CFP Readiness for Equinix Demo Day

Marques · ‎Apr 20, 2023

⛔Closing May 5th

The May 5th CFP closing date is fast approaching for Demo Day. Submissions and edits to submissions can be made at Equinix Demo Day 2023 Call for Proposals.

Whether you've expressed interest, submitted a draft CFP, or already began working on your demo, here are some considerations to make your CFP standout and make your presentations memorable and actionable.

🔨 Nail the theme

The event focus is Equinix integration with talks and demos where the code is shown and is user repeatable.

Some example scenarios:

A product that includes cloud provider integrations giving it the ability to deploy and manage Equinix resources. This may take advantage of public IaC (Infrastructure as Code), Kubernetes controllers, or SDK (Go, Python, Java) tools for Equinix Metal.
Prove your project is resilient. Show it. Destroy it. Show how it can be reprovisioned. Can your project be brought back up without careful attention?
A user case story or journey is told. How is this story a unique or common experience? How was integration with the platform utilized? What challenges were presented and overcome by this integration?
Tell us more about the developer experience. What made Equinix the right choice for this project? What features would have made this smoother? What features made this shine?
How did the developer support, the online community, documentation, tools, or platform features provide value to your organization, product, or project.

If the product is a managed service or closed source, these examples would help to make the demo more applicable to the event theme:

Helper code and documentation (a tool assisted guide or workshop) reproduces the environment and demonstrates applications running on this product integration.
A story about the development process of the integration and the lessons learned

Additional routes to explore for this event (fitting open source projects well):

How does this solution stack up with alternatives in the ecosystem
What design and development choices were made for this project
How has the community size and adoption changed
What are some of the open challenges past or present, how have they been overcome

🧰 Share your Toolbox

There are several ways to publish your integration to get early eyes on it and share it with the community. Our first choice for projects like this is GitHub. Consider the following repositories on the Equinix Labs GitHub organization as a place to park your integration or a template for your project:

Equinix Workshop - Create a workshop using this template. Once you've customized the project, enable GitHub Pages and the workshop will be publicly hosted and available.
Terraform Template - This template bakes in our best practices and is ready-made for publishing an Equinix Terraform module
Terraform Equinix Labs - If you want to share your project with other users of Equinix and turn that project into a workshop, take a look here and open a PR adding your project as a sub-module.
Terraform Kubernetes Addons - If your project can run in any Kubernetes environment running on Equinix Metal and has Equinix resource requirements, submit your project as an add-on here so others can take advantage of your integration.

Do you have another location in mind? Let us know.

🦺 Pass Inspection

As the hosts of the event, we believe the value of any particular product can be demonstrated through open integrations. Our particular focus is on the capability to integrate with Equinix in a user demonstrable and reproducible way, along with the capabilities unlocked through those integrations. The review panel will process CFPs with these considerations.

Keep in mind, other CFPs will target common user scenarios especially on network Infrastructure and edge compute automation. While event presentations are not in a product competition, for the purposes of the CFP review, there is a competition of compelling stories. The more engaging we believe those stories fit our user and engineering audience, the more they demonstrate the themes of integrations with Equinix in repeatable ways, the better the chance will be for the CFP to be accepted. The best presentations will be ones where the practitioner viewer is compelled to pull down the discussed project and start experimenting with it to deliver their projects.

The presentation, including demos or integrations, does not need to be ready at the time the CFP is submitted.

A CFP may be tentatively accepted with the recommendation for a different format or criteria for improving the fit. We will be considering alternate presentation formats for CFPs including panels, lightning talks, and workshops.

Tentative acceptance communications will start on May 10th with final acceptance communicated on May 12th.

🧱 Build Your Story

Once accepted, we want to have the opportunity to field test your work and storytelling in an advocacy stream or a recorded solution demo. The advocacy live stream is the perfect environment for an early, rough-edges, walkthrough.

For demo day, we encourage (but do not require) ironed presentation videos to be submitted no later than two weeks ahead of the event. This will help to avoid any on-air mishaps such as a missed step, flakey builds or runs, and network or availability issues.

Presentation windows should leave space for discussion during and after. Another format we can explore is to have the recording voiced over live by the presenter with an event host providing real-time feedback. In this case, the sooner pre-recordings can be offered the better.

🏗️ More Opportunities

There are more opportunities for collaboration through presentations and demos on Equinix. This includes streams on Equinix Labs Live and recordings targeted at our solution teams. Future events may provide a better audience for talks and demos that we can't fit into this event.

🚧Demo Site

The event page for Demo Day 2023 (equinix.com) is up. As the event nears, we'll be reaching out to CFP submitters with more details on preparation and ways to spread the word.

If you haven't already, subscribe to the Equinix Developers YouTube channel where you can find playlists of our previous live streamed events:

Dates to remember: