Topics

We love variety, and welcome any talk that tends toward technology or culture in the context of building scalable websites, services, systems, companies, or teams. Take a look through previous speakers for ideas and videos.

Structure

We like speakers to have the control they need around the structure of their talks. The sessions are 45 minutes long, and we’ll be there to give time reminders. We advise speakers to leave at least 5 minutes at the end of their talk for questions, but feel free to leave more.

We strongly discourage product or service pitches wrapped in excellent sounding abstracts! If you represent a company that has a product or service you are touching on in your talk please ensure you provide a balanced introduction to the topic that reflects the broader ecosystem you play in. (Trust us on this one, the attendee tweets will not be kind!)

What’s on stage

There will be a lectern on stage, which can hold a laptop, and has a microphone attached. There is also a roaming wireless microphone available. We will have a MacBook Pro available with Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint installed. We will have connectors available for Mac and PC into the AV system.

The hall is relatively narrow and deep, and so we advise a slightly larger font than usual. Screencasts and live demo’s can also be difficult for people past the first few rows to see properly.

Audience

There will be roughly 400 people at the conference. Since it’s single track, almost all of them will be at your talk. The majority of the audience are engineers; developers, operations, devops, sysadmins. There is a good range of experience from students to the old hats.