Proposing a Top-Flight ServerlessConf Talk

It’s that time of year again: ServerlessConf is coming to a new city. Austin, Texas is the venue this time and we’re looking for another batch of great speakers to share what they’re up to and what they’ve learned. The Call for Proposals is open, and we’d love to hear about projects, tools, and techniques you’ve all learned about since the last ServerlessConf in London.

Picking a Topic

Some of my favorite talks at past conferences have been about a specific aspect of a problem. Think about problems that you’ve had before, even outside the serverless context. Computing has a long, winding history and the same problems can pop up again in different domains.

There are tons of category options including: Performance/Scalability, Operations, Startups, Security, Frameworks, Architecture & Patterns, Use Cases, and Enterprise. The most important category is, of course, Other. The audience can learn from your experiences in just about any domain, so feel free to range out a little bit.

Title & Overview

Once you have a topic, you’ll need a title. “Writing Serverless Apps,” isn’t going to make it easy to distinguish your talk. Try for a title that’s more unique, and alludes more to what you’re going to be covering.

For the talk overview, the more you can explain about what will make your talk different, the better. There’s a separate section for listing technologies involved, so skip a list of tools and spend more time on what you (or your team) has accomplished with them.

Standout Strategies

A great proposal is all about telling a great story. Talk about the goals you had when building your product, your background, and what others can learn from you.

After you describe the subject, spare a word or two for your ideal audience. How much experience does your ideal listener have, and what kind? Is this an introduction to the tool, or more of an overview of what can be done with it?

For projects or tools that are Open Source, including links to demos and code help. If you can add links to public information about your topic, that helps us see more than you can include in just the length of your talk summary.

There’s also no “one proposal per household” rule. Feel free to submit more than one proposal if you think there’s more than one angle on your project or experience.

Table Stakes

Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation

Of course, if we can’t read it, we can’t accept your talk. Run your proposal by a friend or coworker so they can catch what you might have missed.

Draft, Draft, Done

It’ll probably take a revision or two to make a proposal that covers everything, so once you have a draft set it aside and come back to it later to edit.

See Y’all in Austin

Whether you submit a talk or not, we hope to see folks from all backgrounds and experience levels at ServerlessConf Austin in April. If you are submitting a talk and want some help reviewing it before you submit, find me on Twitter or email me.

And don’t forget, you can catch up on talks from past conferences if you missed them.