Speaking

My strong interest in the area of communication, especially public speaking along with my passion for using technology to impact people’s lives and to ‘pay it forward’ has led to me take up many different public speaking opportunities over the years. Below is a snapshot of some of them.

May 2024 – speaking at Atlassian’s annual conference, TEAM ’24 in Las Vegas

Topic: Building AI: Atlassian’s approach to crafting exceptional intelligent experiences

I spoke with my colleague, Geoff Sims. We shared our experiences and learnings from building AI features and capabilities at Atlassian. Unfortunately, the session wasn’t recorded 🙁More here – https://nikhilnk.wordpress.com/2024/05/20/speaking-at-atlassians-annual-conference-team-24-at-las-vegas-on-building-ai-atlassians-approach-to-crafting-exceptional-intelligent-experiences/

June 2021 – speaking at Atlassian’s Team Tour 2021 (virtual)

Topic: Your product and engineering strategy should always include scale and performance

I spoke along with my then engineering counterpart, Per Weinberger.

Session blurb: When we think of building products, we think of the features – the “functional” aspects. But the value a product can deliver is limited if “non-functional” aspects like scale and performance are ignored. In fact, we believe scale and performance are more important than the product features! We’ll explain why in this talk, and share our experiences running scale and performance teams for Atlassian’s largest Cloud product.

Recording link (scroll to the middle of the page, needs registration) – https://events.atlassian.com/teamtour21_the_series/practices

July 2019 – speaking at an Atlassian User Group in Sydney on ‘How is Atlassian making Jira Cloud faster’

At that time, I was the Product Manager leading a company-wide initiative to improve the performance of Jira Cloud family of products. Along with my engineering team member Luke Durkan, I gave a talk on what Atlassian was doing to make Jira Cloud faster.

More about the event here (the photos are of a different event though 😅) – https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-sydney-presents-introducing-portfolio-for-jira-3-and-how-is-atlassian-making-jira-cloud-faster/

I was quite active with Toastmasters in 2019 and 2020. Once the pandemic hit, the Toastmasters meeting became just another Zoom meeting and I dropped off. Plus, things at home and work took a higher precedence. The highlight of my time at Toastmasters then was winning the third place in the Table Topics competition (‘on the spot’ topics) within the Bradfield Division.

I participated in representing Area 13 to which my Toastmasters Club (Atlassian) belonged to. I had won the first place at the Area 13 level 😀

March 2018 – speaking on ‘Hacking For Travel When You Have A Desk Job’ at an ‘unconference’ in Bangalore

This was at a community event in Bangalore. I had done a lot of travel in the last couple of years until then and it seemed like a good opportunity to share some interesting experiences and tips with the audience. More here – https://nikhilnk.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/talk-at-inverted-passion-on-hacking-for-travel-when-you-have-a-desk-job/

April 2014 – Career options session at BNM Institute of Technology, Bangalore

I was invited to speak with students of Dept. Of Information Science & Engineering at BNM Institute of Technology on the different career options ahead of them. I shared stories and experiences from my own career journey until then (it’s become even more interesting since!) and presented the various options they could look at for their own careers.

August 2009 – speaking at Facebook Developer Garage, Bangalore

This was probably one of my first ‘industry’ talks.

Having worked on building applications on the Open Social and the Facebook platforms, growing them to be among the top applications, building an active user base and monetizing the apps by running some interesting brand campaigns, I shared my experiences on treating applications as products and took the audience through the various stages of development and growth of these apps and the important elements involved in each of the stages.

More here – https://nikhilnk.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/speaking-at-the-facebook-developer-garage/