Submit your talk.
Submit early, refine later.
code.talks 2026 happens Nov 4–5 in Hamburg. 100+ talks across 14 tracks, curated by 25+ practitioners. This year we review submissions in three waves. Submit in wave 2 and you’ll have your answer by the end of August.
Apply now
Next deadline: Wave 2 closes July 27
Three waves to get your talk in.
Submit early, get a decision faster, and free up your fall to actually prepare.
WAVE 1
CLOSED
Submit by May 31
Submit deadline
May 31
Decision made
June 19
Yes or no
June 22
WAVE 2
CURRENTLY OPEN
Submit by July 27
Submit deadline
July 27
Decision made
August 15
Yes or no
August 18
WAVE 3
UPCOMING
Submit by August 31
Submit deadline
August 31
Decision made
September 18
Yes or no
September 21
Why submit in wave 2.
Here’s a thing we hear every year: speakers wait until November because they want to keep their topic flexible. AI moves faster than any conference timeline. What you know about agentic workflows today might be old news in six months. So you sit on your submission.
We changed that rule for 2026. Lock your topic now, refine your content later. Once we accept your talk, your topic stays as submitted, and your abstract and slides keep evolving right up to the day you walk on stage.
BENEFIT 01
More curator attention
Wave 1 submissions land on empty curator desks. By wave 3, most slots are filled and the bar is higher.
BENEFIT 02
A decision in June, not September
Wave 2 speakers know if they’re in by August 18, which gives you 2 months of runway to prepare your talk and your team.
BENEFIT 03
Topic locked, content flexible
Your topic is fixed once accepted. Your angle is yours to evolve as the field moves.
From form to stage.
01 · SUBMIT
Send your talk
Drop your topic, abstract, and track into the form. Ten minutes, no slides required yet.
02 · REVIEW
Curators vote
The track’s lead curator and their team read every submission and shortlist the strongest.
03 · DECISION
You hear back
We email you a yes or no within days of the wave’s decision date, no endless waiting.
04 · REFINE
Evolve your content
Once you’re in, your topic is locked but your abstract and slides keep improving until showtime.
Who decides what makes it on stage.
25+ practitioners read every submission. Most have spoken at code.talks themselves. Some go deep on AI. Some challenge it. They don’t agree on everything, and that’s by design.
The program is organized around 14 tracks. Each track has a lead curator who owns the shortlist for that area. Around them, smaller curator teams cover the depth. And this year we added a Community Curator layer, so the people who attend code.talks also have a voice in what gets on stage.
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What we’re looking for.
One question per submission: will this talk make developers better at their job?
GenAI & LLMs
Lead:
Matthias Lau
Large language models, generative AI, agents, RAG and prompt engineering — putting machine intelligence to work in real products.
Architecture
Lead:
Uwe Friedrichsen
Software architecture, system design, distributed systems and the trade-offs behind decisions that scale.
Cloud
Lead:
Dennis Kieselhorst
Cloud-native development, infrastructure, Kubernetes, serverless and modern platform engineering.
Security
Lead:
Vlad Cherednychenko
Application and infrastructure security, threat modeling, secure coding, identity and DevSecOps.
Frontend
Lead:
Ramona Schwering
Modern web UI: frameworks, performance, accessibility, design systems and great user experiences.
Product
Lead:
Zamina Ahmad
Product engineering, discovery, metrics and building the things users actually need.
Data
Lead:
Florian Krause
Data engineering, analytics, streaming and pipelines that turn raw data into real value.
Culture
Lead:
Ole Michaelis
Engineering culture, teams, leadership, collaboration and healthier ways of working.
Craft
Lead:
Thomas Much
Software craftsmanship: clean code, testing, refactoring and quality that lasts.
DevEx
Lead:
Sebastian Korfmann
Developer experience, tooling, internal platforms and removing everyday friction.
Science
Lead:
Michael Sperber
Computer science foundations, algorithms and the research behind the practice.
Impact
Lead:
Lovis Möller
Sustainability, ethics, accessibility and technology built to do good.
Geek-Out
Lead:
Martin Westphal
The fun, weird and deeply technical rabbit holes worth diving into.
Newcomer
Lead:
TBA
For those starting out — fundamentals, career paths and finding your footing in tech.
Found your track?
Lock your topic now and refine it right up to the day you walk on stage.
Apply now
Next deadline: Wave 2 closes July 27
