Attending to Speaking

Hey everyone, I hope your summer went well. I know school and college have started back up for a lot of you, and I hope you're having a great start!

Today I wanted to dive a bit further into this journey of how I went from attending DEFCON to speaking at Red Team Village, and the dynamics and challenges I faced moving into this new step.

The idea:

Ever since I was at DEFCON the first time, I had really wanted to do a talk. Maybe not main stage right away, but somewhere. I wanted to give back and really try to bring my ideas forward. However, my opsec paranoia and imposter syndrome had completely kneecapped that idea.

So I had the dream, but I did not think it would be a reality anytime soon. That was until I got an email from my original mentor, Lee (more info on him here). He had reached out to a very, very small group to see if anyone wanted to submit a collaboration talk for the Red Team Village.

Immediately I thought this was a sign, and my chance to give the talk idea a whirl. I knew that if I wanted to do this, I should get the ball rolling ASAP.

Diving down the rabbit hole:

Within about a week I had spoken to Lee, declared my interest, and he was all for it. He said let's get some ideas going. This part had me running in circles, because saying you want to give a talk is easy. Coming up with an idea is a whole different story.

I really struggled with thinking of ideas. I kept getting to the point where I would assume I am not an expert at X subject, or what if someone knows more, and a lot of internal debating.

After a lot of thinking and rewording and trying to land on a concept, I came up with a few ideas to float over for review. After a bit of time we had agreed on a unique subject to speak on, with a follow-on workshop. (Two for one, might as well do the workshop as well.)

At this point I had a plan of working backwards: get the workshop completed, then submit the talk for approval, and if approved, work on the talk. Now this may sound backwards, but I knew the hardest part would be the workshop. Making a talk and practicing would be a much easier task to accomplish if I got approved. The idea came from not knowing how long approval would take, so I wanted to make sure I was not rushing.

I need an adult:

Building the workshop was hard. I knew the concept I wanted, but I am not a web expert, so I turned to Claude to assist (Not to build it fully). Essentially I'd make a rough version of the concept and have it help make things clearer, or answer questions and assist.

Now, before I am burned at the stake for using LLMs, I did not make some form of product or anything fancy. It was rudimentary, and it will not be used for any form of financial gain. As a small side note, it broke things more than it helped, if that makes anyone feel better.

Regardless of the above, the workshop went through about 7 iterations before I submitted the Call for Papers.

The Acceptance:

Once submitted, it took about two months, I think, to hear back. In the meantime I had the workshop up to version 13. The acceptance announcement came on the morning of what I think was a Friday, and I was super excited and formally accepted my spot immediately.

Now I knew it was game time. Over the next few weeks I wrote my talk, broke out PowerPoint, and did the classic "rewrite all my slides about 30 times". The rewriting happened because I kept finding myself going off topic so often that the core subject of the talk became obscured and led down rants that were not needed.

During this time I met with Lee virtually every other week to make sure everything was good on his side, but there is a limit to how much you can do virtually. That was something we would need to deal with once we were in person.

The only other speedbump was getting hosting set up for the workshop, which turned into a fun side adventure a week before the conference. It was a good old troubleshooting night that gave me a few laughs.

Here we go:

I am not sure what I was thinking with the idea that I would have time to practice at DEFCON, but I went in under some delusion that I would, and I was clearly wrong. I was busy every hour I was there, so practicing was basically out of the question. The only small window was right before the talk, which was good, as it at least gave us time to mentally plan the cadence.

Going into the talk was a different story. It was shaky at first, and I will admit I was nervous and Lee picked up on it. Lee is a phenomenal speaker, and when he saw my nerves and my rushing, he used his first part to subtly set the tone and slow the talk down. That gave me the chance to reset, grab some water, and recalibrate. Once that happened I was good as gold, and the rest of the talk went off without any issue. Lee did surprise me at the end by giving me a shout out to the audience, letting them know it was my first talk ever.

Right after the talk I was still a little on edge, because I knew people would come up and I figured they might grill me on the spot. That never happened. So many came up with great questions and good feedback. Someone even said I should have gone to main stage, which had my jaw on the ground.

Overall this was such a great experience. I cannot thank Lee enough for all the help, and Red Team Village for allowing me to speak there.