Proposals for the 2027 programme are open until the end of October. Four speakers are already announced; the other twelve slots are decided from what arrives in the next eight weeks.
If you have been thinking about it and talking yourself out of it, this post is aimed at you.
What to send
Two paragraphs. The first says what the talk is about. The second says why you are the person giving it, which can be as simple as “I did this and it went badly for eight months”.
That is the whole submission. We do not want slides, an abstract in a particular format, a biography in the third person, or a video of you speaking somewhere else. We have read enough conference submission forms to know that they mostly filter for people who enjoy filling in forms.
A title helps, even a rough one. If you cannot write a title you probably have a subject rather than a talk, and we would rather help you find the talk inside it than say no.
What we are looking for
Talks about work that actually happened. The programme is built around things that outlast the team that built them, which in practice means:
- Systems you have lived with for years, and what the fifth year taught you that the first did not.
- Decisions that turned out badly, honestly described. Two of this year’s talks are about failures, at our request, and they are the ones people quote afterwards.
- The unglamorous parts: testing, on-call, hiring, documentation, migrations that took eighteen months.
- Work from outside the usual shapes. Local government, hospitals, logistics, agriculture. A well-told talk about scheduling farm machinery beats a fashionable talk about scale.
We are not looking for product pitches. There are no sponsor keynotes and there never will be.
Half the line-up is held for first-timers
This is deliberate and it is the part of the programme we are proudest of. Half of the sixteen slots go to people who have not given a conference talk before.
If that is you, say so in your proposal. It helps rather than hurts. Every first-time speaker gets a session with one of us in the new year, a read-through of the talk about a month before, and a rehearsal in the room on the morning if you want one.
Speakers do not pay for a ticket, and we cover travel and a night’s accommodation for anyone who needs it. Ask; nobody has ever been turned down for asking.
What happens next
Every proposal gets a written answer from a person, not a form email. We aim to have all of them out by the end of November.
The full line-up is announced in February, once everyone has said yes in writing, and the grid goes out about a month before the conference itself, which is on 14 and 15 May at The Assembly Rooms in Bristol.
Talks are twenty or forty minutes. If your idea is really a workshop, say so, and we will talk about the afternoon rooms instead.
If you are not sure
Send the two paragraphs anyway. The worst outcome is a short, friendly no from someone who read it properly. The most common thing we hear from speakers afterwards is that they nearly did not send it, which is a strange thing for a programme to be built on.
Proposals go to the address on the contact page, by the end of 31 October.
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