SPEAKER FAQs

1. What type of content are you looking for? Is there a theme?

We’re looking for compelling technical sessions, case studies, lessons learned and best practices. P99 CONF is designed to highlight the engineering challenges and creative solutions required for low-latency, high performance distributed computing applications. We’d like to share your expertise with a highly technical audience of industry professionals. Here are the categories we are looking for talks in:

• Development — Techniques in programming languages and operating systems
• Architecture — High performance distributed systems, design patterns and frameworks
• Performance — Capacity planning, benchmarking and performance testing
• DevOps — Observability & optimization to meet SLAs
• Use Cases — Low-latency applications in production and lessons learned

Example topics include...

• Capacity management in practice
• Correctly Managing Latency SLOs
• Using distributed tracing to optimize system response times
• Memory and latency comparison of Java, Go and Rust
• Why Your Observability Platform is Built on a Throne of Lies
• Performance testing: making lab tests relevant to the real world

2. Does my presentation have to include p99s, specifically?

No. It's the name of the conference, not a strict technical requirement. You are free to look at average latencies, p95s or even p99.9s. Or you might not even be focused on latencies per se, but on handling massive data volumes, throughputs, I/O mechanisms, or other intricacies of high performance, high availability distributed systems.

3. Is previous speaking experience required?

Absolutely not, first time speakers are welcome and encouraged! Have questions before submitting? Feel free to ask us at community@scylladb.com.

4. If selected, what is the time commitment?

We are looking for 15-20 minute sessions which will be pre-recorded and live Q&A during the event. We expect the total time commitment to be 4-5 hours. You’ll need to attend a 30 min speaker briefing and a 1 hour session recording appointment, all done virtually. Additionally, we ask that all speakers log onto the virtual conference platform 30 minutes before your session and join for live Q&A on the platform during and following your session. And, of course, all speakers are encouraged to attend the entire online conference to see the other sessions as well.

5. What language should the content be in?

While we hope to expand language support in the future, we ask that all content be in English.

6. What makes for a good submission?

Session descriptions should be no more than 250 words long. We’ll look at submissions using these criteria:

Be authentic — Your peers want your personal experiences and examples drawn from real-world scenarios

Be catchy — Give your proposal a simple and straightforward but catchy title

Be interesting — Make sure the subject will be of interest to others; explain why people will want to attend and what they’ll take away from it

Be complete — Include as much detail about the presentation as possible

Don’t be “pitchy” — Keep proposals free of marketing and sales.

Be understandable — While you can certainly cite industry terms, try to write a jargon-free proposal that contains clear value for attendees

Be deliverable — Sessions have a fixed length, and you will not be able to cover everything. The best sessions are concise and focused.

Be specific — Overviews aren’t great in this format; the narrower and more specific your topic is, the deeper you can dive into it, giving the audience more to take home

Be cautious — Live demos sometimes don’t go as planned, so we don’t recommend them

Be rememberable — Leave your audience with take-aways they’ll be able to take back to their own organizations and work. Give them something they’ll remember for a good long time.

We’ll reject submissions that contain material that is vague, inauthentic, or plagiarized.

No vendor pitches will be accepted.

7. If selected, can I get help on my content & what equipment do I need?

Absolutely, our content team is here to help. We will want to touch base with you 1-2 times to help you with any content questions you may need and offer graphic design assistance. This conference will be a virtual event and we’ll provide you with a mic and camera if needed (and lots of IT help along the way). Need something else? Let us know and we’ll do our best.

Contact us at community@scylladb.com with questions.