Surviving CFP season without burning out

Friday, Sep 12, 2025 | 1 minute read

Alex Rivera
Surviving CFP season without burning out

CFP season looks like productivity. It is often just twelve slightly different versions of the same talk, rewritten at 23:47.

This fictional post shows how a DevRel overlay can mix blog narrative with talk templates.

Keep one source of truth

Put the canonical abstract in content/talks/templates/<slug>/. Individual conference pages (content/talks/YYYY/…) stay short: venue, date, language, slides, video. When the abstract changes, you change it once.

A checklist that actually fits in a week

  1. Freeze the title before you freeze the demo.
  2. Write the abstract in the language you will present in, then translate.
  3. Record a 90-second pitch. If you cannot say it out loud, the CFP will not say it either.
  4. Reuse the talk key (talk: "Search that scales") so the theme can group occurrences.
  5. Decline the events that would make the good ones worse.

None of this requires a CMS. Markdown plus front matter is enough, which is the whole point of this theme.

Previous page CFP in three steps, part 1: the hook
Next page Hello from the DevRel theme

© 2024 - 2026 DevRel Example

Search is powered by Pagefind. Just hit CTRL+K or CMD+K to start searching.

Powered by Hugo with Dream and Devrel themes.

How this About page is built

The About layout lists socials from data/socials.toml, then each Markdown file in content/about/ except index.md, sorted by filename. That is why the files are named 10-me.md, 20-details.md, 30-speaking.md.

Add a file, pick a title in front matter, write Markdown. No extra template work.

Speaking

Alex (still fictional) talks about search, observability, and community. Recurring abstracts live under /talks/templates/. The map at /talks/map/ is built from conference.latitude and conference.longitude on each talk — there is no separate geo database.

If you present in more than one language, set talk-lang on the talk and add a versions entry on the template. The theme renders tabs so you can paste the right abstract into a CFP.

Who am I?

Alex Rivera is a fictional Developer Advocate used only in this example site. The biography, conferences, and co-speaker are invented so you can copy the content shape without copying a real person.

In a real site this section is the first 10-*.md file on the About page: short, first person or third, with the links that do not belong in the nav.

Social Links