Proposal template

You do not need to answer everything perfectly in the first pass. Start with what you know. Short, rough answers are fine. The editorial team may follow up to help shape the proposal further.

{Session title - a working title is fine}

{One-line summary - in 1–2 sentences, describe the engineering problem, experience, or question your session explores.}

{What problem are you addressing? What real engineering challenge, question, or experience is this session about?
You may include:

• What made the problem difficult or interesting
• Constraints, assumptions, scale, or trade-offs
• Why this matters to engineering teams}

{Who is the intended audience? Platform Engineering/SRE/DevOps/Infrastructure/Developers/Engineering leaders/Other}

{Level: beginner/intermediate/advanced}

{List one or two practical takeaways.}

{What will you share? This can be:

• Architecture or design decisions
• Code or implementation details
• Production experience
• Benchmarks or measurements
• Failure modes and debugging
• Operational challenges
• Trade-offs and alternatives
• Incident / postmortem
• Live demo
• Open-source tooling
• Before-and-after experience}

{What is your experience with this problem? Choose any that apply:

• Production system
• Real incident or failure
• Internal engineering project
• Open-source project
• Experiment or prototype
• Research / investigation
• Hard-earned engineering lesson}

{What approaches failed, disappointed, or created unexpected problems?}

{What will you do differently today?}

{What trade-offs did you consider? For example,

• Why one architecture over another?
• Why build vs. buy?
• What did you optimize for?
• What did you knowingly give up?
• What alternatives did you consider?}

{How can this help other practitioners?

• A design approach
• A debugging technique
• A pattern to adopt
• A mistake to avoid
• A way to evaluate competing approaches
• A set of operational practices
• A new way of thinking about the problem}

{Current state - choose one:

• Production experience
• In progress
• Experimental/prototype
• Open source
• Retrospective/lessons from a previous system}

{Add tags to help us understand your proposal. Tags may describe domains, techniques, systems, or formats, for example: #observability #inference #agents #security #governance #finops #sre #devops #platformengineering #mlops #databases #scalability #kubernetes #developerplatforms #failurestory #demo #workshop #casestudy #workinprogress}