Knowing when to retire a talk

Rabea Gransberger: It's just a feeling for me. Usually, I've been submitting a talk for around two years, then, at some point, I just stop because I don't want to hear it again myself or the topic is out of date.

Eventually, the "Java 9 Modules" talk will be out of date, when everybody knows how to create Java modules, and then I will have to stop it. But with the code reviews talk, for example, it's funny because I think that it was in a very good state when I gave it for the last time. It was a very good feeling. Before that, I always had the feeling that I didn't like the talk myself. I got very good feedback about the talk from the conference rating systems and so on, so I continued to give the talk, but I was never really satisfied with the talk myself.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you were to describe yourself at a party, what would you say that you do?

Rabea Gransberger: That's really difficult. Probably, nowadays, I would say that I'm a software developer and consultant because at my company, it's mostly consulting work that we do for our customers.

Half a year ago, I would have told people that I was just a software developer, but when I got to work with other companies on customer projects, I found out that what we do is mostly consultancy work. Usually, a software developer just gets a task and solves it, but they aren't thinking about processes and trying to extract tasks from the processes that the customer needs.

Geertjan Wielenga: You're not a developer advocate who goes to a conference to talk about a particular product. You're not representing your company: you're representing yourself. Is that correct?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, at my company we don't have a project that is open source and we don't have a product that can be used by other developers as well. I'm not in the position to advocate for a framework or product, but I do mention parts of my work during my talks.

When I gave the "Java 9 Modules" talk, I was also referring to Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi), for example, which I use in my daily work. There were several times when a developer advocate position was offered to me by other companies, but I don't think that's what I would like to do, actually.

Geertjan Wielenga: Interesting. Will this be a developer advocate book with somebody saying that they don't want to be a developer advocate?!