Hi all! As a few of you may remember, we had a small-group HAProxy workshop 3 years ago to see if it would be useful to meet from time to time and it was a great success that we've been impatient to re-edit but much wider, and not limited to developers.
Well, time flies, I'm a terrible organizer so I could definitely not handle this myself, but luckily we have at HapTech some people who are also interested in such a larger event and who have the skills and willingness to devote a lot of their time to organize this. The great news is that thanks to them we now have two days booked and a place! It will be in Amsterdam on November 12th and 13th this year. It's great to have such important points addressed (those I cannot deal with) but the most important part of the job remains in our responsibility, which is to provide some contents, and I think here is the right place to ask. The goal is to alternate full presentations (40 min) and lightning talks (10 min). In this timing there is no place for marketing stuff so we'll have to immediately go technical and informative (and fun if possible). So the question is : what could be presented ? I'd say that often for such conferences people imagine they have nothing interesting to present because it's specific to their use case. If you're currently thinking this, that's great, because you already think like a speaker, then take a few days to step back, think about it again, and you'll come back with an idea, trust me :-) In practice, what you're doing every day and that your friends and coworkers find smart or interesting will surely interest other people. You might have architected a nice solution to address certain issues related to scalability, filtering, config deployment, statistics/logs management and reporting. You may want to explain the tricks you invented to move some configs from another component to haproxy. You may also have something you're not proud of because you find it ugly but it does the job, and presenting it could help you get suggestions for better ways to do it or motivate some attendees to develop the feature you are missing and that they find easy to do. You may also have a number of griefs against haproxy about things you'd like to see evolve with suggestions about how to address them. You may have some patches that implement features specific to your use case that you are too ashamed to publish because you think you did some crap, while just presenting them could bring you some valuable feedback to help you polish your code and make a first submission. You may have developed some SPOA agents doing various fun stuff. You may also be working on some extensions that are not yet ready but for which you'd like to gauge the interest. Or if you've designed the next generation config generator for containers or whatever, surely it can get more exposure by being presented there. All such things could be presented. In order to save everyone's time we've set up a call-for-papers submission process. Just go to http://haproxyconf.com/ and click on the "Call for papers" button. You can submit your abstracts till June 21th 2019. A selection committee will pick the ones expected to be the most interesting for the most attendees. Those which are obvious vendor pitches will be evicted. I'm well placed to know that there is always a gray line in a presentation where it's natural to speak about one's company but while it's OK when it's just to plant the context and we all know that companies are willing to fly their employees away to have their logo on a public presentation, it's not OK when it only serves as free ad space with no value to share. If you're still hesitating or are too shy, think again about the lightning talks. 10 minutes, questions and answers included. Hint from someone gone through this: if you don't want to answer questions, make sure you don't leave enough time for them ;-) Oh and if you think you don't speak english well enough, just have a look at some of my presentations at Kernel Recipes and you'll see that attendees understand you even when you have a horrible french accent! Note that the event is split over two days to avoid the rush of arrival and departure (trains, planes) and to leave a bit of time between talks for people to discuss. Based on our past workshop and on other similar conferences I've participated to, I expect we'll have a great moment that we'll want to reiterate next year! And it would be a great opportunity for many of us to meet for the first time. My coworkers who've been setting this up are willing to respond to questions about the process if they are addressed at submiss...@haproxy.com. Just to finish, here are the important points again : - when: November 12th-13th - where: Amsterdam (The Netherlands) - contact: submiss...@haproxy.com - site: https://www.haproxyconf.com/ - CFP: https://www.haproxyconf.com/call-for-papers/ - deadline: June 21th 2019 Hoping to meet many of you there, Willy
