Encourage people you know to submit - especially those who wouldn’t normally do so and/or might normally be underrepresented at a tech conference!

Key dates

The deadline for submissions is: August 28th, 2017 AoE. If it’s still August 28th, 2017 anywhere on earth, you can still submit a proposal!

We’ll let you know if your talk is accepted by: September 18th, 2017.

Perks

Speakers get free admission to PyCascades. Grants to assist with your travel and lodging expenses are available as well. If you have an employer and they are able to provide sponsorship for your travel please ask your employer first.

Financial Aid

Please note in your submission that you will require financial assistance, and fill out the financial aid application form.

Proposal Submission Guidelines

Everyone who is interested is encouraged to submit a proposal, regardless of experience level. PyCascades thrives on having talks ranging from introductory to advanced. If you are reading this, and you are interested in speaking at PyCascades, we want you to submit a proposal.

There is no official restriction on the topic that you propose for a talk session. Talks about Python or the Python community are most likely to line up with the interests of PyCascades’ audience. We observe a limit of one talk per presenter. You may propose more than one, but the committee will ask you to choose only one talk if more than one of your proposals is accepted.

Your proposal should include the following elements:

• Short Abstract Once accepted, the abstract will be published in the conference program.

• Talk Description and Detailed Outline These sections will not be made public, and only visible to the reviewers and program selection committee. Please include detailed outline with timings for each section.

Presentations will be scheduled in 25 minute blocks. We won’t be doing Q&A after the talks, but we ask that speakers be available at the front of the stage for a few minutes of the break after their talk to answer questions.

Talk proposals will be reviewed anonymously.

Need help?

Need help with proposing, preparing, or presenting your talk? Regardless of your experience, feel free to reach out to one of our mentors. In addition, please note in your submission that you will need a mentor. We can get you in touch. If you would like to be a speaker mentor, let us know! Know someone who would be an awesome speaker mentor? Recommend them to us!

Speaker mentors

• Cris Ewing Cris is a long-time member of the Python community. An engineer and an educator, Cris has delivered talks, lectures and tutorials at a variety of events over the last 15 years, including a keynote talk at PyCon in 2016. Cris would be happy to help!

• Lorena Mesa Political analyst turned coder, Lorena Mesa is a Sprout Social software engineer in data science, Director on the Python Software Foundation, PyLadies Chicago co-organizer, and Tech Ladies Chicago city organizer. Lorena would love to help especially with slide preparation, practice, and supporting new speakers.

• Andrew Brown Andrew is a mathematician turned data scientist. Andrew has been teaching and presenting regularly since he was in cadets as a teenager. Andrew can help with slides preparation and talk practice.

• John DeRosa John has been a Pythonista and Djangonaut since 2005. He’s now a Senior Developer with Coffee Meets Bagel. Before that, he was a Senior Developer at CBRE, CTO at IP Street, and Director of Web Development for Fisher Communications. He has an MS Computer Science from University of Washington. John’s happy to help with any aspect of your talk!

• Alan Vezina Alan Vezina is an experienced software engineer, avid cyclist, and sandwich connoisseur. He currently works as a Senior Software Engineer at ModusBox where he focuses on data visualization. He spends his time outside of work as a Co-Organizer of PuPPy (Puget Sound Programming Python), which is one of the largest Python groups in the United States. His duties as Co-Organizer include Emceeing events, finding potential speakers, and helping craft slide decks & content for technical talks.

• Maria McKinley Maria has given a couple of talks at Puget Sound Python meet up group, and is an instructor for the UW Python Certificate Program. She is also a Senior Software Engineer at Disney, and a member of Toastmasters (an organization for improving public speaking and leadership skills). She would love to help you with your talk.

• Brian Dorsey Brian is a Developer Advocate on the Google Cloud Developer Relations team. He helps with the full spectrum of compute services; from VMs, through containers, PaaS and more. Brian has taught Python at the University of Washington & spoken at both PyCon US & PyCon Japan. He’s a bit of a Python fan (understatement). He’s learning Go and enjoying it.

• Sam Kitajima-Kimbrel Sam is a Python developer and distributed-systems “enthusiast” hailing from Seattle by birth, New York by nurture, and the Bay Area by choice. Five years ago he attended his first PyCon US and hasn’t been able to break the habit; after making the jump from audience to stage in 2014 and speaking regularly at events around the world, he’s excited to be giving back some of his expertise to PyCascades speakers! Sam currently works at Nuna building healthcare data infrastructure for the U.S. Medicaid and Medicare programs and resides in Oakland, CA with his husband Kameron.