Promising to write about topic X is good because it provides focus and a goal. It’s bad because it presumes that your understanding of X will stay still while you write.
Sigh.
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one of my primary motivations for picking a particular topic for a talk is that i want to learn/relearn and deep dive on that topic myself. one of the most useful parts for me is the "further reading" slide(s) i'll put at the end of the talk.
always illuminating for me to go through what sources helped me, which are being kept current, which are well written.
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@paul_ipv6 On occasion, I’d warn conference organizers who’d invited me to give a talk that I’d proposed a topic because I was interested in it, and I might not end up with anything useful to say.
It only really bit once, when my research into “how you can program well even if you’re old” suggested there was nothing in particular you could do except maybe exercise and have lots of social connections.
That took 1 slide, so the rest of the talk was about something else.
