That's a scary challenge you've picked this year. Rooting for you.

I understand that texts are a poor way to judge conference talk propositions, but there must be better ways to compensate for that.

In addition, it was an opening to all of my self criticism to flourish - My video presence is much worse than it is in front of an audience, and a short improvised pitch is different than a rehearsed talk with visual aids, so it's a bad indication of the talk's potential.

It's not that adding a video was technically challenging, but rather that it was one extra thing to do - after crafting a text and getting feedback on it, I now needed to find a quiet enough time to shoot an elevator pitch.

also, by the initial looks of it, C++ unit tests are just ugly