Get those CFPs in
Last year, Sandi Metz asked you, "What are you afraid of?", we had a great response and a successful conference. This year we're looking to expand on the range of topics from previous years. "Our CFP" mentions that explicitly:
We’re interested in talks on Ruby, but also topics that would of interest to the modern development community. Examples could include Go, Clojure, JS MVC Frameworks, Docker, RaspberryPi / Arduino, DevOps, language implementation, CS theory, or something else.
Jacob Burkhark from EngineYard blogged last year about his conference experience and encouraged people to submit more talks:
Instead of being the expert on a topic, be the expert on your own experience. That’s it. Who isn’t the expert on his or her own experience?
Davey Shafik, also from EngineYard also discussed his experience, and gave this nugget of advice:
Look at schedules from previous years for the conference (if they exist) to get an idea of what experience level the conference targets, and observe the associated community to see what people are interested in — what are emerging trends and topics that people are fascinated by?
So on that note, why not check out GORUCOs previous speakers to get an impression of what it takes to get a talk accepted. All you need is just a synopsis and a biography. You don't need to have a whole talk planned out, just an idea and the desire to share your story is enough to get started.
Looking for some inspiration? Let's take a look at a few different types of talks.
Last year Michael Bernstein gave a thorough and entertaining talk To Know A Garbage Collector. I'd classify this as a discovery talk, as Michael shares what he found while diving into this topic most of us would rather let a compiler deal with.
It started as an obsession with making the web application used at my day job faster, and ended with trying to implement new Garbage Collection algorithms in a notoriously insane codebase. Garbage collection is an epic hack and a triumphant abstraction that supports various programming paradigms. As hardware and software changes, Garbage Collection's role also changes but remains equally important. I'll discuss my experiments with MRI Ruby, my investigations into other languages and the influence of their GC implementations, the history of the subject, and more.
Have you taken the time to learn something that comprehensively, and do you want to share that story? Let us know.
Back in 2011 Jeremy Ashkenas gave CoffeeScript for the Well-Rounded Rubyist, giving a 101 talk and comparing it with Ruby:
You may have heard the controversy about CoffeeScript becoming the default client-side language in Rails 3.1. We'll tackle CoffeeScript (and JavaScript) from a Rubyist's perspective, comparing object models, closures, syntax and more. Learning about CoffeeScript can help highlight the Ruby-ish parts of JavaScript.
Maybe there's a tool, or language that is your everyday bread and butter. Feel like telling us how to get started, and how to be productive? Let us know.
There are so many more types of talks too, from experience reports like John Pignata's Asynchronous Service Oriented Design, software design talks like Matt Wynne's Hexagonal Rails, and more.
The CFP for GORUCO 2014 closes on March 14th, so better get those CFPs in.