Way back in 2015, I had an inkling that I wanted to do a talk about unicode and how terrible it was. Thankfully, through some very helpful mentoring, I refined this idea into a talk/rant about emoji.
Since March 2016, this talk has been given twelve times. 😱
- Northern-most talk: Spokane (47.66° N, beating Budapest by mere minutes! (47.50° N)) 🌲
- Southern-most talk: Dunedin (45.88° S) ❄️
- Language variations: five (Ruby, Obj-C, Python, PHP, Web) 💎 📜 🐍 🐘 🕸
- Countries: four (Hungary, Australia, New Zealand, USA) 🇭🇺 🇦🇺 🇳🇿 🇺🇸
- PyCons: Three (Australia, New Zealand, USA) 🐨 🥝 🥓
- DjangoCons: All three ✨ (Europe, Australia (DjangoCon AU/PyCon AU), US) 🎷 🐍 🌲
- Unicode versions released since first talk: two (Unicode 9.0 and Unicode 10.0) ✨
- Emoji proposals submitted since first talk: two (Tropical Bird (recommended for Unicode 11.0 🎉), Coin (rejected 😭))
On top of the full “⚡️😓✨” version, I’ve given an Ignite talk, and a short talk on hacking with emoji, not to mention writing about it
This all being said, at this point, I’m not sure I’ll present this again
I’ve previously written about talk retirement, and this one has had a good run. This isn’t one of those talks I can just whip out at a moment’s notice, because every time I prepare this talk for it’s next outing, something in Unicode has changed and I need to update the slides. It can be quite a bit of work.
It’s also getting to a point where it’s a bit too common on a schedule. It’s a talk that people who go to many conferences would skip because they’ve already seen it. It’s different every single time, but the talk title stays the same.
That being said, I love this talk. It’s my absolute favourite talk I give. I’d love to refresh it one day but I think after starting at DjangoCon Europe and finishing at DjangoCon US, this might be time to hang it up.
If there is a conference that would really like this talk (and they’ll cover travel/accom), do let me know and we can chat.
Postscript
I’ve had a few people say they were upset about me saying this. But I want to make one thing clear.
For quite a few of the iterations of this talk, I’ve been paying out of my own pocket to attend the event. Events that are outside of my normal community. On the whole it’s been great, meeting people outside my normal circles, etc; but I can’t keep self-funding these sort of speaking oppurtunies.
So I want to re-iterate what I say above:
if your event will cover my costs, I’ll gladly give this talk again.
It takes so much time to prepare talks, and this one always needs polish. It costs me time just to get the deck up to scratch, let alone the time to travel to and attend an event, and the cost of accomodation and travel.
I’m lucky enough that I can afford to self-pay the occasional conference, but I’m trying not to let myself be guilted into that as much any more. So for this talk, given how popular it is, if you want it, pay for it. Don’t let me lose money to give your event content.