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

Late last year, (just literally as the omicron wave hit Australia) we announced our annual Summit (along with our Code Leaders conference) would be returning late 2022, to Sydney.

When we return it will be over 3 years since our last in-person conference.

So much has changed in the world and our industry since then. And we want to hear from you about it.

There’ll be over 80 presentations across 6 specialised tracks (up from our our traditional tracks–Product, Design, and Front End development)–plenty of opportunity an scope.

So, if you’ve got experience, lessons learned, ideas to share with your colleagues, across design, product, dev and more, we’d love to hear from you.

Here’s there tracks we have lined up (and read on for what we think makes for a great presentation–hint it really helps when getting on the program to keep these in mind)

When do CFPs close?

CFPs close June 30, but don’t delay–if we get a good proposal we like we’ll often lock it in early!

Submit you proposal (or proposals) here.

The Old Favourites

Design

All things modern design–product, UX, UI, IxD, visual, Design Research, DesignOps–if the design team does it we would love to hear about it.

Product Management

From discovery to onboarding, A/B Testing to growth strategies, customer success and more, our Product track covers everything the modern product professional and team needs to succeed.

Front End Dev

Covers key technologies and practices in front end development, including CSS, JavaScript, DOM APIs, PWAs, Web Components, performance, accessibility, security, and more. If it’s about building modern, standards based Web sites and apps, we want it on this track!

3 Brand New Tracks!

And now for the new tracks!

Content Design/Strategy

Often overshadowed, we’ll be featuring a track covering all things content design and strategy for the first time at Summit this year.

The React ecosystem

React and its ecosystem are such a core area of focus today that we’re spinning up a new track to focus on all things React and related, including NextJS, Remix, Redux, headless CMS, and more…

Career Development Track

We started with the idea of a Junior developer track, but quickly realised what’s important to juniors is important to everyone-which includes developing your career.

So for the first time in 2022, we’ll have a Career Development track. We’ll have sessions focussed on designers, developers, product professionals, and at different stages of folks’ journey–junior, mid-level, senior and beyond.

Don’t forget Code Leaders

Code Leaders has run for several years alongside our Code conference in Melbourne (we’re focusing all our energy when it comes to in-person events this year on Summit). We felt it was too important just to let slide so we’re running it the day before Summit.

It’s aimed at senior engineering professionals, engineering managers, CTOs and the like and covers higher level issues in technology, as well as leading and managing engineering teams an organisations.

So, if you’d like to share your ideas and experience leading engineering teams, we’d love to hear your proposals.

Submit your proposals by June 30

CFPs close June 30, but don’t wait til the deadline, as if we see a proposal we like, we will often lock it in right away. Submit your proposal here for Summit, and submit a proposal here for Code Leaders.

What do speakers get?

Speakers chosen from our CFPs we fly to Sydney from wherever they are, put them up in a nice hotel, and look after them very nicely with speaker dinners, receptions and more.

We film all presentations, edit them, and weave our magic to create unique online presentations which we host at Conffab (and you can of course host elsewhere).

What we think makes a great presentation

At Web Directions we have a strong editorial style we’ve developed over more than 15 years of putting together conferences. The type of sessions that prove popular, and so which we program, tend to have a number of characteristics:

• They’re often about “unknown unknowns”–introducing or explaining to the audience concepts, practices or technologies they may not be aware of, or maybe only vaguely aware of, that would be useful to them in their work, today, or in the near future.
• They’re focussed–don’t think breadth, think focus and depth.
• Forward looking (but not far future). It’s right there in our name “directions”–we want to help our audience chart where they are going, but we don’t want to lead them down dead ends, or show them things that might only one day become useful.
• Product and solution agnostic. We don’t focus on specific solutions (libraries, frameworks, tools) whether open source or commercial. Not that we have anything against these, just we feel they are often covered well elsewhere, while foundational technologies, patterns and practices, that can apply regardless of the tools and solutions you use, are often less well covered. The exception here is our React+ track at Summit focussed on the React Ecosystem, given how central to modern web development these technologies are.

One of the things we love hearing from our audience is “I can’t wait to get back to work and put this into practice“. If you can aim for that, for the event’s target audience, you’ll go a long way to getting a place in the schedule.

Here’s a few more tips what we recommend to give yourself the best chance of getting a place at our conferences.

• Most sessions especially those chosen from CFPs are of around 20 minutes duration.
• 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.
• Past presentations give a good indication of the sort of thing we’re looking for as well. You can find hundreds of past presentations from our conferences on Conffab (you can browse it all without signing up even for a free account).
• Focus is good! Rather than proposing for example “what’s new in Javascript” think about a deep dive on one aspect of what’s new in JavaScript (for example “Crunchy or smooth? All about JavaScript’s Spread Operator”). What’s something you think is indispensable but not as many people know about and use as you think should? There’s a great topic right there!

Once again: Submit your proposals by June 30

As we said, CFPs close June 30, but don’t wait til the deadline, as if we see a proposal we like, we will often lock it in right away. Submit your proposal here for Summit, and submit a proposal here for Code Leaders.