o11ycon+hnycon Call for Presentations

In case you missed it, Honeycomb is gearing up for our conference, o11ycon. Based on your feedback, we’re also adding a new day to that event this year: hnycon. o11ycon+hnycon is a two-day virtual event happening June 9-10, and we’ll post more details about o11ycon+hnycon soon. For now, we want to announce an open call for presentations (CFP). The CFP closes on April 30.

Based on feedback from the last o11ycon, we learned that participants wanted to hear more about what’s happening inside Honeycomb. However, we had such positive experiences with an open and inclusive vendor-neutral environment that we didn’t want to change that. The result is two distinct events on different days of the same conference, each with its own set of content and with very different formats.

What is o11ycon vs. hnycon?

o11ycon (o11y, pronounced “ollie” and an abbreviation for “observability”) is a vendor-neutral and community-focused conference. The goal of o11ycon is examining the cutting-edge capabilities that define observability, sharing lessons learned, and identifying provided value. o11ycon is seeking presentations that explore the leading edge of observability practices.

o11ycon is highly interactive and meant to spark community conversations, with open-space inspired sessions, fireside chats, and panel discussions. Ideally, o11ycon presentations should focus on addressing challenges when practicing observability, regardless of specific tool choices or implementations. o11ycon continues to offer inventive, original new content and experiences for the observability community, driven by audience participation.

hnycon (hny, pronounced “honey” and an abbreviation for “Honeycomb”) is Honeycomb’s product- and customer-focused conference. The goal of hnycon is exploring Honeycomb’s capabilities and how customers apply them, along with the benefits they unlock. hnycon is seeking presentations about how you use Honeycomb in your organization.

hnycon is more keynote-style, with breakout sessions and longer presentations that leave time for Q&A. Ideally, hnycon presentations should focus on lessons learned, how-to’s, or interesting problems solved specifically when using Honeycomb. The new hnycon is focused on observability content, specifically for the Honeycomb community, driven by customer presentations.

With these events happening back-to-back, in the same conference, you can attend and find the content that is most relevant to you. For presenters, that also means you have distinct avenues and audiences to share your stories with.

CFP themes

The conference CFP shares themes and topics. When you submit yours, you can indicate which event your topic is best suited for (o11ycon, hnycon, or both). Themes for o11ycon+hnycon are:

• Intersections between observability and other engineering practices (e.g., CI/CD, Chaos Engineering, Incident Response)
• Capabilities that separate observability from more traditional approaches
• Challenges with observability and future solutions
• Adoption journeys, lessons learned, and things you wish you’d known sooner

Specific topics for proposals may include (but are not limited to):

• Observability adoption stories (culture, tools, and transformations)
• Migrating from the old world to the new world (e.g., monoliths to microservices and where observability fits in)
• Observability as an ongoing practice (iterative approaches)
• Business cases for observability
• OpenTelemetry
• CI/CD, progressive delivery, and observability for your pipelines
• How observability is changing SRE practices
• Observability for front-end development
• Observability for more than just service teams (e.g., sales, product, support)
• How traces, logs, events, and metrics are interchangeable
• Challenges we still need observability to address
• Observability challenges at scale
• Call for Failures (tell us your war stories!)
• Honeycomb use cases

Presentation formats

The two events will have different formats. o11ycon is geared toward folks who may be presenting for the first time, or are seasoned pros, or are anywhere in between. There are multiple avenues for participation, and you’re not limited to just choosing one (let us know if your idea might fit into multiple formats!).

Presentations for o11ycon may be one of the following:

• Open-space style discussions. These will likely be around 30 minutes and consist of small virtual breakout discussions around a proposed topic. By proposing a topic, you are volunteering to start a discussion on that subject. You don’t need to be an expert in that topic or have solutions to present. You simply need to be willing to start a discussion about it with other conference attendees. Open-space discussions will have appointed moderators (not the presenter) to ensure discussions adhere to community guidelines.
• Panels. These will be moderated discussions on a proposed topic that last around 20 minutes. Panels should include at least three participants (in addition to a moderator, who will be provided). If you’d like to propose a panel you will need to specify a topic, suggested questions, and list your confirmed panel participants. All panels will be moderated by a track host.
• Short presentations. Running somewhere between 10-15 minutes, these short presentations are perfect for first-time presenters or to talk through implementation challenges or solutions. Short presentations may be informal (i.e., very few or no slides) and will rely on real-time interactions between presenters and track hosts. Presenters should be ready to address audience questions since there will be plenty of time for Q&A.

Presentations for o11ycon and hnycon share one format option:

• Longer presentations. These are 20 – 25 minutes, more traditional (i.e., slide driven) presentations, with a few minutes at the end for Q&A. This is probably the type of conference talk you most commonly think of when attending conferences.

Note that for hnycon, longer presentations are the only format option.

Submit your ideas!

We’re excited to share more news about o11ycon+hnycon. Stay tuned for more announcements. For now, the CFP is currently open and accepting submissions through April 30.

Want to propose something else? Not sure how to propose the idea you’re thinking about? Any other questions or concerns? You can find me, Charity Majors, or Liz Fong-Jones on the Pollinators community Slack group or on Twitter (@gmiranda23, @mipsytipsy, and @lizthegrey respectively). We’d be happy to help!