See all blog posts

ScyllaDB Summit 2021 Call for Speakers

ScyllaDB Summit 2021 will be held as an online event this year, January 12 – 14, 2021. Our own sessions will showcase the latest ScyllaDB features and capabilities, roadmap plans and the view from the top from our executives. We also want to extend this Call for Speakers, inviting you to tell your own story to the global community of your peers. Users’ voices and real-world perspectives are vital for the success of any software industry conference.

What Our Attendees Most Want to Hear

Our attendees appreciate hearing real-world examples from practitioners — developers and devops, architects, technical leaders, and product owners. We’re looking for compelling technical sessions: case studies, operational best practices, and more. Here’s a list of suggested topics, or feel free to recommend others.

Real-world Use Cases

Everything from design and architectural considerations to POCs, to production deployment and operational lessons learned, including…

  • Practical examples for vertical markets — IoT, AI/ML, security, e-commerce, fraud detection, adtech/martech, customer/user data, media/multimedia, social apps, B2B or B2C apps, and more.
  • Migrations — How did you get from where you were in the past to where you are today? What were the limitations of other systems you needed to overcome? How did ScyllaDB address those issues?
  • Hard numbers — Clusters, nodes, CPUs, RAM and disk, data size, growth, throughput, latencies, benchmark and stress test results (think graphs, charts and tables). Your cluster can be any size — large or small. What attendees appreciate hearing most is how you got the best results out of your available resources.
  • Integrations — ScyllaDB is just one of many big data systems running in user environments. What feeds it from upstream, or what does it populate downstream? Kafka? Spark? Parquet? Pandas? Other SQL or NoSQL systems? JanusGraph? KairosDB? Our users love block diagrams and want to understand data flows.
  • War stories — What were the hardest big data challenges you faced? How did you solve them? What lessons can you pass along?

Tips & Tricks

From getting started to performance optimization to disaster management, tell us your DevOps secrets, or unleash your chaos monkey!

  • Computer languages and dev tools — What’s your favorite languages and tools? Are you a Pythonista? Doing something interesting in Golang or Rust?
  • Working on Open Source? — Got a Github repo to share? Our attendees would love to walk your code.
  • Seastar — The Seastar infrastructure at the heart of ScyllaDB can be used for other projects as well. What systems architecture challenges are you tackling with Seastar?

Schedule

  • CFP opens: Mon, Sep 21st, 2020
  • CFP closes (deadline for submissions): Friday, Nov 6th, 2020, 5:00 PM Pacific [Editor’s Note: this deadline has been extended.]
  • ScyllaDB Summit (event dates): Tue, Jan 12th – Thu, Jan 14th, 2021

Required Information

You’ll be asked to include the following information in your proposal:

  • Proposed title
  • Description
  • Suggested main topic
  • Audience information
  • Who is this presentation for?
  • What will the audience take away?
  • What prerequisite knowledge would they need?
  • Videos or live demos included in presentation?
  • Length of the presentation (10 or 15 minute slots or longer)

Ten Tips for a Successful Speaker Proposal

Please keep in mind this event is made by and for deeply technical professionals. All presentations and supporting materials must be respectful and inclusive.

  • 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. We tend to ignore proposals submitted by PR agencies and require that we can reach the suggested participant directly.
  • 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.

SUBMIT A SPEAKER PROPOSAL

About Peter Corless

Peter Corless is the Director of Technical Advocacy at ScyllaDB. He listens to users’ stories and discovers wisdom in each to share with other practitioners in the industry at large, whether through blogs or in technical presentations. He occasionally hosts live industry events from webinars to online conferences.