Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

If you’re thinking of starting, our developing your speaking career, our Call for Presentations for all of our 2020 events, across design, development, product, leadership, and people/talent/culture are now open–with our Code and Code Leaders conference CFPs closing February 14th.

And, we’d love to hear your proposals for our 2020 conferences.

We want you to succeed

Whether you’re very experienced, just starting out, or anywhere in between we’re keen to help you develop your capability as a speaker. Numerous people who’ve started on our stages have ended up speaking at events all over the world. Regardless of your ambition, there are few steps you can take to develop your career more significantly than preparing and delivering a talk in a room of your peers.

If you’ve been to our conferences, you’ll know there’s a mix of longer (around 45 minute, usually invited), and shorter (around 20 minute) presentations. 20 minutes is an ideal time to address one thing in some detail, while not being an overwhelming first step as a speaker.

Some hints to give you a better chance of acceptance

• If we see proposals we really like, we start pencilling them in before the closing date. So it pays to not wait until last minute.
• We’re also happy for multiple proposals from the same person.
• We provide detailed information about the kind of sessions we’re looking for at our speaking page. 
• And past presentations are a good indication of the sort of thing we’re looking for as well.

Want to talk a bit more about your proposal?

We’re always happy to talk more–just email [email protected] and we can discuss it more!

What are we looking for?

Code, our 2 day, single track conference on front end engineering

Code focusses on 

• key front end technologies like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and browser APIs (especially newer APIs people may not be so aware of)
• areas of engineering practice like performance, security, testing, debugging
• Computer science concepts like algorithms, mathematics, garbage collection, functional programming

In particular we have typically stayed away from specific solutions, whether open source or commercial, no matter how widely used and popular they might currently be. “How to do X with Angular” (or React), for example, is well served elsewhere and unlikely to be accepted for our conferences. We focus on long term foundational technologies and practices.

Code Leaders, our 1 day single track conference on engineering leadership

This focusses on the challenges facing professionals managing and leading engineering teams. If you lead developers, we’d love to hear from you about the challenges you face and the way you go about solving them. This could be architectural, but often covers more people focussed concepts.  

Code and Code Leaders take place late May 2020 in Melbourne
Call for presentations for Code and Code Leaders close February 14 2020

Product (Design and Management) Conference

As we’ve recently announced, in 2020 we’re merging out Design and Product conferences as a single 2 day, 2 track conference.

• For the product design track: We’re looking for all things product design, beyond–every aspect of the design lifecycle, from Research to UX, UI, IxD, visual design, designops, and more.
• For the product management track: All things product–from building and leading product teams to discovery, delivery, onboarding, growth and more. Share your practical hard earned experience with your peers.

Design Leaders

We’re looking for topics relevant to current and aspiring design leaders–hiring, mentoring, scaling design, communicating design, ethics, and the other challenges design leaders face.

Product and Design Leaders take place early July 2020 in Melbourne
Call for presentations for Product and Design Leaders close March 14 2020

Web Directions Summit 2020

The final event for 2020 is our annual Summit, with this year 4 tracks–Product Design, Product Management, Front end engineering and for the first time a People/Talent/Culture track (we’ve taken our Culture conference and turned it into a 2 day track at Summit).

All proposals for our other conferences will be considered for the relevant track at Summit, and we also accept proposals for Summit as well.

Web Directions Summit takes place early November 2020 in Sydney
Call for presentations for Web Directions Summit close May 1 2020

What Do Speakers Get?

We cover speakers conference ticket (of course) and travel and accomodation (if required). There’s a fantastic dinner which gives speakers the opportunity to connect with one another, as well as Gold ticket holders from the conference. 
We also professionally video presentations, caption and transcribe them, allowing speakers to showcase their work to a far wider audience. 

We’re really excited with the programs we’re lining up for 2020, and can’t wait to hear your proposals!