About a month ago, I submitted a talk for the 2019 edition of SXSW. You can now vote for my talk if you want to help convince the program committee to select me. Votes are open until August 30.

Imagine that you have a keynote of 15 minutes at an event with a full schedule.
Imagine that the moment you get on the stage, they tell you that your slides are missing.
What do you do?

This happened to me at the Great Indian Developer Summit in April 2018, and this video shows how I handled the situation:

There’s a 1958 movie, Teacher’s Pet, in which Clark Gable plays a successful, but uneducated editor of a New York newspaper, and Doris Day plays a professor teaching a journalism class. The theme of this romantic movie evolves around which is more important, education or experience? Clark Gable concludes that experience is the jockey, education is the horse.

Earlier today, I wrote an article on Wil-Low.com about the problem of fake followers on Twitter: How real are your followers? I wrote this post after a newspaper reported about a Belgian political party that won more than 10K followers in India in a very short period of time. One of my readers jokingly asked me: And how many followers do you have in India?

We used to make fun of Klout. For instance: whenever it was your birthday, your Klout score spiked because of all the people sending you birthday wishes on social media. Nevertheless, many of us looked at the Klout score of our personal and business accounts on social media.

It's great to be mentioned as an influencer by Johan Vos on how to make a business with open source (go to 18 minutes 10 seconds to hear this particular snippet).

In this Dutch podcast, Bert asks me about the history of iText, about successes and failures, about strengths and weaknesses, about courage and fear, and so on.

Next week, I'm flying to Bangalore for the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS). I've been asked as a keynote speaker for the third year in a row.

This was my keynote in 2017: