CDK Day CFP Is Open!!!! 
Tags: aws, conferences, cfp
Published: 2021-02-03 14:16:10

CDK Day is coming back on 30th April 2021, if you don't know what to expect you can checkout the article I wrote last year:

{% post https://dev.to/aws-builders/everything-i-learned-creating-cdk-day-my-first-global-virtual-conference-3g7k %}

# CFP Details
The CFP is open from now until 19th March 2021, you can find it here : https://sessionize.com/cdkday

## CFP Questions

To help you have the best chance of being accepted to speak at the conference I wanted to list out all of the questions asked with how to answer them

1. Session Title
A catchy short title used primarily for people to decide if they want to listen to your talk

2. Description
This field is limited to 300 characters as this is the content that will be displayed on the website to advertise your talk. It needs to be brief and catchy

3. Describe your talk in as much detail as you desire
Use as many words as you want to really paint a picture for us of what message you want to get across. The more words you write here the more chance we have of understanding your talk

4. Session Format
There are two formats - Lighting Talk or Full Session
    - A Lighting Talk is 10 minutes with no Q&A, these could be on absolutely anything given the short format. A 10 minute rant about something may even be a good topic
    - Full Sessions are where you have a bigger message you want to convey that takes more time which is why the format is a 30min presentation slot with 10 mins Q&A. 

5. Level
We want a mix of talks targeted at different audience experience levels, please be honest with this one and don't think that one level is more desirable than the others. Here is my guidance:
    - Introductory means something along the lines of "Let me tell you about Projen"
    - Intermediate could be "Let me show you how I used projen to automate cdk version updates"
    - Advanced could be "Here is how to build a CDK construct that targets TS/Py/Go/Java/C#"
    - Expert could be "Building AWS CDK locally on an M1 Mac, how I made it work"

6. Which CDK is the focus of your presentation
We want to make sure we balance all of the CDKs throughout the day so this will just help us filter. If you built a product on top of one of the CDKs please pick other

7. What Formats are you comfortable with?
This is about your personal comfort levels with presenting and your level of experience. Some people now hate presenting live and would rather pre-record their talk then still join live to answer questions. Be honest here what you are open to.

8. If Live, what is your preferred UTC time window
This is a global conference as opposed to say a UK regional one which means it spans every time zone for the audience and presenters. We cannot guarantee that we can accommodate the time window given here but it will definitely help with scheduling. Given the conference will be 15:00 to 20:00 UTC it would help if your window was within those constraints.

9. Would you like help preparing your presentation?
We want to be available for speakers who want support, that comes in many formats. Maybe you know what you want to present and it's a great idea but when it comes to the execution you need someone to look over your slides to offer feedback. Maybe you want to pre-record but you have never done it before so you need someone to show you how. 

10. The consent checkbox
Nothing sinister here, we just wanted everyone to confirm they are happy to be part of the live stream and recorded.