littlesheephtpt

I want to get started doing talks at tech conferences. I have several (hopefully) decent topics which are a cross between security and AI/machine learning. My plan is to build up experience with smaller, local opportunities like meetups and small regional conferences. (I am not a complete speaking noob -- I do internal corporate talks frequently and have done a bunch of college seminars).

I have a few questions, though:

1) Will doing the talk at a small conference/meetups disqualify me or hurt my chances to get accepted at a bigger talk?

My goal is to do talks at the 'big' conferences but, if I have a particularly good topic to talk about, I wouldn't want to "waste" it at a smaller venue.

2) Is it okay to submit multiple talks per conference?

3) Is earlier always better for submission, or does the submission time (early in the CFP period vs late) matter at all?

4) How 'complete' is your talk when you submit? Is it a vague outline that you don't start working on until accepted, or is it mostly ready-to-go when you submit?

Any other thoughts and advice for a beginning speaker greatly appreciated.

I occasionally write technical articles (such as in-depth how-to's, exploratory data analysis, etc) on topics like web, devops, and security. However they have very low traffic and I'm considering hosting on somewhere like medium, wordpress, blogspot, etc. Which hosting do you prefer?

Few side notes which may matter: 1) I don't care about monetization. 2) I do care about source code highlighting, ability to add custom javascript/css (for graphs/visualizations).