Crafting a Winning Conference Talk: Lessons from a PyCon US Reviewer

In this short article Sydney shares some of the lessons she learned as she reviewed talks for PyCon US 2025. The morale of the article seems to be that if you follow the instructions closely and carefully, and avoid spamming the proposals with LLM-generated trash, you're already doing quite well.

By the end of the article, Sydney shares that many proposals have one or more of the following issues:

• irrelevant content – or failure to explain why their content is relevant for that conference;
• not following the instructions of how to fill in each field;
• lack of details – as a reviewer, the more detailed your proposal is, the better. If you have more details to share, share them, especially in the outline field;
• proposals that want to cram way too much information into the timeslot they get; and
• no clear target audience.

This reinforces the idea that if you follow the instructions closely and show that you've thought about your proposal thoroughly, you're in good shape.