What makes a good Ottawa Systems talk?

— And how do we choose them?

Thank you for being interested in giving at talk at Ottawa Systems. This is a community event and without speakers volunteering their time, it simply wouldn't happen.

If you think you have something that might be interesting to talk about then you are probably right!

If you are not used to public speaking or are worried about the quality level of your talk (especially if you've been impressed by our previous speakers or speakers at other events) then we hope Ottawa Systems can be a low stress place to start out.

Relation to "Systems"

We are a systems meet-up and so your talk should be related to computer systems or systems programming. Our homepage lists some example topics, but that's not a definitive list.

If your talk concerns latencies in milliseconds or less: it's probably a systems talk.

If you're counting instructions or you're managing your own memory, or you care about O(n) vs O(n²), and you're working with few layers of abstraction then that's a systems talk.

If you're using nano- or peta- prefixes on a unit: it's probably a systems talk.

Length

You have a 45 minute slot. We recommend preparing a 30 minute talk and leaving 15 minutes for questions and answers. If you think you need the full 45 minutes for your talk then that's fine too.

Demos & Access to Internet

There is Internet at our current venue but you are significantly improving your chances of success if you don't need to rely on anything outside of your own computer for your talk. If you have a live demo, we would encourage you to have a fallback (some slides or screenshots) in case of technical difficulties.

Preferred Approaches for Talks

We are lucky to have generally knowledgeable attendees: you should assume a high level of general computing knowledge and experience.

For example: while not everyone can program in Rust, you can probably assume most people will know what the borrow checker is.

For this reason we recommend that you avoid general introductions to a topic (which tend to be shallow) and instead focus deeply on one specific piece.

If you think that the average techie would need a brief introduction of some terms or a problem space in order to make sense of the rest of your talk, that's fine.

If your talk is extremely specific to one language or technology, beyond what can be assumed or introduced in a few slides at the start of your talk, it may be a bad fit for Ottawa Systems.

Some Example Tropes

We're not recommending this particular title format but if your talk would fit in with these, then that's a good sign.

General problem Y is solved, except for highly specific use-case X. (When your specific needs mean the normal advice breaks down.)
How I spent X hours hunting down an obscure bug with a Y line fix. (Debugging stories are welcome. We've all been there.)
The problems of doing X at scale. (A combination of the last two: we're doing a big thing, and here's why that's hard.)
You take X for granted but it's actually incredibly difficult to make it work. (Explaining how an outwardly simple thing is actually deeply complex.)

How the Organizers Choose Talks

We are more likely to choose talks from people who haven't spoken at Ottawa Systems before.
We are more likely to choose talks from people who have attended Ottawa Systems before.
We try to avoid too many talks about any single topic in a short period: if we recently had a talk on homelabs or robotics, we would prefer fresh topics for a while.
We try to avoid talks which are strongly suited to existing meet-ups in Ottawa.
Current and former Shopify employees, and men in general, are over-represented in the organizers' friend and peer groups. We want to avoid replicating that bias in our talks.
On a given evening we want to pick two talks which are sufficiently different that attendees who are not interested in one are likely to be interested in the other.