How We Choose Talks

"So there we were, three months from a hard deadline, and we were struggling. We weren't a team, just a collection of people who sat next to each other…"

The experiences of teams as they were faced with and surmounted (or even failed to surmount) tough technical, organisational, or social problems can be the basis for a great talk. Tell us the good, the bad, and the ugly. How did you live to tell the tale and what did you learn along the way?

"So you know, monads allow you to run actions depending on the outcomes of earlier actions. This is obviously necessary in some cases, but in other cases it is disadvantageous. In those cases, it turns out that applicative functors can be a great fit."

Technical talks don't need to be aimed at a general audience. Being able to assume some level of prerequisite knowledge from the audience lets you get into the nuts and bolts of a certain piece of technology or methodology and share your specialised knowledge.

"Being an ally is not about you, it's about using your privilege to support and enable others to succeed."

Tech companies have long held that programming is about machines, not people, and that tech is a perfect meritocracy. Our experiences tell a different story, and talks that address the social aspects of working in technology are very enlightening and inspiring.

"Have you ever been in a design session and wanted to do X, but that option was just off the table? I'm here to tell you why."

Klarna has been around for over 10 years, and has its share of convoluted and often hilarious reasons for why things work the way they do. Understanding the full historical context of a decision can lead to the realisation that maybe it wasn't the worst thing after all.

"The problem of how to efficiently visualise metrics for thousands of services is a familiar one. What if we reframed the problem?"

Giving a talk on your groundbreaking approach to solving a problem is a great way to test your idea and inspire the audience.

"It turns out that the machine learning algorithm used to predict property values was racist."

With great power comes great responsibility. It is important to be aware of the impact the products we design and systems we build have on society. Your talk can inspire your colleagues to use their skills and intellect for good.

"Everyone knows that assessing credit risk is core to Klarna's business, but surprisingly few people know how this actually works."

To understand one's problem space fully, one needs context. A talk about your domain, its caveats, brilliance, ugliness gives us all the knowledge we need to create a better product.

"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Well… it turns out it's about 320 kilograms every day."

A lightning talk is a fun technical or non-technical talk aimed to entertain, but also make people think. It's a 5 minute talk with auto-advancing slides - every 15 seconds.