Hometown Glory

High Contrast Remix

It has been a crazy week, so I’m going to write this, ship it and rest until Monday.

On Monday, Igor Lukanin and I hosted the London leg of our first ever conference - Cube Rollup at RSA house.

Mark Rittman presenting at Rollup London

It was a really great event, with loads of enthusiasm and great questions. I look forward to speaking at the San Francisco leg on 15th October. I’m hoping to see many US data folks and friends!

On Tuesday, I hosted London Analytics Meetup 7 at Zego’s office in the City of London. We had great talks from Germán Lopez-Campos of Zego, Katie Hindson of Lightdash and Francesco Puppini.

Germán sharing some life lessons in cost optimisation and data platform improvements

Katie had a really insightful presentation on semantic layers, explaining their value and interface needs for non-technical stakeholders

Francesco did a great job presenting the Unified Star Schema in a really engaging and fun way. If you have a chance to hear him speak, you should take it! He is speaking at the SF leg of Cube Rollup on 15th October.

Finally, on Wednesday I spoke at Big Data London (BDL). I’m a born and raised Londoner (East) and BDL really feels like my home conference, so it’s really cool to get to speak here. You never know how long your time doing things like this will run, so I’m glad I got to this before it ends.

The view from the lectern at the Modern Data Stack Theatre where my talk was

I’ve written about how public speaking isn’t something that has come naturally to me, and I’ve been nervous about in the past. Any confidence I’ve had in my abilities has always been driven by my own perceived confidence in them. As I have spoken more often, and regularly do webinars and podcasts for Cube and elsewhere, this has led to me feeling competent to a reasonable level¹. I believe this has led to me no longer being anxious about speaking. It was strange this week, knowing I was speaking multiple times and just being mentally ready to do a standard preparation and drill before each talk and then go and do it.

The idea of me speaking at BDL in front of over a hundred people, and not worrying about it, would have been completely outlandish 3 years ago. My talk at Coalesce 2022 preoccupied a corner of my mind for days before - this week, it’s been a tried and tested drill. If I can become comfortable and competent with this, as a very introverted person, I think almost anyone can.

Funnily enough, even though my conscious mind seems to have adapted, my subconscious mind doesn’t seem to have. Just as I was finishing my talk at Big Data London, I realised that my body had been running on adrenaline, even though I hadn’t felt it.²

I had a good but exhausting BDL week - I hope you had enjoyed it too!

Yes, I sat on this the whole way home

1. I keep being asked to speak, which is my evidence for not being bad at it 😅, I’m sure there is some named effect or paradox for this which may suggest otherwise, but hopefully that isn’t the case here!

2. At least I don’t think it was very hot in there, exactly between 1:40pm and 2:40pm.