give a very theatrical show on the philosophical implications of AI. I later heard a quite extraordinary amount of gossip about the man, which I will not repeat here, but was also extremely French. There was also some really pretty good wine served throughout, and I may have used some to steady my nerves prior to setting foot on stage.

The relaxed tone was a bit spoiled by the trip home. Deauville does have an airport, but it is not really well connected to anywhere much with scheduled flights. Instead, I had planned to ride the shuttle bus laid on by the event organisers back to Paris and catch a flight from there. So far so good, except we left Deauville fully three-quarters of an hour late, and then hit both construction and Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic. Fortunately I had foreseen this eventuality and had arranged for a mototaxi to meet me at the shuttle’s destination in Neuilly to take me to CDG.

Mototaxis are a Paris institution. They cost about half again as much as a traditional four-wheeled taxi, but they take half the time, which is well worth it if you are trying to make the last flight of the day. I was messaging with my rider on the way in (paraphrased: “coming in hot, be ready”), and when the bus drew up I fairly leapt off it and onto the pillion seat. However I may have overdone it on the urgency, because the guy cast all caution to the winds in service of getting me to the airport on time. It did all work out, but I am pretty sure my fingerprints are still indented into that mototaxi’s fairing…

Dublin

The final stop on the tour was Dublin, for LocWorld, billed as “The #1 conference for localization professionals, networking, and industry innovation”. This is not my normal milieu: I have done my share of translation and localisation, but it’s not my industry — and I would be talking to these people about the importance of a data fabric to the success of their Generative AI projects!

Fortunately I was not going in cold. I was there as part of a panel, chaired by SnapLogic partner Acolad, which very much is of that world, in the business of human and machine translation. That framing helped me situate the IT infrastructure talk in a context that was more relevant to a non-IT audience.

Talking to an audience so far divorced from the subject matter is a true test of a presenter’s skills and of their understanding of the material, since there is no way to fall back upon commonly-understood tropes and jargon-laden shorthand. Everything has to be spelled out, and in a way that maintains a link to the audience’s own world.

This time, I steadied my nerves with Guinness. I do admire the confidence that the LocWorld organisers have in their attendees, though: an evening event at the Guinness Storehouse is not obviously compatible with a 9am kickoff the next day!

This courageous schedule did however give me a good way to judge how my remarks were landing. The audience actually showed up at 9am, nobody fell asleep, and there were laughs in the right places, as well as some good questions at the end of the session. I call that a success!

This time the return home was much more serene, plus I got to snap this picture of a rainbow above the Swiss Alps from the plane home.

Happy Pride, y’all!