Postgres speakers - POSETTE 2026 CFP is closing soon!
Guidelines for submitting a proposal to the POSETTE CFP POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is back for its 5th year, and the excitement is already building. Scheduled for June 16 – June 18, 2026, this free and virtual developer event brings together the global Postgres community for three days of learning, sharing, and deep technical storytelling. Whether you're a first-time speaker or a seasoned contributor, your story matters and the Call for Proposals (CFP) closes on February 1, 2026. If you’re considering submitting a proposal (or encouraging someone else to), in this post I will walk you through everything you need to know to craft a strong, compelling submission before the deadline arrives. 1. Key Dates to Know CFP Deadline: February 1, 2026 @ 11:59 PM PST Talk Acceptance Notifications: February 11, 2026 Event Dates: June 16 – June 18, 2026 (includes four unique livestreams, live text chat, and speaker Q&A) Schedule & sessions announced: Feb 25, 2026 Pre-record all talks: Weeks of April 20 & April 27 Tip: Add a calendar reminder, this deadline arrives quickly, and no late submissions are accepted. 2. Why Submit a Talk to POSETTE? Submitting a talk for a conference can seem like a difficult task at the start, but this guide can help you come up with potential ideas that can be used to submit a talk for the conference. Share your story with the global Postgres community Your experience, whether it’s a deep dive into query planning, a migration journey, or lessons learned from scaling can help thousands of developers. Grow your professional visibility POSETTE is a high‑reach, virtual event that enables your content to live on well after the livestream. First‑time speakers are welcomed and encouraged POSETTE is not an exclusive club. If you have a story to tell, this is a supportive, welcoming place to tell it. 3. What Makes a Strong Proposal? First‑time speaker? Don’t worry. The guidelines below cover the key elements you’ll need to craft a strong, successful proposal. Make your proposal focused, not broad: Many proposals try to cover too much. The strongest ones zoom in on a specific challenge, insight, or transformation. A narrow, well‑defined topic reads more clearly and creates a stronger takeaway for attendees. Clearly identify the target audience: State who the talk is for: Beginner Postgres developers Cloud architects DBAs focusing on performance Engineers migrating from Oracle/MySQL This helps the selection team understand fit and event balance. Demonstrate real‑world value, not generic theory: Talks rooted in hands‑on experience tend to perform best. Strong abstracts answer: What problem did we face? What did we try? What worked (or didn’t)? What can you replicate in your environment? POSETTE audiences love actionable content. 4. Show how attendees will grow from your talk: Selection committees love when speakers articulate transformation. Clarify what people will gain: “Improve query execution time by…” “Avoid common replication pitfalls…” “Design HA setups more confidently…” The reviewers want talks with practical outcomes. 5. Highlight what makes your talk unique Is your approach unconventional? Did you migrate at massive scale? Did you build or extend an OSS tool? Did you learn something the hard way? Emphasize novelty POSETTE gets many submissions, so originality matters. 6. Use a storytelling angle: Human brains love stories. Strong abstracts often follow a mini narrative: Problem Tension Turning point Solution Lessons This makes your proposal memorable and relatable. 7. Keep the abstract concise and structured: Avoid long, meandering paragraphs. A clear structure like this works well: Topic summary (one sentence) Problem + context (two–three sentences) Solution or insights (two–three sentences) What attendees will learn (one–two sentences) 4. Ideas for Topics That Work Well Not every proposal needs to be a deep internal dive real‑world stories resonate. Consider topics like: Migrating to Postgres (cloud or on‑prem) Performance tuning adventures and lessons Postgres extensions and ecosystem tooling Operational best practices, HA architecture, or incident learnings Developer productivity with Postgres Novel patterns or creative uses of Postgres internals Azure Database for PostgreSQL customer stories Community‑focused topics, such as how to start a PGDay event, how to begin contributing to open source, or how to engage with the Postgres community effectively. Look at POSETTE 2024 or 2025 talk titles to calibrate tone and depth. 5. What Happens If Your Talk Is Accepted? Good news: the speaker experience is designed to be smooth and supportive. Talks are 25 minutes long and pre‑recorded, with professional production support from the POSETTE organizing team at an agreed-upon time during the weeks of April 20 & April 27 Speakers join live text chat during the session to interact with attendees No travel required the event is fully virtual All you need is a good microphone, a quiet space, and a story worth telling. 6. How to Submit Your Proposal Here are the official links you’ll want handy: 📄 CFP Page: https://posetteconf.com/2026/cfp/ ❓ FAQ: https://posetteconf.com/2026/faq/ 📝 Submit on Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/posette2026/ Submission Checklist Before hitting "submit," make sure you have: A strong, interesting title A clear and concise abstract Defined takeaways for attendees An understanding of your target audience Submission completed before Feb 1 @ 11:59 PM PST POSETTE is built by and for the Postgres community and your experience, whether small or monumental, has the potential to help others. With the CFP deadline approaching fast on February 1, now is the perfect time to refine your idea, shape your abstract, and submit your talk. This could be the year your story gets shared with thousands. Take the leap the community will be glad you did.CFP talk proposal ideas for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025
Some of you have been asking for advice about what to submit to the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025. So this post aims to give you ideas that might help you submit a talk proposal (or 2, or 3) before the upcoming CFP deadline. If you’re not yet familiar with this conference, POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 is a free & virtual developer event now in its 4th year, organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft. I love the virtual aspect of POSETTE because the conference talks are so accessible—for both speakers and attendees. If you’re a speaker, you don’t need travel budget $$—and you don’t have to leave home. Also, the talk you’ve poured all that energy into is not limited to the people in the room, and has the potential to reach so many more people. If you’re an attendee, well, all you need is an internet connection The CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres will be open until Sunday Feb 9th at 11:59pm PST. So as of the publication date of this blog post, you still have time to submit a CFP proposal (or 2, or 3, or 4)—and to remind your Postgres teammates and friends of the speaking opportunity. If you have a Postgres experience, success story, failure, best practice, “how-to”, collection of tips, lesson about something that's new, or deep dive to share—not just about the core of Postgres, but about anything in the Postgres ecosystem, including extensions, and tooling, and monitoring—maybe you should consider submitting a talk proposal to the CFP for POSETTE. If you’re not sure about whether to give a conference talk, there are a boatload of reasons why you should. And there’s also a podcast episode with Álvaro Herrera, Boriss Mejías, and Pino de Candia that makes the case for why giving conference talks matters. For inspiration, you can also take a look at the playlist of POSETTE 2024 talks. And if you’re looking for even more CFP ideas, you’ve come to the right place! Read on… Ideas for talks you might propose in the POSETTE CFP On the CFP page there is a list of possible talk titles (screenshot below) you might submit—these are good ideas, although the list is by no means exhaustive, and we welcome talk proposals that are not on this list. Figure 1: POSETTE CFP talk topics taken from the CFP page on PosetteConf.com On Telegram the other day, when answering the question “Do you have any ideas of what I should submit?”, I found myself suggesting different TYPES of talks. Not specific ideas and talk titles, but rather I framed the different categories. So I decided to share these different “types” and “classes” of talks with all of you, in the hopes this might gives you a good talk proposal idea. First you need to pick your audience: Before you think about what type of talk to give, remember that the POSETTE team is focused on serving the needs of both the USER community—as well as the Postgres contributor & hacker communities. That means first you need to decide on your audience. Are you giving a talk for PostgreSQL users, or Azure Database for PostgreSQL customers, or the PostgreSQL contributor community? All are good choices. Then you need to decide: what do you want to accomplish with your talk? Do you want to skill up the Postgres hacker community?: If you want to help skill-up the developer/contributor community, maybe pick a part of Postgres that new contributors often ask a lot of questions about, get stuck on, need help with, etc—and give a “tour” of its mechanics, starting with the basics. Do you want to help grow the Postgres community?: If you want to help grow the Postgres community of contributors and developers, you could propose a talk that would motivate tomorrow's developers/contributors to get involved in the project. Imagine you were going to a university to give a talk about "why work on Postgres"… what would you say? And how would you entice people to work on Postgres? What pain points would you challenge them with? What benefits would you share from your own Postgres experience that might inspire these developers to think seriously about Postgres as a career path? You could also shine a light on the different ways people can (and do!) contribute to the Postgres community: from mentoring to translations to organizing conferences to podcasts to speaking at conferences to publishing PostgreSQL Person of the Week. Do you want to share your expertise with Postgres users?: If you want your talk to benefit users, maybe pick an area that you are already expert in (or want an excuse to dig into and learn about?) and create a Beginners Guide for it? Or Advanced Tips for it? Or Surprising Benefits of? Or Things People Might Not Know? Especially if there is a part of Postgres you feel like people sometimes mis-use, or don't take enough advantage of.... Do you want to share your customer experiences with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, or Postgres more generally?: Maybe you have a wild success story you think others will benefit from. Or you want to share a problem you had and how you used Postgres to solve it? People love customer stories. Do you want to shine a light on the broader Postgres ecosystem?: If you want to target users with your talk, don’t limit yourself the Postgres core. There is a rich ecosystem that surrounds Postgres and people need to understand the ecosystem, too. So maybe there are tools or Postgres extensions or forks or startups that you can give a useful talk about? Do you want to help experts in other database technologies learn about Postgres?: If you have expertise in other databases as well as Postgres, maybe you can help people who who are skilled in running workloads on other databases and are looking to skill up on Postgres—by helping them understand what’s similar, and what’s different. As if you’re giving them a dictionary to translate from their familiar database to Postgres, and vice versa. There are so many more possibilities: Often I look at the schedule from previous years to look for inspiration (and to make sure that my talk proposal is not a duplicate of a talk that’s already been given.) And I think about pain points, things people get confused about, or questions that come up a lot. Another thing to keep in mind: how can you help your story to "stick"? Can you make it entertaining? How do you share your story in a way that keeps people watching (versus looking at their phone instead?) Key things to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP deadline: The CFP for POSETTE will close on Sunday, Feb 9th 2025 @ 11:59pm Pacific Time (PST) No travel required: free & virtual developer event Length of talks: 25 minutes/session Language: All talks will be in English Talks will be pre-recorded: All talks will be pre-recorded by the POSETTE team during the weeks of Apr 28th and May 5th (with accepted speakers presenting remotely) When is the event?: Jun 10-12, 2025 Format of the virtual event: All pre-recorded talks will be livestreamed in one of 4 unique livestreams on Jun 10-12, 2025—all with parallel live text chats on Discord. Two of the livestreams will be in Americas-friendly times of day (8:00am-2:00pm PDT) and two of the livestreams will be in EMEA-friendly times of day (8:00am-2:00pm CEST). All talks will be published online after the event is over. More info about the CFP: All the details, including key dates and how to submit on Sessionize, are spelled out on the CFP page for POSETTE 2025 Code-of-conduct: You can find the Code of Conduct for POSETTE online. Please help us to provide a respectful, friendly, and professional experience for everybody involved in this virtual conference. Figure 2: The CFP is open for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 until Sunday Feb 9th at 11:59pm PST. What Postgres story do you want to share?
