We’re looking for high-quality, technical and non-technical sessions from speakers who can cover advanced topics and keep our demanding audience inspired.

We’ve had great speakers presenting talks about the PHP ecosystem, frameworks, DevOps, architecture, JavaScript, scaling, testing, performance, security and more. And we would like to advance on these very topics for this year’s conference as well.

But we also would like to invite speakers to talk about non-technical subjects that are increasingly instrumental in maintaining success as a developer or development team. These are topics like communication, understanding, relationships, (self) management and even the business and economics part of development. In other words: the soft skills that complement the deep technical skills. And about the surrounding environment necessary to be successful as a technical developer.

This invitation is intentionally a bit broad in the hope to inspire everyone to share their ideas and insights and hard-fought experience in the broader development arena that we all thrive in.

The call for papers is open up to and including July 28th. You can send in as many proposals as you like, so start submitting your talks!

Talk categories

• The standard conference sessions should be 45 minutes including Q&A.
• Deep-dive session: 90 minutes including Q&A.
• Keynote session should be 50 minutes and topics should be appealing to the majority of the audience.
• Activity for conference social (e.g. Pub Quiz, group games).

Talk levels explained

The audience at DPC mainly consists of professional full-stack PHP developers. Some just started their professional career and others are seasoned professionals. Some are more front-end oriented, others prefer back-end development. Most, if not all, will use frameworks and are familiar with agile processes.

• Beginner: meaning the audience does not have much experience with this specific topic.
• Intermediate: meaning the audience has some knowledge of the topic and some real-life experience but has no in-depth knowledge.
• Advanced: meaning the audience has lots of experience with this topic and wants to learn hidden features, advanced techniques, etc from an expert on the topic.

Tips for submission

• Be sure your talk title and abstract define the exact topic you want to talk about, and what you hope people will learn from the session.
• Include 3-4 bullet points of what the audience will learn.
• Please keep talk titles short (max. 50 characters). This ensures the talk title fits the schedule format which is aimed at readability in print and on mobile).
• If available, please include links to slides, reviews (on joind.in for example), and videos of the submitted talk.

Once the Call For Papers closes, the organizers handpick a team of developers for the selection committee. Each member rates all submitted talks on a scale of 1 - 10. The organizers average up the ratings and do some manual review for statistical outliers. This means we don’t only look at the overall average but also at talks that receive high ratings from a subset of the selection committee. With these results, the organizers will start making final picks.

The scores from the selection committee are leading but a few other factors are involved:

• We try to ensure a wide variety of presentations.
• We are committed to present a diverse speaker line-up.
• We look for a balance between well-known veterans and exciting young upstarts.

In short, we prefer exciting content over exciting presentations (although both doesn't hurt) so hit us with your best topics.

If you have been selected, you will receive a confirmation email followed by more details as the event draws closer. We expect to release the schedule within six weeks after the CFP closing.

Every year we receive many submissions and we have to turn down many excellent talks. If your submissions are in this category we will inform you by email as soon as possible.