So it is the morning after the day before. A solid six months of overthinking, anxiety dreams, second guessing and rewriting culminated in a talk that was over in the blink of an eye (but somehow still overran!).

As I write this (in my hotel room at 07.48) I am feeling pretty good about the whole experience. Unusually so to be honest – in the past I’ve been kicking myself about things I forgot to say or sections I tripped over. There were plenty of both yesterday but for now at least I am not dwelling on that.

Being promoted to one of the opening keynotes definitely upped the stress levels but the trade off was I got more time – which I needed as I could not get the talk down to 35 minutes and in the end think I did almost an hour!

Following Hera, and her adorable 3 month old co-presenter, was also pretty daunting. She has such an engaging presenting style and such an important and difficult topic – it is a hell of a combination! The whole audience were rapt – leaning forward in their seats and scribbling in their notebooks.

Things could not have been more different for my slot 😆. The audience did really feel engaged but they were leaned back, notebooks down. I’d been thinking about it as as much Netflix stand-up special as design conference keynote in the writing and I think maybe I leaned into that more than I realised 😅

People laughed when I expected (and sucked teeth when I did as well – sorry dog lovers!) and quite a few people caught the reference to Vicky as well which I ❤️. Oh and I think people liked the ‘post-credits scene’ – I enjoyed that! Lauryn Hill forever the GOAT.

People have written some lovely things on Bluesky and LinkedIn, people were supportive in the corridors and the bar so I’m feeling warm and glowy (though that might be the after effects of the wine last night!). Oh and the stickers went down well – but I still have a few left so I’ll be posting them out to anyone interested.

Thanks to all the people that listened to the earlier versions of the talk and reassured me during my many (open) moments of doubt – it helped enormously.

I can’t thank Cat, Shaun, Hillary, Chris, Amy (and all the other Nexer folks) enough for looking after me so well and for running such a wonderful event year after year.

I don’t feel like I’ll ever top that experience as far as conference speaking goes so I am not going to try. The plan was always that this would be my last speaking gig for an event people pay to attend* – I’ll still do things for Communities of Practice and the occasional little meet-up but that is it for stages.

I’ll be retiring my Uniqlo blazer after one outing.

See you at CampDigital 2026 – where I’ll be significantly more chill 😎.

*in the UK – if anyone wants to fly me somewhere exotic (or Canada) then I suspect I’ll pull a JAYZ and make a comeback!