Exploring Conferences: Speaking at Meet-ups, Prologue

In 2019, I decided to seriously build apps for Apple Platforms and went all in on the Apple WWDC Scholarship and Google Summer of Code. I won the scholarship, and got selected to work on an iOS project in Google Summer of Code. After achieving both, I wanted to meet a few like-minded people in my city, so I involved myself on X (formerly Twitter) and started sharing my experience and a little about SwiftUI.

At that time, I also learned about Swift Delhi, which used to host monthly meet-ups with a few speakers at different locations in Delhi-NCR. I randomly decided to go to one of them, and as scared as I was, I forced myself to talk to people!

It was not easy. As an introvert, it was a monumental task just to introduce myself, "Hi, I am Rudrank Riyam, and I am a third-year college student; what about you?" So difficult to say those sixteen words, phew.

But, people got so excited and curious when I told them I won the scholarship and went to WWDC for a week. They started treating me as someone who had already returned from the iOS developer's dream, a.k.a, Worldwide Developers Conference pilgrimage!

That pushed me to open up and talk to a few more developers, including the event organiser. And at the end of the meet-up, out of nowhere, Amit, the organiser, asked me to share my experience as a WWDC scholar.

I was scared.

I was hesitant to get myself off the seat and face the audience.

But I did, and looking back, I am so proud of myself. I stammered about my experience working 100+ hours during the submission time, the humongous effort it took to get a fresh passport and the US visa stamped within two months, the privileged treatment you get as a scholar, meeting scholars from different countries, and everything in between.

The group of developers who were listening eagerly loved it. I assume they could sense and imagine the experience of what I felt during those ten magical days.

It was a terrifying yet surreal experience to talk to a bunch of people because I prefer to have a life of playing games, writing, coding, and staying in my room all day.

And that was my first unofficial technical public speaking experience!