Call for Speakers

Submit Your Talks Now

Our call for speakers is officially open. The theme of our workshop is "Perl in Practice". That means we're interested in the practical side of Perl. We love JAPHs and Perl poetry, but that's not what we're looking for. We want to hear about things that solve practical problems.

The call for speakers has closed. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals.

Here's some general ideas to spur your thinking.

"I Couldn't Do It Without Module X"

Is there a module (or three) that you find fantastically useful? Well, why not tell everyone else about it. And yes, it's okay if you wrote the module yourself, as long as it's on CPAN.

Doing File/Network IO/Daemons/Web Services with Perl

Do you know how to do some specific thing with Perl that you'd like to tell people about?

My Great Perl Project

Did you work on an interesting project that used Perl? Tell us about it.

Debugging/Testing/Profiling Perl

Debugging, testing, and profiling are always important with any language. If you have some tips we'd like to hear them.

Perl and Some Other Thing

Interfaced with another system in Perl, maybe a web service, a legacy app, or another language? Tell us how you did it.

Software Development in General

Topics that go beyond Perl, such as testing, managing technical debt, or development practices are all fair game.

Tracks

There will be two tracks at Frozen Perl, one for beginners and one for intermediate to advanced talks.

The beginners track is aimed at people who are new to Perl or programming in general. Good talks for this track might be those that cover a basic module everyone should know about, or introduce a few intermediate-level regex features.

When submitting a talk for the beginners track, please make sure to tell us what you expect from your audience, such as knowing about certain Perl features or modules, or maybe familiarity with web programming idioms.

The intermediate to advanced track is pretty much wide open. Anything goes, as long as it fits in with our "Perl in Practice" theme.

Talk Length

Talks can be either 20 or 50 minutes. We encourage people to submit 20 minute talks, as we'd like to include as many speakers as possible, and 50 minutes is pretty long to sit and listen to someone anyway.

If you're a first-time speaker, we strongly suggest you submit a 20 minute talk, as a successful 50 minute talk takes some practice.

We'll also be doing a Lightning Talk session. More details on that TBA.

Common Questions and Answers

Can I submit multiple talks?

Yes, please do! More talks give us more to choose from, which is really helpful for us.

I'm not a big name, who wants to hear me?

We do. As a community, we want to encourage people to step up and try new things, so we're really excited to see submissions from new people. All the well-known speakers of today were first-timers once.

You don't need to be a guru to give an interesting talk. Just pick one topic you know a bit more about than other people.

My topic really needs more time!

No, it doesn't. People have short attention spans when listening to people talk, and it takes a very experienced speaker to make long sessions work. Pick the highlights for your topic and if it's interesting people will get in touch with you outside your talk to discuss it.

Why is this a call for speakers, not papers?

Yes, it's traditional to call it a "call for papers", but have you been to a YAPC, OSCON, or Perl workshop recently where someone wrote a paper?

Copyright © 2008 Minneapolis Perl Mongers
The Perl logo is a trademark of the Perl Foundation.