Writing My First CFP
Tags: conferences, callforpapers, speaking, beginners
Published: 2017-08-10 18:32:31

---
title: Writing My First CFP
published: true
description: 
tags: conferences, call for papers, speaking, beginners
---

As I new developer, I find myself going through a lot of firsts. This past month my friend and I wrote our first abstract for a CFP.  We submitted to Github Universe a talk about our bot that helps newbies contribute to open source for their first time. This project was actually our first contribution to open source. So many FIRSTS! 

Answering a Call For Proposals is actually kind of scary.  I had no idea where to start, how it should look, what it should say.  So I did the thing I always do when I'm stuck: [I asked Twitter!](https://twitter.com/angieg0nzalez/status/880132956278226946) And Twitter came to the rescue.


## Resources
I received a lot of great links to different resources on how to get started. These were my favorite.

* [vmbrasseur/Public_Speaking](https://github.com/vmbrasseur/Public_Speaking) - An extremely thorough repo with links to all things about speaking at conferences. There's links on how to find a conference, what do with rejection, and how to write a proposal. 

* [CFP's Made Easier](http://edunham.net/2016/06/23/cfps_made_easy.html) by E. Dunham - Since I had very little idea of how a CFP worked, I really enjoyed how this post broke down what should be in abstract. I took each question the author asked and made sure I was able to answer it. This made for a long abstract at first, but it gave me a much clearer idea of what I wanted to say. 

* [Speak at GitHub](https://github.com/blog/2394-speak-at-github-universe-three-weeks-left-to-submit-proposals) - And of course, I turned to GitHub's own blog post to make sure I was writing something they were looking for. I especially liked how the author shared examples of what some of their favorite talks were from last year.
 


Some other resources can be found here [[0]](http://speaking.io/) [[1]](
http://weareallaweso.me/
) [[2]](http://wunder.schoenaberselten.com/2016/02/16/how-to-prepare-and-write-a-tech-conference-talk/) [[3]](https://medium.com/@bentlegen/three-tips-for-getting-a-talk-accepted-at-fluent-9eff841efc54)



## How I Did It
First I created a Google doc and dumped all these new links and samples on there. I read through the articles, extracted what I thought was the most important bits, and pasted them on the doc. Then I linked back to the article so I knew where the info was coming from. I also copy pasted the GitHub Universe application on to the doc so I could brainstorm on there and be able to refer back to my notes. While reading all these resources, I specifically looked for prompts/questions that I could answer to get me started in the writing. First draft done! Then I turned to my most valuable resource...*MENTORS*. 

I attended a wonderful and amazing event called "Own Your Expertise" by [Write/Speak/Code](https://2017.writespeakcode.com/index.html). There I had the opportunity to sit one-on-one with a mentor (Shout out to Annie Flippo, an awesome Sr Data Scientist here in LA) and go through my abstract. The main point I took from her was that my abstract was lacking personality. Coming from a research background in college, I had written it like an abstract for a research paper, it was objective and distant. So for my second iteration I worked on injecting a little more of us into it. After the second draft was done, I shared it with out project mentor, the also awesome [@gr2m](https://twitter.com/gr2m). He's been guiding us through the project and been an amazing resource. Gregor helped us add more personality and narrow down the talk's goal and details.  


## Lessons
I received an email from Github Universe yesterday, we didn't get picked. But that's ok!  We will reach out to local meet ups to try and show our project there. I also want to submit this talk to other CFPs and I will be writing blog posts about the actual project and my journey in contributing to open source. 

My main take away from this is how invaluable a network and mentors are. If I would have done this by myself, I probably would not have even submitted.  By reaching out to Twitter and meeting with mentors I was able to gain confidence, guidance, and motivation to keep trying. 

You can check out our project's repo here: [First Timers Only Bot](https://github.com/hoodiehq/first-timers-only-bot). It's not live yet, but it will be very soon and it will be very exciting!