Call for speakers for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022

Written by Claire Giordano
January 31, 2022

When you find yourself answering the same questions again and again, it’s a good idea to blog about it. Which is why this post about Citus Con: An Event for Postgres exists: to answer your questions, and share the news about this first-ever, inaugural event.

Citus Con: An Event for Postgres is a free and virtual developer event happening in April 2022, organized by the Postgres and Citus team here at Microsoft. Speakers will come from different parts of the Postgres ecosystem, including Postgres users, Citus open source users, Azure Database for PostgreSQL customers, and developers/experts in PostgreSQL and Postgres extensions, like Citus.

The Call for Proposals (CFP) for Citus Con is open until Feb 6th. Whether this will be your 1000th conference talk or your very 1st, we’d love to see what Postgres experiences you have to share.

Key things to know about this new event, before diving into the CFP

  • What: a virtual & free developer event
  • Call for Proposals: The CFP is open until Sunday Feb 6, 2022 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (PT)
  • Virtual: no travel required
  • Length of talks: 25 minutes/session
  • Video recording & production: All you need is a good microphone & a decent webcam: our team will take care of the recording, editing, and production for you
  • Format: 3 different 3-hour livestreams in the Americas, APAC, and EMEA geographies, plus some on-demand talks too
  • Talks posted online: Both the livestream & on-demand talks will be published online on YouTube after the event, free for anyone to watch.
  • When: Event will take place online on Apr 12-13, 2022
  • Other dates & deadlines: Important dates are spelled out at the top of the Speaker FAQ here
  • Code-of-conduct: Yes, you can find our event’s CoC online
  • Carbon negative: Even virtual events have an environmental impact. So we’re partnering with Tradewater to fully offset the carbon emissions from the event and then more—making the event carbon negative

Call for Speakers = Call for Proposals = CFP is open until Feb 6th, 2022

Do you have a Postgres story to tell? Some hard-earned lessons to share? Insights about how you use Postgres—or how you built a new feature in Postgres (or Citus)? A migration story? Or how you tuned performance? Maybe a talk about how you’re using PostGIS to do something spatial, or how you’re using Citus for sharding, or how you’re using t-digest and rollups to analyze timeseries data? The talk selection team for Citus Con can’t wait to review your proposal.

If you’re ready to submit into the Citus Con CFP now, our CFP page is a good place to get started since it answers all your questions. When you’re ready, just submit the proposal on Sessionize.

If you haven’t submitted a proposal yet but you’re thinking about it and need a nudge of encouragement, here is a long list of reasons to give a Postgres talk.

And if you’re looking for advice about what makes a good talk proposal, there are some good speaker resources on the FAQ page. Including these favorites:

Ideas for talk topics for Citus Con

Do you need ideas about what kind of talk proposals to submit? If yes, you’re in luck, we put together a list of topics we’re hoping to see submitted in the Call-for-Proposals. Please know this is not an exhaustive list though—rather, these ideas are just meant to get your creativity flowing:

  • How you run your app on Postgres on Azure
  • Citus open source user stories
  • Scaling out Postgres with Hyperscale (Citus)
  • How you use other Postgres extensions, like PostGIS, pg_cron, HLL, t-digest, pg_auto_failover, postgres_fdw, & so many more
  • New innovations in Postgres
  • Postgres community
  • Generally interesting Postgres knowledge
  • Data modeling and SQL best practices
  • Tips for building your application on Azure Database for PostgreSQL
  • Techniques for using Postgres at any scale with Citus—from single-node to a distributed cluster
  • Migrating to Postgres on Azure
  • Monitoring tools for Postgres on Azure
  • Postgres performance (including analytics and time series workloads)
  • Azure ecosystem integrations with Postgres
  • Using Postgres with Python and Django applications
timeline graphic for Citus Con
Figure 1: Timeline for the very first Citus Con: An Event for Postgres, a free and virtual developer event happening on April 12-13, 2022.

Everyone is welcome

Everyone is welcome. And by everyone we mean everyone, whether you are just starting to learn about Postgres or you’ve been working in this space for decades. Experts and newcomers. Students and professors. Users and developers. Technologists and managers. Open source contributors, as well as those who’ve worked with proprietary software their whole careers and want to learn more about this Postgres thing. Our conference organizers aim to give all of you an experience that is respectful, friendly, professional—and useful.

Because Citus Con will be virtual, all you need is an internet connection, and time. Hopefully the virtual format will make it easier for you to participate from the comfort of your own desk.

  • CFP for Citus Con closes on Feb 6, 2022: If you want to propose a talk, be sure to submit to the CFP before the CFP closes on Sunday night, Feb 6th 2022.
  • Join us on Apr 12-13, 2022 for the big event: Come join us virtually and be part of the very first Citus Con. For now, just click on the Save-the-date button on the Citus Con homepage here. And learn even more about what you can do with the world’s most advanced open source relational database—from the nerdy to the sublime.
  • Want to help spread the word?: Because Citus Con is a first-time event, not everyone has heard about it yet. If you’re on Twitter and you want to help more people learn about it, you can follow or RT some @CitusCon tweets. Or just share the CFP page with your friends, teammates, and fellow fans of Postgres.
Claire Giordano

Written by Claire Giordano

Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Alum of Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Conference speaker at PGConfEU, FOSDEM, PGConf NYC, Nordic PGDay, pgDay Paris, PGDay Chicago, Swiss PGDay, & Citus Con. Talk Selection Team chair for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.

@clairegiordano @clairegiordano@hachyderm.io clairegiordano