Anyone interested in speaking is highly encouraged to submit a proposal. PyTennessee always aims to be friendly, welcoming, and encouraging to first-time speakers, and we hope our speakers hold us to that standard. There are no restrictions on topics, but we recommend they be potentially of interest to Python developers. Talks can either be short Lightning Talk style talk (5-10 minutes), or talks in the 30-45 minute range.

Who Should Submit?

We want as many people as possible to submit a talk. We want new speakers, experienced speakers, speakers who are new to the industry, speakers who have been around the block a few times, developers who are new to Python, people who have only ever written Python, web developers, CLI app developers, game developers, data scientists, data analysts, and any other kind of developer you can think of.

The PyTennessee attendees will be just as diverse, so feel free to cater your talk to a specific experience level.

Looking for Ideas?

One of the best ways to come up with an idea is to think about something you want to learn about. It’s a great way to learn about the topic and you’ll be able to share your experiences with the audience.

Another great source of topics is challenges you’ve recently overcome. Did you recently use a unique profiler to identify a performance bottleneck? Perhaps you had to dive deep into a protocol or library and discovered something everyday users might not know. Experiences like these are usually full of great tips and tricks to share.

Still looking for ideas? Here are some ideas to help get you started:

• What gotchas have you learned about async programming?
• How to design software for safety and reliability
• Ethics of big data and software development
• Effective use of linters and other static analysis tools
• Recent changes to standard Python tools or the Python standard library
• Ethical Hacking and other security uses with Python
• What’s new in the Python community
• Features coming in Python 3.9 that people need to know about
• What’s a language feature that not enough people are aware of
• Tell us about a personal project you worked on and the challenges you had to overcome
• What have you learned about working from home or working during a global pandemic?

Talk Selection Process

PyTN talk review process occurs in two phases: immediately after the CFP closes, our talk selection committee will have a first round of anonymous voting, weeding out talk proposals that don’t sound like a good fit for this conference. After that, the program committee will make a second pass through the talks that remain, and will ultimately select the talks that make up the PyTennessee 2020 schedule. After the talks have been chosen, the Chair and Speaker Coordinator will notify all the accepted speakers and assemble the final talk schedule.