Last week I’ve attended the first ever hack {cyprus } summit. hack {cyprus} is well known among techies in Cyprus for organizing other events, mostly hackatons. They are good at that. And this time it was something new.
The event itself was excellent! It had all the usual things you’d expect from such a gathering – a bunch of bearded guys in dark t-shirts and jeans (each one secretly wishing that there were more women in tech), gadgets, coffee, snacks, and so on and so on. And there were talks and workshops with lots of chatter in between.
Being a big fan and a frequent attendee of technical conferences all over Europe, I knew there was no chance I’d miss this one in Cyprus. Even if I have to drive from Limassol to Nicosia. In fact, I decided I’ll get even more value of it – practice my public speaking and presentation skills at the expense of the crowd. So when the call for talks was announced, I submitted a couple of talks and one was picked.
There was a little hickup where I didn’t know the time slot of the talk (how long it would be), so I submitted two talks – one for 30 minutes or so, and one for 60 minutes. The 60 minute one got chosen, and then I learned that the time I have is 20 minutes for the talk and 10 minutes for the Q&A. Oopsy.  But, never the less, challenge accepted. It took a lot of cutting and trimming but I think I sort of managed to get the essence of it into about 20 slides. My talk wasn’t the first one of the day, so I observed other speakers. I think most of them went slightly over 20 minutes and cut into the Q&A time, but on the other hand, there weren’t enough questions for most of the talks to fill all that time. So in the end, it all worked out pretty well. If I remember correctly, I managed to squeeze my talk into about 25 minutes altogether.  I’d love to see the video of that – there’s plenty of mistakes to learn from there, but for now, there are only the slides.
I would like to say huge thank you to everybody involved – organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees. It was a blast and I hope to attend many more.