标签：#speaking

As part of the Förderverein AWS Community DACH e.V. I joined the selection committee for talks again this year. Third year in a row (I wrote about the previous editions and my broader community journey in my 2025 year in review ). The process is always inspiring, fair, and full of incredibly well-crafted abstracts. How the evaluation works Sessionize uses a Comparison Evaluation Mode based on the Elo rating system (from chess). Three sessions are shown at the same time and you rank them relative to each other. You don't assign absolute scores; you just decide "this one is better than that one." Each comparison produces three "games" (A vs B, B vs C, C vs A) and the algorithm adjusts ratings accordingly. After a first pass through all sessions, the system gets smarter about which triplets to show next, targeting sessions with similar ratings for more precise differentiation. It's fast, focused and surprisingly fair, because you only ever think about the three in front of you, not all others. You can also use "Strong opinion" options: Top (this is excellent), Doesn't fit (wrong conference), or Ignore (conflict of interest, can't judge). These signal the algorithm without distorting the ranking. In my case: I marked 2 as "Doesn't fit" (not because they lacked quality; they were actually interesting but too inspirational for a technical community day, better suited for a different audience). The other 2 ignored were my own submissions : Vibecoding in Between Meetings and Serverless vs Kubernetes - The Final Showdown . The full process The behind-the-scenes post by Philipp Garbe explains the whole pipeline in detail. In short: Round 1 (Screening): Board members filter out spam, incomplete proposals, marketing pitches, non-AWS topics, and speakers outside EMEA. Round 2 (Content Evaluation): Every association member can participate. This is the Elo-based comparison round. Members must disclose personal connections and skip sessions they can't rate objectively. Round 3 (Fin