One of the greatest resources for me when starting out was attending events or conferences hosted by senior engineers.

I used to and still watch many such conferences available on YouTube or attend them in person, as they helped me gain deeper insights into how things actually work. Be it Cloud, DevOps, Golang, or even Linux internals, these tech talks have always fascinated me.

While watching such videos, I would always think that someday I would also be giving a talk in front of many people and sharing my knowledge with them.

And honestly, that day wasn’t very far away. At the start of 2026 itself, in March, I got the opportunity to give a technical talk at Opstree Solutions.

The session was titled “Building CI/CD Pipelines for Infrastructure: From Automation to Testing.”

It focused on my ideas and perspectives based on the book Infrastructure as Code Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age written by Kief Morris.

That book introduced some really interesting ways of looking at Infrastructure as Code. The point that intrigued me the most was how to test and implement a CI/CD pipeline for IaC, especially for provisioning code.

Although there were times while preparing for this talk when I couldn’t fully understand a few concepts, I now think I should have consulted a senior. But anyway, I searched online, and Reddit turned out to be a huge help. I also couldn’t complete the demo, which, in hindsight, should have been my highest priority.

Anyway, here are some lessons I learned from my experience and from watching the other speakers at several events:

Always introduce yourself

Some people really struggle with this, and honestly, so do I. I get confused about what to say about myself. Well, that mainly depends on how well you know yourself. But when you’re starting out, you can simply say something like:

“Hey everyone, I’m Rajeshwari. I’m a freelance Cloud Engineer, and I love brewing coffee.” (Or not, if you actually don’t. 😄).

And that’s it. You don’t have to make it fancy.

Keep the audience engaged

This is probably the most important aspect of giving a talk. If you just keep talking and describing your slides, it starts feeling like a boring office meeting.

Instead, at regular intervals, ask the audience if they have any questions. Or even better, while introducing a topic, ask if someone already knows the answer before explaining it yourself. It naturally makes people more involved.

I wasn’t able to keep my audience as engaged as I wanted, but honestly, Sandeep sir made the session much more interactive by asking me thoughtful questions throughout the talk. It also helped me deepen my own understanding of the topic.

Always prepare the demo!!

One drawback of my talk was that I couldn’t prepare the demo completely. As I mentioned earlier, there were a few concepts that I couldn’t fully grasp while preparing, which resulted in an incomplete demo, and I couldn’t present the code.

Thankfully, I had created a pipeline flow diagram as a backup and presented that instead.

Do not overprepare

Actually, I’d say prepare at all! I didn’t prepare the night before the talk or even 15 minutes before it. You already know the topic, and you’ve created the presentation, so why memorize everything? You can prepare a few key points that you want to cover, but don’t lock yourself into a script.

Just keep the conversation flowing while you’re on stage. I stayed calm and didn’t think much about the session beforehand. I was simply excited to attend the event itself. Trust me, it relieves a lot of pressure.

Write small pointers, not big sentences

The point of a talk isn’t to show off your PowerPoint; it’s to show your understanding of the topic. For me, the best feeling is talking naturally, with ideas coming to my mind at that very moment instead of reading what’s written on the slides and explaining it again.

Even I couldn’t do this perfectly. Some of my slides were filled with too much text, and that definitely shouldn’t have happened.

So these were some of the lessons and experiences from that day.

The opportunity to give tech talks is one of the best things this field has given me. ❤️

Looking forward to many more such experiences!

And all the best for your first session!! 🙌🌟