2022 in Review: Public Speaking

One conference talk, a couple podcasts, and—unexpectedly—a bit of YouTube-ing.

Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)

A bit of context: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. You can find them all at [the root of this little ‘series’](https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/2022-in-review/).

Public speaking of all sorts remains an important part of the work I want to do — writing and speaking are complementary, rather than replacements for each other — and 2022 was a decent year for speaking for me.

I set out with a goal of giving two conference talks, and I was on track to do just that… and then Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to the cancellation of TypeVille in Poland. I was quite disappointed about that cancellation — that trip would have been a ton of fun — but it was 100% the right call, and that mild disappoint is of course nothing compared to the horrors of war faced by Ukrainians. I would still like to find a venue for the talk I was prepping for TypeVille, Types as Tools for Thought”: I think the material is good and worth getting out into the world.1 I did still give one talk at EmberConf: The Road to TypeScript.

I hosted no podcasts this year, but I did appear on two podcasts this year:

Finally, I also published a number of videos to YouTube — something more or less totally new for me! Some of those came out of work: whenever I’m doing or explaining something for open source that I think can benefit others, I am trying to record it and publish it, like in Wacky Tricks We Use in Publishing TypeScript Types (in Ember.js) or some of the streaming I have done.

The biggest video I published was Work tracking with Obsidian embeds, a complement to my post Writing Down What I Do  —  In Obsidian. It’s small by YouTube standards (about 3.4k views as of this writing), but that is pretty decent traction given I have very few subscribers and no regular posting habit. I plan to do more of both of those kinds of things in the future: again, they complement the writing work I do here.


Notes

  1. I would also like to get that same material written up as an essay. An essay form would have very different strengths and weaknesses than a conference talk, and — critically — would be different from just having a transcript of the talk. I think that basic approach and format, of paired essay and talk, is one I would like to explore a lot more in the next half decade. ↩︎