CFPs

If you want to do a conference, you have to brave the dreaded topic of the CFP — the call for papers. Most speakers apart from invited keynotes submit their talks to a CFP and, along with everyone else, try to sell your talk to the conference.

A few important things about CFPs.

Know when the CFP opens and closes. This is completely random per conference. Some conferences will open their CFP long before the next run and also close it whilst others may still have their CFP open 2 weeks before the event! The best way to handle this is to follow the conferences on social media, and use trackers like CFP Time. Find whatever social platform you use, follow those accounts, and they’ll announce it.

What you submit varies per conference. Your title and abstract will always be in there. Some conferences will also want a longer description, so put some thought into the structure and breakdown. You don’t need to have this full breakdown be the final way the talk is presented, during development you’ll often come up with new ideas, but it should cover the major points.

You’ll usually submit a biography too. Now it’s important to never lie on your bio, but you should still focus on the parts of your experience that are most relevant to the audience and talk that you’re developing.

If you’ve been in your career a while you’ve probably done lots of things, so just highlight the bits closest to the topic, because that gives the organisers confidence you know it and can deliver. I keep different bios for different events, a security conference might want to hear more about my security background, a containerizations conference wants my Kubernetes background. I’ve done everything in all of them, but bios are short, maybe a hundred words, so you’ll need to be abbrievating anyway. Just pick the parts that fit best.