What we are looking for

We are looking for talks about your work in the world of Ruby and Rails, and/or tech and the broader community. Have you built something you were proud of, spent time working out the best way to achieve something, overcome hurdles at work or learned something new that you want to share? We’d love to hear about it!

The selection process

We want a diverse lineup of speakers from different backgrounds, genders, sexualities and ethnicities, speaking on a wide range of topics. To help us accomplish this, here is the process for submitting and reviewing talk proposals for RubyConf AU 2020:

Submission

Submit your talk through Papercall before 10:30 AM AEST on November 8th. If your talk is successful in being selected, the Elevator Pitch field may be used on our website to publicise your talk. The Description field, however, will be viewed by reviewers and organisers only (contrary to Papercall’s uneditable text in the submission form) - please provide as much detail there as you can to give your talk the best opportunity of being selected.

Shortlisting

A group of 3-4 reviewers, with diverse backgrounds and experience levels, will read through all anonymised talk proposals. They will shortlist roughly double the amount of required talks.

Selection

The reviewers and organisers will trim this shortlist to the required number of talks, with a buffer in case selected speakers withdraw. To increase speaker diversity and experience, proposals at this step will be de-anonymised. We believe this is necessary to ensure that our lineup is as varied as possible and better represents our broader society.

Notification: Selected speakers will be notified via email. We aim to have all speakers selected before November 30th. Submitters of unsuccessful proposals will also be notified by email.

Selected speakers will receive a ticket to the conference. If you are selected and have already purchased a ticket, you will be refunded the amount that you paid. There is also a travel allowance provided to speakers who don’t live in Melbourne.

Pro tips

Presenting a talk at RubyConf AU is an awesome opportunity to engage with the Ruby community. To help increase your chance of having a talk accepted, here are some ‘pro-tips’.

• Successful submissions in the past years have been detailed, focus on contemporary experience, applicable beyond a single implementation, considered diversity in viewpoints and personal background, and described novel experiences or developments in the chosen topic.
• If your talk is more general and not specifically about Ruby, then we prefer the talk to be language agnostic.
• We welcome multiple talk proposals per speaker, selecting a maximum of one talk per person. So please submit away!
• If your talk is successful in being selected, the Elevator Pitch may be used on our website to publicise your talk. The Description field, however, will be viewed by reviewers and organisers only (contrary to Papercall’s uneditable text in the submission form) - please provide as much detail there as you like.

Examples

Below are examples of what was entered in the Description field for accepted CFP submissions for RubyConf AU 2019.

Building API’s you want to hug with GraphQL

Come learn how adopting GraphQL has empowered our front-end engineers, made working with legacy code easier, help us reason better about authorization and have us thinking about types to boot!

We’ll take a look at why you should consider using GraphQL on your next project, how it compares to REST, and how it can help alleviate some of the more gnarly parts of your legacy code base.

Through this talk you’ll hear how we’ve adopted GraphQL in a number of projects, the successes and pitfalls we’ve seen as a result, as well as how we’ve evolved our implementations over time. You’ll learn all the nifty bits of the toolkit, like resolve wrappers, lazy execution, mutations, schema visibility, error handling and even some advanced techniques that will help you compose even more readable resolve functions. Not to mention how to debug your way out of trouble and back into your cat’s good graces.

If you’ve never considered GraphQL before, or really want to make your cat proud of you, you should absolutely attend this talk

Hacking Your Emotional API

Imagine that your brain is wired to an API, and that one of the endpoints triggers you to be absolutely furious when it’s called. All the other emotions have endpoints as well. This is the metaphor that I use to describe how feelings work.

When we think about emotions this way, they become a bit less scary. The metaphor allows us to use technical language to describe experiences which are often misunderstood.

To explain why it’s important to improve our emotional responses I go over research which describes how improperly handling your emotions can have significant impacts things like abstract thinking, short-term memory and executive function.

Then I present a toolbox full of techniques that you can use develop emotional fluency, and I illustrate a number of those techniques by describing my own emotional challenges as if they were written in code. I describe how I used those skills to “refactor” that code.

This topic is particularly relevant today, as the non-coding aspects of developer life are becoming more important than the coding ones. Thriving in a diverse community requires us to develop our skills in communication, understanding and empathy. I want to share what I’ve learned about emotions in a way developers can relate to, so they can grasp how feelings impact not only their own quality of work, but their ability to work well with others.