[tomekowal]

To me ideas just come unexpectedly and often because I see someone mistaken https://www.xkcd.com/386/

I had a talk where I showed how Elixir and Elm programming languages complement each other and someone in the audience asked what are we using Elixir for in our company. When I said that for payment systems he looked surprised, because he heard about "let it crash" in Elixir and he thought it is unusable for anything critical. That inspired me to talk about how we use Elixir for handling money.

I also answered questions on Stak Overflow for some time. Of course there are many typos or library quirks that are simply missed, but often you see a person that just entirely misunderstood the concept. This is also a target for talks. There might more people struggling with the same thing (especially if your question gets more views).

Pay attention to what surprises people when you are talking with them. If someone didn't know what you find obvious, there is a good chance more people don't know it. We have some kind of bias where we think that what WE know is common knowledge and automatically EVERYONE ELSE is smarter than us (because they know everything we know and some more that we don't). That is obviously not true :)

If you find a topic that surprised couple of people it means you have and idea worth sharing. It doesn't have to be novel! I often put quotes and references from blog posts that I read about given topic to show that this idea is not new at all! Old ideas are often not widely known or forgotten. They are perfect for conferences, because they might be crystalized over years, so it is easy to research them.