Friday the 10th of July is GopherCon’s Hack Day. By popular request we’re going to be running lightning talks in main theatre most of the day. This is your opportunity to step on to the stage at the Mile High Ballroom and tell the world something about Go.

The Process

There are 3 lightning talk sessions with 10 talks each on Friday July 10th:

Registrations are now open. Registrations will close on midnight the 20th of June. We’ll post the list of speakers on the GopherCon website by the end of the month.

We are also happy to announce that this year the lightning talks will be recorded.

The Ground Rules

1. Talks are 7 minutes each. After that, the mic is turned off.
2. You’ll get one warning at the 5½ min mark.
3. Slides are allowed, but not required, and you can flip them at your own pace.
4. Demos are allowed, but please be mindful of the time and plan ahead for technical issues.
5. One minute for questions while the next speaker is setting up (you can use more if your talk ends early).
6. You can submit as many talks as you like, but to be fair to others, we’ll only choose at most one talk.
7. All talks must adhere to the GopherCon Code of Conduct

Why give a lightning talk?

(taken shamelessly from Yapc’s instructions on lightning talks).

Maybe you’ve never given a talk before, and you’d like to start small. For a Lightning Talk, you don’t need to make slides, and if you do decide to make slides, you only need to make three.

Maybe you’re nervous and you’re afraid you’ll mess up. It’s a lot easier to plan and deliver a seven minute talk than it is to deliver a long talk. And if you do mess up, at least the painful part will be over quickly.

Maybe you don’t have much to say. Maybe you just want to ask a question, or invite people to help you with your project, or boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up thirty minutes.

Here are some suggestions for awesome lightning talks that I’d like to see at GopherCon this year, and of course this list isn’t exclusive, it’s your seven minutes of fame.

1. Why my favorite library is X.
2. I want to do cool project X. Does anyone want to help?
3. Successful Project: I did project X. It was a success. Here’s how you could benefit.
4. Failed Project: I did project X. It was a failure, and here’s why.
5. Heresy: People always say X, but they’re wrong. Here’s why.
6. Here a few things our community needs to do better.
7. Call to Action: Let’s all do more of X / less of X.
8. Wouldn’t it be cool if X?
9. Someone needs to do X.
10. Wish List
11. Why X was a mistake.
12. Why X looks like a mistake, but isn’t.
13. What it’s like to do X.
14. Here’s a useful technique that worked.
15. Here’s a technique I thought would be useful but didn’t work.
16. Why algorithm X sucks.
17. Comparison of algorithms X and Y.

We look forward to hearing you share your remarkable and inspiring stories, projects and messages.

• Steve