2025.pgconf.dev needs your submissions!

The call for proposals for 2025.pgconf.dev has been extended to January 6, 2025, otherwise known as "very soon". I'm writing this post to encourage you to submit, if you haven't done so yet, regardless of whether you have submitted to 2024.pgconf.dev or its predecessor, PGCon, in the past. The event will only be as good as the content you (collectively) submit, and having found much value in these events over the years that I've been participating, I very much want our future events to be as good as those in the past, or, hopefully, even better. But what makes a good event, and what kind of talk should you submit?

Of course, everyone will have their own opinion of what makes a good talk, and in the interest of full disclosure, I am not on the talk selection committee for this event, although I am a member of the organizing committee. That means I won't be voting on your talks, but I will potentially be attending your talks, so here are a few ideas about what kinds of talks I personally enjoy, just in case that helps inspire you.

• War Stories. If you've had one bad experience with some aspect of PostgreSQL, that's probably not going to make for an interesting talk, unless it was something really dramatic. But if you have had a lot of bad experiences with some particular aspect of PostgreSQL, summarizing those experience can make for a very interesting talk. Christophe Pettus did a very general version of this at 2023.pgconf.eu in his talk Why PostgreSQL is Terrible and I loved it; but a more targeted talk that looks at the problems with some specific area of PostgreSQL with which you might be familiar is even better. Noah Misch's talk on Data Corruption Bugs: Diagnosis and Lessons at least years event is a great example and my talk on How Autovacuum Goes Wrong: And Can We Please Make It Stop Doing That? had some of that vibe as well.
  
  
• Industry Developments. As a PostgreSQL developer, it's easy for me to devote nearly all of my time and energy to understanding how PostgreSQL has grown and changed, or to trying to change it myself. But, surprisingly, there's more to the world than PostgreSQL development, and worse yet, sometimes that other stuff has an impact on PostgreSQL development. Well-researched talks that summarize how the world is changing can be really interesting. For instance, Thomas Munro last year presented a talk on Streaming I/O and Vectored I/O does a brilliant job summarizing how I/O has evolved over the last 40 years or so, which seems like a long time, but I certainly haven't been following it as closely as Thomas and I learned a lot from that talk. Margo Seltzer's keynote, When Hardware and Databases Collide, also talks about the evolution of storage and I/O, but looks forward toward the future rather than back into the past. Bruce Momjian spoke about PostgreSQL and the Artificial Intelligence Landscape, and in other occasions we've had talks about topics like the SQL standard or NUMA. If you're the person who knows more about how a certain trend will affect PostgreSQL than anyone else, I'd like to hear about that.
  
  
• How Other People Do It. It's probably a hard sell to get people who aren't super-involved in PostgreSQL development to come to a PostgreSQL development conference, but I think we often lack perspective on how things work in other open source communities. For example, there are projects that have vast numbers of committers compared to PostgreSQL and somehow that doesn't result in chaos; and then there are projects like Linux where what it even means to be a committer is fairly murky, at least to me. How do we scale the project beyond where it is today? How do we make it a pleasant working environment for people of all backgrounds? How do we deal with cross-platform portability, with evolution in compilers and linkers and other parts of our toolchain? If you have some great insights into how other people are managing problems that bedevil PostgreSQL, I would love to hear about that, and I bet a lot of other people would, too. Even if you submit a conference talk and it doesn't get accepted, I'd still love to hear about that in some other venue.
  
  
• Academic Research. Last year, Abigale Kim gave a talk that I really enjoyed on Anarchy in the Database: A Survey and Evaluation of Database Management System Extensibility. Her research wasn't perfect - at least in my estimation - in the sense that someone who knew more about PostgreSQL could have probably improved the methodology here and there, but nobody in the PostgreSQL community, to my knowledge, does this kind of work. Developers, at least in my experience, tend to want to solve the problems immediately before them without asking broader questions. Work like this is valuable not only because of the research findings themselves, but because a lot of things that we do would probably benefit greatly from taking a research mindset first and an implementation mindset only much later. I hope we have more talks like this in the future; as I say, I really enjoyed it, I felt I learned something, and I had the sense at the time that the rest of the audience was enjoying it, too.

Of course, there are many other sorts of talks that you can (and should) submit to this conference, like a talk about the feature that you just finished developing or are in the midst of developing or just gave up on developing; guidance for newer hackers; community initiatives or other projects that hackers should know about; and so on. All that stuff is great. My purpose here is to list some perhaps-less-obvious content that I, at least, would really like to see.

If you plan attend this conference or have attended in the past, please leave a comment below and tell me about your favorite kind of talk to see at this sort of event. And if you have something to submit, whether or not falls into one of the areas that I just listed, please submit it, and soon. We really, really need everyone's submissions for this to be a great event, as it has (in my opinion) been in the past. Thanks.