Call for papers 2025 insights

I can’t belive it’s already February 2025. For the content team at JSHeroes, January is the busiest week of the year because of the hyperfocus on the call for papers selection process. So another year, another great effort put by the entire team!

We’re lucky to be able to reuse some of the work from the past few years. The process we started in 2023 proved to be simple and efficient and 2025 was no exception.

Here are some interesting figures:

  • number of proposals: 271
  • number of speakers: 157
  • total time spent rating proposals (first phase): 29 hours and 15 minutes
  • average time spent per session per reviewer: 62.1 seconds
  • shortlisted talks: 73
  • selected talks: 9

We followed the same two-step approach as in previous years. The first phase is an anonymized 1 to 5 stars rating system. The second phase is a bit more improvized, based on the shortlisted proposals and our event needs.

This time, we looked for a tighter connection to our 2025 theme. We’ll have two somewhat distinct days this time around. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the industry needs and the developing technologies.

We won’t just throw all the content in a blender and spit out an agenda. Instead, we want to tell a more comprehensive story. Day one will focus on the current state of our day-to-day projects. Day two will explore the frameworks, standards and tools that will shape our future work.

So we looked for talks around common struggles like: maintainability, technical debt or refactoring. But we also couldn’t neglect proposal on the state of tools and technologies in 2025.

There’s always some risk behind choosing one talk over another. And there’s always a big element of uncertainty. But I’m really excited about the talks we picked.

You can check out all the speakers on the homepage as well as the talk details in the draft agenda.

I want to give a big shoutout here to a lot of the speakers who proposed topics for 2025. They understood our goals for 2025 and I was really surprised by the overall quality of these proposals.

This is a great learning point for conference organizers and content teams. If you want your event to work around a central theme, tell your potential speakers what you expect from them. As an occasional speaker myself, I saw too many events that had very generic requirements and expectations from the CFP process.

In the end, I want to thank everyone part of the CFP effort: Jeremias Menichelli, Sara Vieira, Andrei Antal, Radu Blana, Florin Tomozei and Avram Danes. One top of that, big props to: Andrei Pfeiffer, Ioana Chiorean and Tejas Kumar for reaching out to some of the speakers we invited for the past few months.