SREcon23 Asia/Pacific Call for Participation

Overview

You build computer platforms, debug them, and support them, and you have learned something useful to share: You are invited to submit proposals to give talks at SREcon23 Asia/Pacific, which welcomes speakers from a variety of backgrounds, not just SRE, and from a variety of different-sized companies, not just those that are technology-focused. Your insights will help create a relevant, diverse, and inclusive program. Conversations are never complete when they focus just on successes; we encourage talks that focus on lessons learned from failures or hard problems.

At the seventh SREcon Asia/Pacific, we are especially seeking the deepest engineering talks: Those that cover gritty technical internals, advanced tools and techniques, and complex problems that may matter to others, whether your solutions were elegant, ugly, or unsuccessful.

We look forward to learning from speakers across the SRE and systems engineering space. This year we particularly welcome new speakers; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share and the last few years most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and from which we can learn.

At every SREcon globally, we welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country, including people that are underrepresented in, or excluded from, technology, including but not limited to: people of all colours, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, neurodiverse participants, students, veterans, and others with unique characteristics.

Similarly, we welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, performance engineers, security teams, OS engineers, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, government employees, and data scientists. Regardless of who you are or the job title you hold, if you are a technologist who faces unique challenges and shares our areas of interest, we encourage you to be a part of SREcon23 Asia/Pacific.

Proposals

Please submit your proposal(s) via the submission system.

We are looking for proposals for talks only:

• 20-minute talks
• 45-minute talks

Note that 20-minute talks will have an additional 5 minutes for Q&A after the talk and 45-minute talks will have an additional 10 minutes for Q&A after the talk, but the expected length of the presentation shall be 20 or 45 minutes.

We strongly recommend including Audience Takeaways in proposals; what do you want to teach, and what will our audience be able to use in their work (regardless of the size of their organization)? We also recommend including a takeaways slide in your talk to help the audience remember key learnings.

Suggested Topics

This SREcon we would love presentations with lessons for SRE in smaller organizations!

Systems Engineering, Technical Principles

• Performance and Efficiency
• Inclusion of ecological factors into systems architecture
• Analytical methods in the pursuit of technical efficiency
• Technology internals: Touring the internals of something commonly used (e.g., a hypervisor, containers in practice, a kernel, service meshes, new network protocols, language runtimes, etc.) so the audience can reason about, debug, and support it.
• Adapting to geography and culture: latency, data sovereignty, and localisation
• Practices of Crisis Management, Incident Response, and Incident Retrospective
• Practices of Capacity Planning and Economics
• Practices of Observability, Monitoring, Alerting, Debugging
• Practices of Change Management
• Scaling security and compliance (especially in brownfield installations)

SRE Practice and Culture

• Implementing SRE principles in a startup
• Incremental improvement, the "crawl-walk-run", and making Perfect not be the enemy of Good
• Broadening our SRE community
• Psychology of team culture and connections
• Safety Science and crossover into other vocations
• Analytical methods in the pursuit of efficient reliability work

Speaker Information

To see the details of what we want to know about your proposal to speak, we encourage you to visit the talks submission system.

Please note that we make use of a two-phase submission process: Phase 1 provides details needed for the program committee to pick the best content. Phase 2 is where you provide your personal information and the short description for the program agenda. Only accepted and waitlisted proposals will proceed through Phase 2; that information must be provided by Thursday, 6 April, along with your commitment to present.

If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help, please reach out. We can provide support via practice sessions, review of your pre-recorded videos, and a helpful guide on how to record your presentation to get the best results possible.

Both presenters and organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

SREcon23 Asia/Pacific is scheduled to be held in Singapore on 14–16 June, 2023. While we will consider talks from remote-only presenters, we strongly encourage in-person presentations at the conference.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon23apac_chairs@usenix.org.

Background (Overarching Goals of the Global SREcon Conferences)

SREcon is a gathering of practitioners who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. Our purpose is to be inclusive as we bring together ideas representative of our diverse community, whether its members are focusing on a global scale, launching new products and ideas for a small business, or pivoting their approach to unite software and systems engineering. SREcon challenges both those new to the profession and those who have been involved in SRE or related endeavours for years. The conference culture is built upon respectful collaboration amongst all participants in the community through critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation.

For more information on the themes and programs of past conferences, see the list of past conferences.