We’re looking for in-person speakers who can share practical insights, real-world experience, and thought-provoking perspectives on messaging systems.

This year, we especially encourage submissions that go beyond “how it works” and explore: why it matters, what we’ve learned, and what comes next.

We welcome:

• engineers working deep inside messaging systems
• teams running them in production at scale
• architects designing distributed systems
• and leaders making technology decisions

⚠️ Please note:

Introductory or “getting started” talks focused on a single tool are not a good fit for the main track.

If you’d like to teach a technology from the ground up, we encourage you to submit a hands-on lab instead (mark the proper track in the form). This helps us keep the main track focused on insight and experience, while labs provide space for hands-on learning.

RECOMMEND US OR RECOMMEND A SPEAKER

Do you know any researchers, programmers or experts who are a part of groups traditionally underrepresented in IT (due to gender, ethnicity or any other reason) and whose work you can recommend to our committee? Please let them know that our Call for Talks is open and that we’d love to see their work! You can suggest their name in the form if you want us to check them out and possibly invite them.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Your talk should be submitted by 23:59 CST on 31 May 2026.
• You will be informed about the status of your submission by 31 July 2026.

THEMES & TOPICS

• Messaging in Practice: Real-world experience with messaging systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Pulsar, NATS, SQS, Pub/Sub, and more): scaling, performance, failures, and operating reliable systems in production.
• Architecture & Trade-offs: Designing and evolving event-driven systems: patterns, anti-patterns, and the trade-offs between queues, streams, and other approaches.
• Messaging in the Age of AI: How AI and agentic systems change messaging: new workloads, system design, operational challenges, and real-world use cases (no hype).
• Sovereignty, Resilience & Control: Building systems that are robust, independent, and future-proof: multi-cloud, fault tolerance, and operating under real-world constraints.
• Community & Ecosystem Collaboration: Interoperability, shared standards, security, and education. What should we improve or build together as a messaging community?
• Messaging for Decision-Makers: For architects, technical leaders, and C-level: choosing technologies, scaling systems, and understanding long-term trade-offs, costs, and risks - grounded in real experience. These talks should remain concrete and experience-based - not sales pitches.
• Panels & Discussion-Driven Sessions, including user panels (showing real-world experience across companies). If you have an idea for a topic that would benefit from multiple perspectives and open discussion, and would like to prepare and host it, we want to hear it.

TALK FORMAT

MQ Summit is an in-person conference with a strong focus on interaction.

• Talks: 30 minutes including Q&A (we recommend saving 5-10 minutes for Q&A)
• Panels: flexible format (to be discussed)
• Labs: 60-70 minutes (details below)

We prioritise:

👉 clarity, relevance, and space for discussion over long presentations

LABS FORMAT

Labs are:

• preferred format for tool-focused sessions.
• 60-70 minutes long
• limited to 20-30 participants

If your proposal is primarily:

• an introduction to a specific technology (e.g. RabbitMQ, NATS, Valkey, etc.)
• a guided “getting started” experience
• or a hands-on walkthrough

it should be submitted as a lab, not a talk.

We’re looking for:

• guided, interactive sessions
• real use cases and operational scenarios
• practical introductions to tools with depth (not rushed overviews)

👉 We especially encourage collaborative labs: sessions delivered by multiple contributors across technologies or organisations

Examples:

• running and tuning a messaging system
• comparing approaches across tools
• solving real operational challenges

If your idea is more hands-on than talk-based, we’ll guide you to submit it as a lab.

WHO SHOULD SUBMIT?

Developers, architects, SREs, DevOps engineers, operators, and technical leaders - as well as decision-makers working with messaging systems.

If you have real experience, lessons learned, or strong opinions backed by practice, we want to hear from you.

BENEFITS FOR SPEAKERS

All speakers get:

• conference attendance free of charge
• an invitation to all the accompanying events (speakers’ dinner, reception, lunch, et cetera)
• free beverages at the reception
• other small tokens of our appreciation.
• 15% discount code to share with your network to buy conference tickets (Super Early Bird excluded)

The programme committee is also happy to help out with talk delivery, give early-stage feedback and get the speaker ready for the conference.

SELECTION

The MQ Summit programme committee will evaluate submissions based on:

• Practical value and insights
• Relevance to messaging systems and distributed architectures
• Presenter credentials and expertise.
• Diversity in the agenda - have we already accepted a talk on the same subject?
• Diversity in the line-up - we want to make sure we have speakers from different communities and groups.

Your abstract should clearly answer:

👉 Why should someone attend this talk?

👉 What will they learn?

TIPS FOR SUBMITTING

Never spoken at conferences before and are unsure if you should, and what should you talk about? Noel Rappin has a good article on this here: https://noelrappin.com/blog/2014/01/conference-prompts-or-how-to-submit-proposals-and-influence-people/

"1. A conference that was limited to only people that really thought they were the most qualified person to talk would be depressing, if not completely horrific.

2. You are absolutely the most qualified person to tell me what you think on a particular topic.

3. This is how you become qualified. You study something, you teach it to other people."

What mistakes to avoid when submitting a talk? Noel Rappin also has an answer in this article: https://noelrappin.com/blog/2014/03/what-i-learned-from-reading-429-conference-proposals/.

In short: clearly identify your topic, be respectful of everyone, be interesting, but also self-aware, don't pitch your company, and submit early and often. We could also add to that - think if this conference audience is the right one for your talk (and why?).

Need more tips? We recommend Sarah Mei's article "What Your Conference Proposal is Missing": http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2014/04/07/what-your-conference-proposal-is-missing/

CODE OF CONDUCT

All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at our conference are required to agree with the following code of conduct.

PRIVACY

Code Sync (by Erlang Solutions) care about your data and privacy. By submitting this form, you agree that your data will be processed according to Code Sync privacy policy. You can opt out anytime from the emails you receive from us. You also agree to your submission (all the form fields) being shared with our committee members, using this Sessionize platform, who will be reviewing your submission. If your submission is successful, you agree to us adding your profile to our conference platform: Swap Card.

Plus invitation to all the accompanying events: speakers' meet-up/dinner, afterparty, pre-conference meet up etc.