DevOpsDays Birmingham 2022 is currently accepting 30-minute talk proposals from interested speakers. As our conference will be in-person only, we are only accepting in-person presenters at this time. If you are making a submission do ensure you live in the Birmingham, AL area or are able to make travel arrangements.

Programming Guidelines

In 2022, we are actively soliciting programming that addresses these topics:

• Building a Site Reliability Engineering team
• Testing and deploying serverless applications
• Health, stress, and burnout
• Management culture
• Privacy, security, and DevSecOps solutions
• Container orchestration at scale
• Professional development, teaching, training, and mentorship
• Test design and automated testing
• Observability of systems and processes
• DevOps in the enterprise, and fields not traditionally seen as “tech”

We also welcome submissions on perennially popular technical topics from previous DevOpsDays:

• Continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Automation
• Monitoring and alerting
• Microservices
• Infrastructure as code
• What’s next (ML/AI, unikernels, etc.)

Our programming is focused on three goals:

Diverse Backgrounds

We’re eager to provide a platform to our speakers, so if the DevOps industry hasn’t included people like you in the past, tell us about it in your proposal. We want to make a space for the perspectives of people that are underrepresented in or excluded from technology: people of color, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, students, veterans, and many more. In the more specific context of this event, we want to hear about DevOps from a wide set of roles: QA testers, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, government employees, scientists, and other technologists who face unique challenges.

New Ideas

Sure, we know that Kubernetes is hot right now - but what’s going to be hot next year? What about in five years? Present the right idea at the right time, and you could help shape that! To help keep our content fresh, we add points for talks that have never been presented at a conference, or even better, for speakers who aren’t regulars on the “conference circuit”.

Healthy Discussion

Most session submissions focus on how to use a specific piece of technology - and most of those are not accepted. The most memorable talks question assumptions, make predictions, or draw conclusions. It’s even okay to (respectfully) tell someone that they’re wrong - we’d much rather have a disagreement than a room full of nodding heads! DevOpsDays are centered around open spaces, and a good session should act like fertilizer for them, giving people something to start talking about.

We’re also very interested in nominations. Did you see an awesome presentation at another conference? Is one of your friends hoping to break into the conference circuit? Let us know who to reach out to, or send an introductory email yourself! You can reach us at birmingham-al@devopsdays.org.

However, please consider that novelty is heavily encouraged as per our guidelines above. These topics are popular, but every year we receive more submissions about them than we can accept.

Please keep these guidelines in mind:

Absolutely no vendor pitches

Many of our most successful talks are by people who sell products in the same area they’re speaking about. But if your talk is only interesting to someone paying money for your product, it’s a bad fit for DevOpsDays.

Follow the Code of Conduct

We take pride in respect and empathy for all. Speakers and audience members enter our event on equal footing, and adherence to the Code of Conduct is a must for everyone.

For example: no threats, no sexualized language or imagery, no insulting audience members.

Explain why your proposal is interesting to the DevOps community

We’d rather have a lackluster abstract about a very interesting topic than a detailed outline of a topic that isn’t a good fit.

Your talk will go through a blind review process

Our reviewers will receive only the talk name and description to review, which helps ensure that talks are selected on their own merit. We invite you to talk about yourself in the Bio section, which we will feature prominently with your talk if you are selected, but please refrain from putting this information in the description itself.

We also ask that speakers refrain from explicitly calling out company names in their talk names and descriptions - they often make just as much sense without that information.

Avoid purely technical talks

We all love technology, but this isn’t a programming language conference or a Docker conference. Talk about tools in the context in which they’ll be used, and relate them to the business or cultural problems that they solve. (Or tell us about how tools can make those problems worse!) You should especially consider whether the technology you’re talking about impacts diversity, retention, ability to learn, etc.

Multiple proposals won’t all be accepted

In order to maximize the types of programming we offer, we limit our event to one talk per speaker. If you send in five proposals, we’ll accept the one that is the best fit for the conference.