Rootconf Mini 2025, Hyderabad

General guidelines for submitting talk and demo proposals

We appreciate that many participants create submissions out of a genuine desire to share knowledge with our community, and to contribute in a meaningful way. However, many written submissions fail to capture the attention of the community, or meet acceptance through Rootconf’s peer review process. More often than not this is because the content of the submission does not explain what they intend with sufficient clarity or detail.

The template (and example) is an attempt to help you write a better submission, one that is noticed and understood by your intended audience and not lost in the crowd of interesting proposals we receive. Please use this template as a guideline, while ensuring that it is in your own unique and authentic voice.

BEFORE you begin writing your submission, please give some thought to the following:

1. Who is the audience for your session? Think about their interests, work roles, challenges, age or experience as you decide this.
2. What problem/pain are you trying to solve (for the audience)? This should be something that is communicated clearly so that they have a sense of your session’s importance.
3. What will be the scope of your session? This will help identify the central topic or theme and should describe broad areas you plan to cover during the session?
4. How will participants benefit from your session? Think of practical and specific ways in which they will be able to apply the knowledge they gain, and beyond just general awareness.
5. What is the appropriate format for your session, given the audience and objectives that you have in mind?

The most successful talks and sessions are those where presenters are able to abstract an actionable insight from a common pain area, enlighten the audience about something new, provide a fresh perspective, and/or demonstrate innovation.

Here’s a guide for speakers to draft their presentations.

You can view submisisons from Rootconf Mini 2024 for reference. Here are some notable submissions:

1. Rebuilding Tecton’s Realtime Compute stack
2. An exploratory study on Finetuning LLMs
3. Path for secure software engineering for startups

The call for submissions will be close on 10 January 2025. Talks will be selected on a rolling basis as submissions are made.

Topics for submitting talks

A. Systems engineering:

• Resilience engineering in complex systems
• Advanced observability practices
• Serverless architectures: costs, benefits and challenges
• Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies
• Kubernetes in production: lessons learned
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline automation

B. Security engineering:

• Security engineering case studies - systems/processes/practices that organizations have developed
• Security tooling experiences - open source and proprietary
• Cloud security - case studies
• Security for AI; AI and security products

Types of submissions

You can submit a session for:

1. 25 mins talk
2. 10 mins demos and experience reports with dev tools and security tools
3. Birds of Feather (BOF) sessions
4. Hands-on workshops for three hours duration