Some of the talks I’d like to do in 2021 (and beyond)

February 18, 2021conference, english
 This has been written a few years ago and might not be up-to-date…

I have talked about PHP, Linux, The Cloud, AWS, Kubernetes, DevOps, Coffee or Public Speaking at various conferences and meetups regularly for the past 10+ years… But, until now, I’ve always done so in French1.

In 2021, I’d like to share these ideas and talk with more people beyond the borders of France and French-speaking countries. And I need to practice my spoken English more.

So, here are some talks I’d like to do, in English, in 2021 and beyond.


The beginning of my talk at Forum PHP 2019, photo by @fredbouchery

The beginning of my talk at Forum PHP 2019, photo by @fredbouchery

For each talk, I’ll write its title and description, followed by a few notes, including links to videos or slides for some I’ve already done in French.

I also have a few other ideas for new talks and might submit them to some CFPs here or there ;-). I’m not talking about these publicly just yet…


How we moved our VOD and Replay platform to the Cloud

In 2018, we at Bedrock began the migration of 6play, a VOD and Replay platform, to the Cloud. We now manage our AWS infrastructure with Terraform, use managed services and deploy our applications to Kubernetes.

During this talk, you will discover how we have achieved this migration. You will find answers to the questions you may have if you are considering such a change of hosting. How did we transform our infrastructure? What impact did this have on our projects? How did we organize the move? What choices did we make throughout the process? What did we learn, how did we evolve? How do we split tasks amongst teams? Have we adapted our PHP applications? What difficulties did we encounter, what compromises did we accept and what road still lies ahead of us?

I will start by presenting the basics of Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and container orchestration with Kubernetes. I will then go on to share our feedback on our migration to the Cloud.

I have done this talk in French at MixIT Lyon in May 2019 (50 minutes), and Duck Conf Paris in January 2020 (30 minutes). It is based on the experience I share in The Copenhagen Initiative.


A resilient application, in a partially degraded world

In an ever-changing world, can we still achieve “four-nines” of availability? Cloud and Kubernetes. APIs and Microservices… Our architectures are becoming richer and more complex. At the price of a certain fragility?

We will start by defining SLA, SLO and SLI and talk about the meaning of these X-nines. We will then show how, in a permanently partially degraded context, our pyramids of distributed services are undermining the reliability of our platforms.

Taking advantage of the experience gained on our Bedrock VOD and Replay platform, we will see some ways to improve the resilience of our applications, so they can once again answer the needs of our audience. We may even pronounce the term “Chaos Engineering” ;-)

I have done this talk in French at Forum PHP Paris in November 2019 (40 minutes), at a meetup or two (up to 50 minutes), and at AWS re:Invent in November 2020 (30 minutes).


Coffee, the drug that propels our jobs

“I can stop whenever I want!”. That’s a sentence I’ve said many times over the years… Especially when people dared to pretend I was using too much of it. Still, experience proved it wasn’t quite that easy.

It is often said that coffee is the drink that drives the world of IT development… But do you know where it comes from? And what are its effects? Including on our fragile brains? And why we can go so far as to feel withdrawal when we don’t consume it?

This is a short (~20 minutes) talk I’ve done, in French, at several meetups since 2016. Here’s an old version of the slides and here’s a recording (without my video).


Prepare and give your first talk

You have something to say, an experience to share, knowledge to pass on! Even if you don’t know it yet.

Today, using tips from conferences I have attended and spoken at, I will help you prepare and present a talk. Maybe even your first one? By working on your content, then creating your slides, and rehearsing, rehearsing and rehearsing again, you will be ready to go on stage on D-Day.

After a year of remote conferencing, I’ll end with a few tips that will show you how to improve the audio and video quality of your presentation without emptying your wallet. You’ll even be able to apply them to your daily video calls!

I have done this talk (~30 minutes long), in French, at a few meetup since Q4-2020. Here’s a recording of a time I did it with the public asking questions during the talk – which explains why the video is so long.


I’ve done these four talks a couple of times in French, so I know them quite well – and they’ve been well received. Which is why they are good candidates for me to start doing them in English ;-)

At the time I write this post, I haven’t started working on their English versions yet, which means I’ll need a bit of time between a “do you want to talk at this meetup?” discussion and the date of the actual meetup ;-)

If you are a conference or meetup organizer and would like to discuss about one of these talks, feel free to DM me on Twitter @pascal_martin or drop me a mail at contact@pascal-martin.fr.



  1. Well, I managed a panel with several core contributor to PHP in English, once! Several years ago. I’m the guy on the right in the video, if you want to hear what my English sounded like at the time… ↩︎