Gems of Life: My Journey as a debut Speaker

Few months back Bhuvana posted an one-liner in our official slack channel..."Performance Testing Workshop". It was the month of July 2021. Oh I didn't introduced Bhuvana.. well she is my Manager. The term manager provides a very weird and demotivating and professional image. She is definitely professional but she herself is a definition of a dream manager.
Why you want to know? For that you need to read this blog..

After reading the message I thought to wait to check what other people of my team are going to say. At that moment I was thinking that she probably wanted to arrange some training for us or probably we need to host cross-learning session among our team members.

She continued the conversation with a very tricky line "Weekend or free time activities only for interested candidate".

Indeed she knew how to poke us. But I preferred to stay silent and waited for my other 2 team mates reaction. After half day of waiting when none of them asked anything or gave any reaction to the post I couldn't hold my enthusiasm more and asked her the question...

"Bhuvana, How to join it"?

And then it started... She told us it's ' We' who are going to organize the workshop for college students. It was the first building block towards my aim to be a speaker ! Yes , I had this in mind for a long time. I always preferred industry culture on top of academics but inside one strong will was there of sharing my experience and learning among students and help them someway. I never knew how to start that. I locked that wish long back inside me and convinced myself that no road is there for this route.

When Bhuvana offered us this opportunity I couldn't believe myself and my mind voice was going on like this

"Your manager is giving you the silver spoon of working on your passion!!!!!!!
Working on something which was no where related to our deliverables.
Working on something which was not going to benefit her anyway!!!
Now you tell me isn't she the definition of a dream manager?"

Before this she always inspired us to learn new things, do courses.. In short work on ourselves ... Her action itself is motivation for us.

I always preferred the term aim rather than dream . Like it was my aim to work in a product based company.it was my aim to have trip with my friends. Dream means which don't exist in reality. She became that to me...a dream which turned to reality.

We started our journey on 14th July . But that doesn't mean I started working on myself after that....we are human.. it's our common tendency to say leave it or give hundred excuses not to do anything for ourselves even if it excites us.

How many opportunities you left till date because of your laziness? Mine is countless.

Every year on 1st Jan we all make a to do list for the year..' New Year Resolution"!!! But before February comes, we scrap it . Saying, resolution is a myth! At some point of time we stop making the list itself. Anyway this time for me it changed. Well, I cant take much credit for that. It's Bhuvana again.

She pushed us every week and asked for update. She made slide template for us, conducted session on how to make attractive and content full presentation in power point. What she learnt from her experience which she accumulated with hard work and lots of research, she disclosed to us so that we can make the best presentation. She was not only making a road for us for 'how to become a speaker' but 'how to become a good speaker'.

We started working on our slides by selecting contents. We decided to cover below topics as part of our workshop and each would get 1 hour of duration.

Application Performance Management

Fundamentals of Performance Testing
LoadRunner Walkthrough
JMeter Walkthrough

We are 3 members in team including myself and we were going to host one complete workshop and we were standing in 3 different poles!!!!! I made some different ppt, Raghu made exactly the way Bhuvana showed and Kannan didn't make anything at all during our first couple of review meeting!!!

Week by week I was working very little on my passion . I wasn't sure where it will land. I didn't believe that moment that it will turn into reality one day. It was her pushing that helps us to work on our goal. 3 months passed like that way. Every week we gave various kind of excuses and every week Bhuvana patiently helped us to make baby steps.

One fine day after 3 months, during our slide review meetings she announced that we need to give a demo to her and she is going to find our first college where we will host the workshop. It shook me a little.. I thought okey! So is it really going to happen then? I took that time seriously and started thinking. We all started working seriously after that point and puts efforts on our slides and content post office hours. Me, Raghu, Kannan .. we all 3 helped each other for making the final presentation. To have a 3rd eye, Bhuvana had called Siddhartha to review the slidedeck and provide inputs. We got some more valuable insights and made changes accordingly.

By that time Bhuvana was making flyers and searching for colleges. It was the toughest job to find a college who will allow us to host it . I don't know about others but I had very little hope. I am from West Bengal and in my entire bachelor or masters life I never attended any workshop which was hosted by any industry experts, now hosting one?. I always wanted to do such things for students because when I was a student I had many misconceptions and fear about industry. I always used to think if I don't have knowledge on coding, then I am a misfit for IT Industry. But the reality is with proper guidance I could have also done well. I would like to break such mental blocks in students.

After several reviews on our slidedeck, content and presentation skills, with great confidence in us, Bhuvana had presented us as co-speakers with K.S.R.C.T Engineering college where she had prior invitation to present on DevOps, CloudComputing and Performance Testing.

Date and time was 20th November 2021, Saturday, morning 9.30am a 3 hours webinar. 3 of us prepared the best content we could make. Kannan made his presentation after many rebuke from Bhuvana and during his demo session I learnt many news things about his work. Raghu who is the most junior in our team and having only 3 years of experience explained everything so nicely which showed why he is the key automation engineer in our team. He worked so hard on his demo and his presentation skills.

Every day we used to get new new inputs from Bhuvana and we keep on importing those into our workshop. That was the result of what we delivered on 20th November. This date was always special to me. And fortunately I got another reason to feel special on this day.

I keep saying to myself... It's easy to start anything and difficult to maintain. The biggest difficulty in life is we , ourselves. This 4 months journey will be always close to my heart. We don't need to search motivation in movies or in books. We can get it through our friends, family and in my case my team and Bhuvana. I can write more on her and trust me I am not going to get any promotion for that. Someday our path will be part away but this one person from my office life gradually became my mentor. Its almost impossible to find mentor after a certain point of time in life. My ex manager was a gem and he became my friend. I used to believe I will never get another manager like him. Then I got the opportunity to work under Bhuvana and to me she is an another dimension . My work is my love and it is because I get opportunity to learn new new things everyday. Every possible way my team teach me each day how to be a good professional in life. This journey of giving my first talk was a surprise for me .This is one great happiness which I got in a gift wrapped from my team and Bhuvana. I know this is very lengthy blog but sometimes we should capture our feelings rather than let it go.