With a focus on front-end JS, we’re looking for a few great speakers to deliver engaging 15 or 30 minute sessions in a casual pub setting. In our experience, some things that work well:

• Inspiring talks
• Talks with very impressive audio or visual demos
• Audience interaction
• Humour

In general, talks that are advanced architecture talks or product vendor pitches are not good targets for this event.

Please keep in mind that we have a very limited number of speaking slots (last year we had 13 speakers, with the goal of having a strong narrative between sessions). Please do not be discouraged, we just have very few open slots and many great talk proposals will not be accepted.

That said, we’re going to do something interesting this year. Beyond the talks we accept for the live session, if you submit a talk proposal and it is not accepted, we will give you the opportunity to record your own session and we’ll share it along with the sessions we record from the event. This allows us to make HalfStack be bigger than just the live sessions on the day of the conference, and a way to promote your talk to all conference attendees.

We’re open to interesting and unusual sessions, but we’ll also include a few sessions that are introductory as well. Also we hope that possible speakers will be open to suggestions in how their talk might fit in (e.g. if we have two speakers talking about overlapping topics, we’ll do an introduction so that you don’t overlap in talking about the same thing). If you have not previously attended one of our events, please watch some videos from last year’s sessions to get ideas for what works well at HalfStack!

We strive for strong speaker diversity while asking that talk proposals focus on topics and ideas that fit in with the HalfStack contest. We also aim for original talks, though we appreciate that strong talk proposals are likely to be accepted at many events.

Note that sponsorship does not influence talk selection. Our committee selects talks based on a number of factors, with the primary goal being an event with a very enjoyable narrative.

Finally, if you have videos or abstracts from previous sessions, please share.