Tips for finding your next conference

We working in the IT sector are privileged as few others. Some of us even so that we're allowed to spend time going to conferences or meetups and sharing our knowledge - while at the same time learning a lot ourselves.

I'm grateful for being in such a position. I'm working as tech lead in my job, but I'm also speaking every now and then.

If you're in the IT sector and want to become a speaker yourself (and you should, it's fun!), it might be challenging to find possible conferences. After all, there are many people wanting to share a message, and the program committees typically have luxury problems choosing talks.

Where do I head to find places to apply for speaking?

• Meetup: There are a lot of meetups out there, and most put a lot of work into finding speakers. Chances are, they'll be happy if you pitch your idea.
• CFP calendar

• Twitter:

  • cfp_land
  • cfp_exchange
  • ItCfpList
  • AppCfp
  • Following people I admire/look up to and see where they're speaking

• Lists other speakers make of where they're speaking/wanting to speak

  • https://github.com/dmitryvinn/it-conferences
  • https://marcus-biel.com/java-conferences-2020
  • https://confs.tech/cfp
  • PaperCall's list of events
  • And my current favourite: Calling all papers. This one is even more meta, as it fetches from both PaperCall and Confs.tech.
• The Voxxed-series (Devoxx/Voxxed Days) consists of a lot of conferences, usually of high quality

You'll be disappointed, by the way. The acceptance-rejection ratio tends to be at quite many rejections per acceptance. That's how it is, for must of us.