CFP results: what the reviewers actually rewarded

Two hundred and eleven proposals came in. Thirty-four made it. If you were not selected, that is a nine-in-ten outcome and says very little about your work.

What we can tell you is what the accepted set has in common, because the pattern was consistent enough to be worth writing down.

Accepted talks named a specific failure. Not "lessons learned from our migration" but "the migration that took the scheduler down for six hours, and the assumption that caused it." Reviewers scored specificity higher than seniority, every time.

Accepted talks had a number in the abstract. Not a vanity number. A number that constrained the problem: how many nodes, how much power budget, how many minutes of crew time.

Rejected talks were often good talks aimed at the wrong room. A genuinely excellent introduction to a topic will lose here to a mediocre deep dive, because this audience has already read the introduction.

The CFP for next year opens the week after we close. Same reviewers, same bias toward the specific.