Thank you for your interest in presenting at RubyConf AU 2024!

What We Are Seeking

We want all our attendees to be inspired, contemplative, appreciative and encouraged by their time spent at RubyConf AU 2024. Our attendees mostly will be Australian-based Ruby developers, working in various sectors all over the country – corporates, start-ups, non-profits, open source and more. We expect attendees with a wide range of experience and at various stages in their journey as developers - so we're looking for talks and topics that all will be able to connect with in some way.

To that end, we are seeking a range of presentations dealing not just with technology, but also how it affects us, our society and the world. So while we absolutely are interested in presentations dealing with all things Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and adjacent technologies - we are also very interested in matters relating to our broader industry, community, career progression, and individual technology interests.

Some example queries and concepts behind proposals that may be of interest to our attendees and community:

• Have you built something you were proud of or learned something new that you want to share?
• How have you overcome hurdles at work (technical or otherwise)?
• Have you got ideas to improve current coding practices?
• What security, accessibility, and maintainability mistakes might you be making, and how to fix them?
• How can we improve the experience for junior developers entering our industry?

For concrete examples of the sort of talks that have been accepted in prior years, see our conference programmes from the past few years: [2023] [2020] [2019]

Selection Process

We are committed to having a diverse lineup of presenters from different backgrounds, experiences, genders, sexualities and ethnicities, who will address a wide range of topics of interest to our attendees and broader community. To accomplish this, here is the process for submitting and reviewing proposals for RubyConf AU 2024:

1. Submission: Submit your proposal through our Sessionize portal before the CFP close date. To give your proposal the best opportunity to be selected, please include as much information as you can about your topic in the description. 
2. Shortlisting: A small panel of 3-4 reviewers, with diverse backgrounds and experience levels will read through all anonymised proposals. From all the submitted proposals, they will shortlist roughly double the amount of required presentations.
3. Selection: Both organisers and reviewers will trim this shortlist to the required number of talks, with a buffer in case of contingencies. To ensure speaker diversity and experience, proposals at this stage will be de-anonymised. We believe this is both important and necessary to create a lineup with variety, equity, representation and that our conference presentations are a reflection of our broader society.
4. Notification: Speakers will be notified via email by Monday 5 February 2024, and successful speakers will be asked to provide additional information.

Presentation Logistics

We welcome proposals from joint speakers, and also multiple (up to 4) proposals per speaker.

Successful speakers will receive free admission to RubyConf AU 2024 (including relevant social events), and travel subsidy of up to AUD$2500 for flights plus accommodation in Sydney for up to 3 nights.

Ruby Australia is a not-for-profit organisation. We are only able to provide this sort of support for our speakers because of our generous sponsors. If your company or organisation is willing to cover your travel and hotel expenses, we will include them as a Speaker Sponsor of the conference.

Pro Tips

Presenting at RubyConf AU is an awesome opportunity to engage with the Ruby community. To help increase your chance of having a talk accepted, here are some tips we think may be useful:

Successful submissions in the past years have been detailed, focused on contemporary experience, applicable beyond a single implementation, considered diversity in viewpoints and personal background, and described novel experiences or developments in the chosen topic.

For talks that deal with issues of industry, careers or community, we do prefer the presentation to be language-agnostic (where possible).

If your talk is successful in being selected, the Elevator Pitch may be used  to publicise your talk; it will not be seen by the initial reviewers.

The proposal 'description' will be viewed by reviewers and organisers, so please provide as much detail there as you like, but please avoid providing any personally-identifying information.

Examples

Below are examples of descriptions that were provided for proposals accepted for RubyConf AU 2023:

Implementing Object Shapes for CRuby

The Ruby 3.2 release includes a new technique for representing objects' properties that can increase cache hits in instance variable lookups, decrease runtime checks, and improve JIT performance. This technique is called "Object Shapes." In this talk, we'll learn how object shapes work, why we implemented them for Ruby 3.2, and interesting implementation details. If you're curious to learn more about Ruby internals, or how instance variables work, this talk is for you!

Hanami 2: New Framework, New You

Years in the making, Hanami 2.0 is out! This release brings new levels of polish and power to a framework you can use for Ruby apps of all shapes and sizes. Come along to discover what goes into building a new Hanami app, the principles that underpin the framework, and how they just might change the way you work with Ruby altogether. 

How To Make Your Website Not Ugly: Basic UX For Programmers

If you’re a programmer who has ever found themselves inadvertently (perhaps unwillingly!) straddling the line between design and code, this is the talk for you. Even with zero design training or background, there are numerous small, simple and practical ways you can vastly improve the look and usability of a website. In this talk, we’ll explore 10 of them together, using research and proven solutions to see how the impact as a whole for both clients and users is greater than the sum of its parts.

We thank you for your interest, we are grateful for the time that you have put into your proposal, and hope to see you at RubyConf AU 2024!