IT Conferences Call For Papers List Goes to Twitter!

Michał Matłoka

23 May 2017.1 minute read

SoftwareMill has a speaker culture. Only in 2017 we had already 16 talks at different conferences and events in multiple countries (keep in mind that we only have around 40 people on board!​). Finding Call For Papers (CFPs) from conferences you may want to speak at can take a lot of time. There are some solutions that list various conferences, but most of them don’t work for us - e.g. Lanyrd is still mostly in a read-only mode.

That's why almost a year ago we announced an open IT CFP List. It was implemented as a simple GitHub repository, where anyone could file a Pull Request to add a new CFP. Over the year we got a few PRs and noticed that there are people from outside SoftwareMill watching this repository for changes. Additionally, we got some in-person feedback from one of the well-known speakers that he loves it, because it’s simple and just works! Our list was also included on the speaking.io website in a chapter related to finding a place to talk.

Today we want to improve the user experience of our list, targeting a broader audience by also pushing new CFPs to a dedicated Twitter account. Because all good programmers are lazy, we made this process automatic. We leveraged Zapier to fetch commits from the GitHub repo, and push them to Twitter using a predefined message template. This flow is so simple that it even works on Zapier Free Tier. The only "challenge" we got is that Zapier requires to have access to both private and public repos on our GitHub account - so we created a separate account, which only has access to our IT CFP List repo.

Thank you for your feedback and contributions over the past year - and don’t hesitate to follow the @ItCfpList on Twitter!

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