Curry On has two central goals.
Talks can cover topics as varied as an academic idea applied to a surprising problem domain in a real-world system, to something racy like “programming language academia is irrelevant and here’s why”.
We give no firm guidelines on topics (go wild!), however we particularly seek talks that can provoke thought and discussion, or even (more idealistically) can elicit or encourage new ideas or change.
Areas of particular interest to the conference include:
Each accepted talk will get a 40 minute talk slot.
There are two different sorts of talk slots. Presenters have a choice between:
(There will be a limited number of chess-timer talk slots.)
One of Curry On's prime goals is to bring industry and academia together to have an open conversation. But one speaker addressing hundreds of people is hardly a conversation. So, we're changing that.
We also call ourselves "a new and unusual non-profit conference focused on programming languages & emerging challenges in industry."
Chess-timer talks are our unusual solution to making tech conferences a more interactive, more fun, and better place for learning and discussions.
Chess-timer talks primarily seek to get more audience members participating in the presentation. Speakers who choose to give a chess-timer talk are allowed 20 minutes of solo speaking time, and 20 minutes of discussion time. A Curry On representative operates a chess-timer during the presentation, switching between solo + discussion time budgets. When an audience member interrupts the talk to ask a question, for example, we switch the timer to deduct from discussion time. This style of giving talks has been demoed in small (20-30 person) academic workshops to great success. In those workshops, it has incentivized speakers to strategically insert fodder for discussion points into their presentations so as to try and elicit audience members to ask questions.
Speakers with selected talks will have the opportunity to choose whether or not they would like to give a chess-timer talk. Curry On will feature a limited number of chess-timer sessions, meaning that a majority of talks will still be standard conference talks.
We are striving to provide some form of travel grant to assist with the costs of attending. We’ll post details here once a budget is finalized.