If you’ve ever been to a conference, particularly as a speaker whose submitted a paper that may or may not have been accepted, you might wonder quite how conferences choose the talks that get accepted.

I had the privilege of chairing the program committee for Current and Kafka Summit this year and curating the final program for both. Here’s a glimpse behind the curtains of how we built the program for Current 2022. It was originally posted as a thread on Twitter.

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Lightning talks are generally 5-10 minutes. As the name implies - they are quick!

A good lightning talk is not just your breakout talk condensed into a shorter time frame. You can’t simply deliver the same material faster, or the same material at a higher level, or the same material with a few bits left out

Building the program for any conference is not an easy task. There will always be a speaker disappointed that their talk didn’t get in—or perhaps an audience who are disappointed that a particular talk did get in. As the chair of the program committee for Current 22 one of the things that I’ve found really useful in building out the program this time round are the comments that the program committee left against submissions as they reviewed them.

There were some common patterns I saw, and I thought it would be useful to share these here. Perhaps you’re an aspiring conference speaker looking to understand what mistakes to avoid. Maybe you’re an existing speaker whose abstracts don’t get accepted as often as you’d like. Or perhaps you’re just curious as to what goes on behind the curtains :)

This post is the companion to an earlier one that I wrote about conference abstracts. In the same way that the last one was inspired by reviewing a ton of abstracts and noticing a recurring pattern in my suggestions, so this one comes from reviewing a bunch of slide decks for a forthcoming conference. They all look like good talks, but in several cases these great talks are fighting to get out from underneath the deadening weight of slides.

Herewith follows my highly-opinionated, fairly-subjective, and extremely-terse advice and general suggestions for slide decks. You can also find relating ramblings in this recent post too. My friend and colleague Vik Gamov also wrote a good post on this same topic, and linked to a good video that I’d recommend you watch.