Improvised lightning talk extravaganza

This Wednesday, our two meetups — Turku ❤️ Frontend and Aurajoki Overflow — organised the most ambitious anime crossover event of the year with our partner Solita.

One of our programs from the meetup deserves its own blog post: to document it and to inspire other communities to try something similar because it was a lot of fun.

A few years ago, I crafted an idea of an improvisation lightning talk activity for tech speakers to hone our craft. The initial idea had to take a backseat because of the pandemic but we finally made it happen with our local communities.

We booked five speakers from our community who were brave enough to commit to performing a 5-minute lightning talk about a topic they would learn at the start of the event. We asked the audience members to write down topics on paper slips and put them on a bowl before we started the official part of the event.

After the welcomes and sponsor slot, we invited all the speakers on the stage and picked a random topic from the bowl for each one. Then, while a prepared talk was being given (it was a great one by Eyal Eshet on the European Accessibility Act that’s coming in effect in June), the speakers had roughly half an hour to prepare their lightning talk in another room.

After the break, we had a potpourri of five amazing and fun lightning talks about web performance (or how to bullshit a 5 minute talk in 25 minutes), virtualization (with a Dockerfile!), the good, bad and ugly of legacy code (with almost original soundtrack), reasons why people have irks with their programming language and a startup pitch for BooBNB (an AirBNB for ghosts).

It was so much fun!

I’m so excited that over the past decade, we’ve built such a vibrant community with speakers who were willing to get on stage without knowing what was waiting for them.

And the reception was very good. People enjoyed the funny and informative talks.

Lightning talks are my favourite part of any tech conference and little by little I’ve been introducing them to our community events too and this was definitely a pinnacle of that progress. We’ll definitely do it again soon!