DevOpsDays DFW 2024 is currently accepting talk proposals. These are 30~45 minutes presentation sessions that follow the Guidelines listed below. We are also accepting Ignite Talk proposals from interested speakers. The Ignite Talks are auto-advancing five-minute talks with 20 slides (max.). If you aren’t familiar with the Ignite Talk format, you can find some examples at: http://ignitetalks.io/.

Our programming is focused on four goals:

Local Speakers

Our primary focus this year is to grow the local DevOps leadership community in Dallas-Fort Worth. We want to provide a platform for local leaders and practitioners to share their ideas. Building a local community is core to the mission of DevOpsDays. Therefore, we will be actively recruiting diverse local speakers and adding an emphasis to local voices, however all speakers are encouraged to submit interesting talks for consideration.

Diverse backgrounds

We are eager to provide a platform to our speakers. If DevOps hasn’t included people like you in the past, tell us about it in your proposal. We want to make a space for the perspectives of people that are underrepresented in technology like people of color, women, LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, students, veterans, and many more. In more specific context of this event, we want to hear about DevOps from a wide set of roles: QA testers, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, government employees, scientists, and any other technologists who face unique challenges.

New ideas

Sure, we know that in the past 10 years since the inception of DevOps that emerging technologies such as Cloud, Big Data, and containers have been hot topics of discussion - but what’s going to be hot next year? What about in five years? Platform Engineering, Managed Services, or Serverless? Present the right idea at the right time, and you could help shape the future of DevOps! To help keep our content fresh, preference will also be given to talks that have never been presented at a conference, and speakers who aren’t regulars on the “conference circuit”.

Healthy discussion

Most session submissions focus on how to use a specific piece of technology - and most of those are not accepted. The most memorable conference talks question assumptions, make predictions, or draw conclusions. It’s even okay to (respectfully) tell someone that they’re wrong - we’d much rather have a disagreement than a room full of nodding heads! DevOpsDays are centered around open spaces, and a good session should act like fertilizer for them, giving people something to start talking about. We’re also very interested in nominations. Did you see an awesome presentation at another conference? Is one of your friends hoping to break into the conference circuit? Let us know who to reach out to or send an introductory email yourself!

Guidelines

For DevOpsDays DFW 2024, we are actively soliciting talk proposals that address these topics and not limited to:

• Security in DevOps
• DevOps in the Enterprise
• Continuous Learning, such as Dojos
• Gen AI applied to DevOps in practice
• Software development practices for the DevOps world
• Site Reliability Engineering
• Quantifying productivity, failure, and risk metrics
• Serverless/NoOps
• Building culture
• Infrastructure as Code
• Microservices
• Containerization
• Professional development, teaching, training, and mentorships
• Emotional labor and empathy
• Teaching junior engineers how to be senior engineers
• Mental health, stress, and burnout
• Learning lessons from other fields (manufacturing, military, etc.)

We will also accept submissions on perennially popular topics as discussed at other DevOpsDays:

• Continuous Deployment
• Automation
• Public and private cloud computing
• Performance Monitoring
• Configuration Management
• Managed Services
• Development methodology
• Software craftsmanship
• Scaling out DevOps
• Hiring for DevOps

However, please consider that novelty is heavily encouraged as per our guidelines above. These topics are popular, but every year we will be receiving more submissions about them than we can accept.

Please keep these guidelines in mind:

Absolutely no vendor pitches

If your talk is only interesting to someone paying money for your product, it’s a bad fit for DevOpsDays.

Follow the devopsdays.org Anti-Harassment Policy and Code Of Conduct

For example: no heckling, no threats, no sexualized language or imagery, no insulting audience members

Explain why your proposal is interesting to the DevOps community

We’d rather have a lackluster abstract about a very interesting topic than a detailed outline of a topic that isn’t a good fit.

Your talk will go through a blind review process

That means that reviewers will receive a version of your talk edited to obscure all names, companies, and so on. Make sure that your proposal still makes sense without this information.

Avoid purely technical talks

We all love technology, but this isn’t a programming language conference or a Docker conference. Talk about tools in the context in which they’ll be used and relate them to the problems that they solve. There’s plenty of time to have technical discussions about tools and emerging technologies during open spaces if you propose the topic.

Multiple proposals will not all be accepted

If you send in five proposals, we will accept the one that is the best fit for the conference. It’s very rare that any speaker will speak more than once, because that would lead to very homogeneous programming.