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ScyllaDB Summit 2022 Call for Speakers

ScyllaDB Summit 2022, our free online annual user conference, will be held February 09–10, 2022. It’s two days dedicated to the high-performance, low-latency distributed applications driving this next tech cycle. The Call for Speakers (CFS) is now open and we invite you to submit your own proposals. You can find the CFS application at https://sessionize.com/scylla-summit-2022.

Update:  ScyllaDB Summit 2022 is a wrap! All the on-demand recordings and speaker slide decks are available now. 

WATCH VIDEOS ON DEMAND

ScyllaDB executives and engineers will highlight the latest product and service announcements, reveal a few surprises, as well as provide detailed dives into our technical capabilities and advanced features.

One of the most critical parts of every ScyllaDB Summit comes from you, our user base: your innovations, achievements, integrations, and journeys to production. We’d love for you to share your stories about building scalable, data intensive applications using ScyllaDB.

Countdown to ScyllaDB Summit

We’re just shy of 120 days out, so it’s a perfect time to get things rolling. In fact, let’s go over the schedule:

Date Milestone
Wed, 13 Oct 2021 Call for Speakers opens
Sun, 07 Nov 2021, 11:59 PM Pacific Time Call for Speakers closes (submissions deadline)
Thu, 16 Dec 2021 Draft presentations due
Mon, 03 Jan 2022 Final presentations due
04–15 Jan 2022 Recording appointments
Wed–Thu, 09–10 Feb 2022 ScyllaDB Summit 2022

Making a Great Submission

There are two parts to making a great talk submission: understanding what our audience wants to hear, and framing the story you want to tell in the best light.

What Our Attendees Want to Hear Most:

  • Building for this Next Tech Cycle — The world is undergoing a massive shift to cloud-native, blink-of-an-eye response, petabyte-scale applications. How is your organization driving change?
  • Real-world ScyllaDB use cases — What are you using ScyllaDB for? On-demand services? Streaming media? AI/ML-driven applications? Shopping carts or customer profiles? Cybersecurity and fraud detection? Time series data or IoT?
  • War stories — Did you survive a major migration or a datacenter disaster? Everything from design and architecture considerations to POCs, to production deployments, our community loves to hear lessons learned
  • Integrations into your data ecosystem — Share your stack! Kafka, Spark, AI/ML pipelines, other databases?
  • JanusGraph use cases — Have billions of edges and vertices? Building amazing systems on top of JanusGraph?
  • API-first implementations — Did you make a wrapper for CQL? Implement REST or GraphQL? What’s your microservice architecture leveraging ScyllaDB?
  • Computer languages and development methods — How are you getting the most from your favorite languages, frameworks and toolkits? What are you re-engineering in Rust? Are you a Pythonista?
  • Operational insights — What are your intraday traffic patterns like? Are you deploying via Kubernetes? What observability and tracing tools are you using? Running multi-cloud?
  • Open source projects — Are you integrating ScyllaDB with an open source project? Got a Github repo to share? Our attendees would love to walk your code
  • Hard numbers — Our users love learning specifics of your clusters: nodes, CPUs, RAM and disk, data size, replication factors, IOPS, throughput, latencies, benchmark, stress test results and ROI. Trot out your charts & graphs
  • Tips & tricks — We’d love to hear your best ideas, from data modeling to performance tuning to unleashing your inner chaos monkey
  • Next steps — What are your future plans?

7 Tips for Submitting a Successful Proposal:

Help us understand why your presentation is perfect for ScyllaDB Summit 2022. Please keep in mind this event is made by and for deeply technical professionals. All presentations and supporting materials must be respectful and inclusive (take a moment to read our Code of Conduct and Diversity & Inclusion Statement).

  • Be authentic — Your peers need original ideas with real-world scenarios, relevant examples, and knowledge transfer
  • Be catchy — Give your proposal a simple and straightforward title that’ll hook them
  • 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. Overviews aren’t great in this format; the narrower your topic is, the deeper you can dive into it, giving the audience more to take home

Lessons Learned for Virtual Conferences

This will be the second virtual version of ScyllaDB Summit (check out the 2021 talks here). Plus, this Call for Speakers comes right on the heels of our overwhelmingly successful P99 CONF.

We’ve learned a lot making the transition from in-person to virtual event hosting, and we’d like to share the portions of our process that are most relevant to you as a potential speaker. These processes also explain why we have a schedule set well in advance of the conference itself.

  1. Welcoming speakers of all experience — ScyllaDB Summit will showcase everyone from seasoned pros to first-time speakers, and can span all stages of adoption of our technology. We especially encourage submissions from voices that have been traditionally underrepresented in the tech industry.
  2. Speaker support — If you are accepted to speak, our team will help you by reviewing and providing feedback on your title and abstract, your content (from your first draft to final slides), and can even coach you on developing your best video recording and speaking techniques.
  3. Social media support — We’ll provide all speakers with a social media graphic you can share out personally — or provide to your marketing team — to let your colleagues and communities know you’ll be a featured speaker at ScyllaDB Summit 2022.
  4. All sessions are pre-recorded — We’ll schedule individual recording appointments about a month before the event. Why so early? This helps in a variety of ways. We can ensure your talk will fit the proper session length. We can edit out small boofs, or even do more than one take if needed. You’ll never have to worry if a live demo is going to fail spectacularly! Plus, it helps us spend more time ahead of the event promoting your talk. Speaking of which…
  5. Video teasers — While we have you recording your session with our production team, we’ll also take the opportunity to get a short (minute or so) promotional video of you saying you’ll be speaking at ScyllaDB Summit. The sooner we can get that out into the world, the more people we can attract to see your talk at the event.
  6. You get to interact with the audience live throughout the session — It does feel a bit odd to see yourself on the main stage while you’re a member of the audience, but this gives you the chance to chat and interact with other attendees live the whole length of your session.
  7. Speaker’s Lounge — In face-to-face conferences, we all love that chance to gaggle in the hallways after a particularly awesome session. We’ve captured the spirit of that live event experience in our virtual Speaker’s Lounge — our virtual talk show. Once you wrap your scheduled session, as a speaker you’ll make your way to the lounge along with any interested attendees that wish to follow. We’ll have prepared some questions. The audience can ask their own, too. In fact, since you’ll be in the lounge along with other speakers, be prepared to pepper each other! We’ve found the interchanges quite lively and many speakers love to stick around in the lounge long after their scheduled talks are done.

Submissions Welcome!

The next part is up to you! Take a day or two to think about what you’d like to talk about. Bounce some ideas off your teammates and professional colleagues if you wish. Just don’t take too long and miss our November 7th deadline! We’re looking forward to reviewing all your great ideas. And if you have any questions which we haven’t answered above, we welcome you to send them to us at [email protected].

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.