Topics we are looking for

We’re looking for high-quality, technical and non-technical sessions from speakers who can cover advanced topics and keep our demanding audience inspired.

In previous editions of Appdevcon, Webdevcon, and the Dutch PHP Conference, we’ve featured a broad spectrum of talks covering everything from native and cross-platform app development to modern web technologies and the ever-evolving PHP ecosystem. Whether it was deep dives into frontend or backend development, insights into mobile platforms like iOS and Android, or best practices within PHP frameworks, our speakers have brought high-level content across all three domains.

For the upcoming edition, we're once again looking for inspiring and advanced sessions that tap into these three areas of expertise. We welcome talks that highlight cutting-edge advancements, coding techniques, architectural insights, development tooling, and best practices. Sessions that provide hands-on ideas attendees can apply at work right away are highly valued, as are those that reflect on trends and hot topics that will define 2025 and beyond.

But we also would like to invite speakers to talk about non-technical subjects that are increasingly instrumental in maintaining success as a developer or development team. These are topics like communication, understanding, relationships, (self) management and even the business and economics part of development. In other words: the soft skills that complement the deep technical skills. And about the surrounding environment necessary to be successful as a technical developer.

This invitation is intentionally a bit broad in the hope to inspire everyone to share their ideas and insights and hard-fought experience in the broader development arena that we all thrive in.

The call for papers is open up to and including December 20th. You can send in a maximum of five talks, so start submitting your talks!

Talk categories

• Keynote session should be 35 minutes and topics should be appealing to the majority of the audience.
• The standard conference sessions should be 45 minutes including Q&A.
• The lightning talks should be 20-30 minutes including Q&A.
• Workshops should be half-day (3,5 hours including breaks), full day (7 hours including breaks) or multi-day (2-3 days)

Talk levels explained

The audience at our conferences mainly consists of professional developers working in the fields of app, web, and PHP development. Some are at the start of their professional careers, while others are seasoned experts. Among them you’ll find frontend and backend specialists, mobile developers focused on iOS, Android, or cross-platform, as well as full-stack engineers. Most, if not all, work with modern frameworks and follow agile development processes.

• Beginner: meaning the audience does not have much experience with this specific topic.
• Intermediate: meaning the audience has some knowledge of the topic and some real-life experience but has no in-depth knowledge.
• Advanced: meaning the audience has lots of experience with this topic and wants to learn hidden features, advanced techniques, etc from an expert on the topic.

Tips for submission

• Be sure your talk title and abstract define the exact topic you want to talk about, and what you hope people will learn from the session.
• Include 3-4 bullet points of what the audience will learn.
• Please keep talk titles short (max. 50 characters). This ensures the talk title fits the schedule format which is aimed at readability in print and on mobile).
• If available, please include links to slides, reviews (on joind.in for example), and videos of the submitted talk.

Guidelines

• All talks are in English.
• Submitting more than one submission is strongly encouraged. The more submissions contributed, the more options we have to pick from, and the higher your chances are of being accepted as a speaker. We've set the limit at 5 so if you have a lot of ideas, submit the best 5.
• Try to not include any hints to your identity in your abstracts. This helps us to make a good initial blind selection.
• Make sure you care, and make sure we see you care. Typos, sloppy formatting and all-lowercase submissions make our reading of your proposal tedious. These things will definitely count against your proposal.
• Don’t overdo it either. If you need more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, we need to ask you to slim things down. With the amount of submissions we get, the quicker you can make a good impression, the better.
• Original Topics. We favour original content. If you want to discuss a topic that you have talked about elsewhere, try to add a twist, or new research, or development, something unique. Of course, if your talk is plain awesome as-is, go for that.
• We welcome presentations by multiple presenters, however do keep in mind that a talk by 2 international presenters will weigh double on our available travel budget, so we may often have to chose single speaker talks over multi-speaker talks.

Perks

If you get selected as a speaker, here’s what you get:

• Travel to Amsterdam covered. We have a travel agent that will assist you booking your travel.
• Entrance to the conference. 
• Airport to hotel. We will arrange a transfer from the airport.
• We cover your stay in Amsterdam in a hotel near the venue. For locals outside of driving distance we cover 1 night, for speakers outside the Netherlands 2 nights, and 3 nights for workshop speakers. If you want to stay longer, we can arrange things, just let us know. You can pay for any additional nights via our travel agent.
• If your employer can cover your travel and hotel, we are happy to list them as a sponsor. If speakers get sponsored by their employers, we can invite more international speakers to the conference.
• There is a speaker’s dinner on Thursday night that you will be invited to and you are welcome at the Friday after party after the conference.

Number of nights depends on where speakers are traveling from.