Call for Papers is open: speak at Code Europe 2026

The Code Europe 2026 Call for Papers is now open. The conference runs across two days: Day 1 online across CEE on 14 September, and Day 2 on-site in Warsaw on 15 September. We need speakers for both.

Deadline: 30 June 2026. We review submissions on a rolling basis. Earlier proposals get earlier decisions, and earlier decisions give you more time to prepare the talk you actually want to give.

Please fill out the Call for Papers form.

Day 1 online, Day 2 on-site

The CFP covers both days, and they’re not interchangeable.

Day 1 (14 September) is online. Keynote talks, panels, and lecture slots broadcast across CEE, with sessions available live and on-demand afterward. The audience includes on-site ticket holders attending the next day and online-only attendees from across the region. Speakers can join remotely from anywhere; no travel required. Day 1 suits talks that benefit from broadcast reach: keynote-style technical perspectives, panel discussions, content where the live in-room dynamic isn’t essential to the delivery.

Day 2 (15 September) is on-site in Warsaw. Three parallel tracks running the full day. This is the conference day for talks that work best in the room, with the engineers in front of you and questions afterward that you can answer face to face. Day 2 speakers are part of the full in-person program: speaker dinner the night before, afterparty, networking with attendees and other speakers.

When you submit, indicate which day suits your talk, or whether you’re open to either. Some speakers do both, with a broader keynote on Day 1 and a deeper track talk on Day 2. If you’re flexible, we’ll match the format that fits the talk and the program shape best.

Three tracks, not a closed catalogue

The 2026 program runs across three tracks. The topic lists below are indicative, not exhaustive. If you have a talk that fits one of these tracks (or sits productively between two of them) and the audience is engineers and builders, we want to see your proposal.

AI Engineering & Data. Agents and agentic workflows. LLM application engineering and context engineering as a discipline. MCP integrations from teams shipping them. MLOps, evals, and observability for AI systems. AI-augmented development with real productivity data, not vendor claims. Vector databases, RAG at scale, structured outputs in production.

Cloud, DevOps & Platform Engineering. Internal developer platforms that engineers actually use. Kubernetes at fleet scale. OpenTelemetry adoption with the traps included. eBPF in production. Software supply chain security. FinOps owned by engineering teams. AI workload economics from the platform side.

Software Architecture & Engineering Excellence. Distributed systems patterns reviewed three years on. The modular-monolith-vs-microservices conversation with real numbers. Modern language deep dives (Rust beyond rewrites, JVM modernization, TypeScript at scale, Go past microservices). API design trade-offs. The staff+ engineer playbook.

The agenda committee — around twelve senior practitioners across the three tracks — reviews every submission against the same bar. Sponsor talks pass through the same review.

We’re not looking for: intro-level content, vendor product demos dressed as talks, “future of [X]” framing without a working system behind it, or talks already given at five other conferences this year. If your proposal lands in any of those categories, we’ll ask you to reframe.

What the committee looks for in accepted talks, for example:

• Production experience as the foundation. “We ran this for X months and here’s what happened” beats “here’s what I think about this.” Practitioner perspective, not commentator perspective.
• Specifics over generalities. Real numbers, real systems, real architectural decisions. Vendor benchmarks and hypotheticals don’t pass review.
• A clear primary audience. Which track, what experience level, what specific roles you’re speaking to. Talks that try to serve everyone usually serve no one.
• Topic still in motion. Something that’s actively changing in 2026, where the conversation isn’t yet settled.
• Fresh material. Strong first or second outings of a talk beat well-traveled material. Proposals that look like a circuit tour usually don’t make it through.

Why speak at Code Europe

The audience. 1,892 participants attended the 2025 edition, with 81% having four or more years of professional experience and 62% having more than five. The questions after your talk will be sharper than at most events.

The lineage. Past editions have featured Bjarne Stroustrup, José Valim, George Hotz, Holly Cummins, Andrei Alexandrescu, Greg Young, Yan Cui, Katie Gamanji, Kent C. Dodds, and Jim Manico, alongside practitioners from Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Netflix, AWS, the CNCF, and GitHub. Code Europe has spent a decade building a stage worth the talks given on it.

The care we take of our speakers.

• Travel and accommodation covered for accepted on-site speakers (Day 2), scaled to travel distance.
• Shuttle service from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to the venue.
• Speaker dinner the evening before the on-site day, with the wider on-site speaker lineup.
• Access to the Code Europe Afterparty for extended networking with attendees and fellow speakers.
• Dedicated speaker support from our team, from the moment you’re accepted through to the day of the talk.
• Professional production: serious A/V, video recordings of your talk, photography you can actually use afterward. Day 1 speakers get the same recording and post-production quality, with the additional benefit that sessions live on as on-demand video across CEE.
• For Day 1 online speakers based in Warsaw or able to travel: an open invitation to join the Day 2 speaker dinner, afterparty, and on-site program as our guest.

We invest seriously in the people we bring on stage, online or on-site. That’s been our discipline for nine editions, and it’s the reason speakers speak so highly of Code Europe.

Before you submit

Multiple submissions are welcome. You don’t need to guess which idea we want. Submit one to five rough directions and let the committee tell you which one fits. Multiple proposals aren’t held against you.

The working title is fine for now. Submit with whatever title you have; the final title is something we refine with you after acceptance. That said, pick a title that isn’t boring.

Be specific about what the audience will leave with. Two concrete sentences describing what they’ll know after your talk beats a polished paragraph that doesn’t commit to anything. “We rebuilt our auth system on top of Workload Identity Federation; this talk covers the migration plan, the three rollback scenarios we needed, and what we’d do differently” beats “An exploration of modern identity patterns in cloud-native systems.”

Don’t resubmit a talk you’ve already given at five other conferences. We’ll find out, and even strong material loses something when it’s been delivered enough times that the speaker can do it in their sleep.

How to apply

Please fill out the Call for Papers form.

If you have questions about whether your talk fits before you submit, write to us at [email protected]. We’d rather have a short conversation up front than have a great proposal land in the wrong track.

See you in Warsaw.