The Call for Proposals is your chance to take a more active part in the virtual DevOpsDays Texas conference, and leave your mark on the Texas DevOps community. We encourage a wide range of original material with a focus on new and local presenters. All talks will be pre-recorded, and organizers will work with speakers to get these recordings sent in by February 14.
Types of proposals we are looking for:
- Ignite Sessions: A pre-recorded 5-minute, 20 auto-forwarding slides lightning talk, delivered to the entire audience. If you are not familiar with ignites, learn more here.
- Presentations: A pre-recorded 30-minute talk on the topic of your choice, optionally with some time for questions.
General Guidelines:
- Be concise,...
- ... but on the other hand, be specific and detailed. It’s hard for us to greenlight a “mysterious” pitch given there’s usually a 10:1 proposal to talk slot ratio. What exactly will someone get out of this talk?
- Multiple entries are welcome.
- No “vendor talks” - we don’t allow talks that are product pitches. Submissions that seem like a sales talk will be declined, so please make sure your summary doesn’t come across that way. If you need more guidance, learn more here.
- All speakers and presentations must conform to the DevOpsDays Texas code of conduct.
- We prefer to highlight speakers who work with or in the Texas community, so we’d like at least half our schedule to be composed of local experts from here in Texas.
- We are interested in showcasing the less-heard voices among us, and priority will be given to submissions by members of underrepresented groups in tech. Please submit a talk!
- We prefer not to have talks that have been given in other venues previously, especially ones that can be viewed online easily. Please consider making a new talk to submit to DoD Texas!
- Talks will be recorded and posted on the YouTube channel after the conference. Please make sure not to use any copyrighted music during your presentation or else it can’t be posted.
- Please do not submit talks on behalf of someone else. In our experience, these usually end up falling through and are not really tailored to our audience when they don’t.
- For Presentations, consider adding an outline in the notes section so that we can get a better idea of what you might focus on.
Ideas:
The kind of talk that is always best received at DevOpsDays is the real-world experience talk. We had problem X, we did Y to address it, here’s how that turned out, both the good and the bad. Sometimes people feel like they should dilute their real experience and turn it into a more generic presentation. This almost always makes for a weaker submission. Genuine implementations and personal lessons learned are what our audience has consistently found the most compelling.
As for content areas - pretty much anything! DevOps culture, process, technology, tooling… Here are some examples of things we would like to hear. Do you have experience bearing on them?
- The DevOps movement has been around for a few years now: Did anyone find out if it really helped your organization? Are there numbers for this?
- Did the culture of DevOps/Cloud-Native/SRE spread to other parts of your company? If not, why?
- Is this the magic silver bullet that solved all your problems? What are the problems it didn’t solve (although you thought it would)?
- Were there unexpected problems during your cultural change into this ecosystem?
- Did the required skill-set of people change?
- Did people leave because you moved this direction? Was this good or bad or both?
- Have there been technical changes after the culture in your team changed?
- Did the change affect the business/sales/marketing side?
- Has DevOps affected you personally? How do you feel about the change it brought to your work?
- How was an organizational transition to SRE? What challenges did you face? Do you believe it was successful?
- What have your organizational experiences been with Cloud Native- Kubernetes/Serverless etc?
The “classic” DevOps questions haven’t been fully answered either…
- What is the role of QA/Tester in DevOps, how do we integrate QA in the continuous delivery process?
- What is the impact that DevOps has on traditional security/auditing/change control? (devsecops, finops, insert preferred portmanteau here)
- What is the impact of DevOps on HR policies and the hiring process?
- How can DevOps scale beyond the 5-8 person web startups? We love traditional IT enterprise cases.
- With all the automation, data is still a hard thing to handle. How does it affect DBAs, backup strategies, …?
We would like to thank DevOpsDays KC, DC, and Austin for the inspiration for this CFP, like in the DevOps spirit we took something that worked well and iterated on it for the Texas Community!