We’re delighted that you’re thinking of submitting a proposal to The Lead Developer Call for Papers, whether it be for New York (February 2017) or London (June 2017).
Everyone has something to share – and we’d love The Lead Developer to be the conference where you choose to share it. We are keen and committed to getting submissions from as broad, diverse and representative a range of potential speakers as we possibly can.
We have a strong Code of Conduct that we emphasise and are committed to, and our conference staff and volunteers are ready and trained to respond to any issues. Speaker travel and accommodation is funded, and we will book things and pay for them upfront to save you having to submit expenses afterwards if you prefer. We also offer an honorarium to thank you for your time. The night before the conference, we host a low-key speaker dinner so you can meet your fellow speakers and get to know the chair and organisers too. Post-conference, you’ll receive professional photos of yourself onstage, and we make videos of all the talks available for free online following the conference, with speakers of course retaining copyright.
Our audience consists of tech leads, lead developers, and engineering managers, as well as CTOs and VP Engineering folk. They are consistently technical (across a very broad range of technologies and industries) and at minimum coaching and leading, with many also line managing people in their organisations. Some folks also attend when they have just been promoted, or when they are trying to figure out what skills they need to develop in order to progress into a tech lead role.
We also welcome product owners, scrum masters, agile coaches, designers, content designers and anyone else involved in delivering technical or digital products who is interested in our programme of speakers to attend, but our primary focus is content that is useful to technical leaders.
Our three main themes for The Lead Developer are Team, Tech & Tools.
We have two types of talk slot – a ten minute lightning talk, and a 30 minute full length talk. If you’re able to flex your talk to fit either slot, please tell us!
We tend to have a lot more submissions for full length talks, and so if you can do a great 10 minute talk you might have a better chance of being selected.
Some examples of topics around Team that interest us include:
The kinds of talks that work well for Tech include:
Bear in mind that though our audience is typically technical, folks come from all different kinds of organisations and specialisations – so an overview of new approaches for building mobile apps might be appropriate, but a deep dive into Swift likely isn’t going to be super accessible for everyone in the audience.
For the Tools theme, we mean tools as well as process and ways of working, including:
If you have a proposal or idea for a talk that doesn’t fit exactly into these themes, or works across more than one, please do submit it! We keep a slot or two available for “wildcards” – something that doesn’t necessarily exactly fit the description of the themes above, but we nevertheless feel would be interesting, inspiring or entertaining for our attendees. There is absolutely no harm in submitting something that might be a little left field – we will consider it alongside all the other submissions.