The TokioConf 2026 Call For Talk Proposals is now open

We are excited to announce that the Call for Speakers for TokioConf 2026 is officially open!

As we announced in June, the Tokio project is hosting the inaugural TokioConf, which will take place on April 20-22 in Portland, OR, and will gather 300 developers to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and explore the future of async Rust. The conference focuses on the practical side of async Rust development. Whether you've been working with async Rust for years and have lessons to share, you're new to it and figuring out the patterns, or you're a student preparing to start your first job, we want talks that help everyone who uses async Rust in production.

Submit a talk proposal here.

We're looking for talks across all technical levels - every talk should provide people with practical insights they can apply in their own work. Whether you're sharing beginner lessons or advanced optimization tricks, focus on real experiences and practical applications that people can actually use. We are especially interested in talks about:

Production Lessons:
What actually happened when you shipped async code to production - the outages, the tough debugging sessions, the scaling surprises. What tools do you wish you'd known about, and what would you do differently next time?

Architecture Patterns & Design:
The architectural decisions that worked (and the ones that didn't) - actor patterns, channels, when to spin up multiple runtimes, different concurrency approaches, and when you probably shouldn't use Tokio at all.

Performance Optimization:
Stories about hunting down that one blocking call that was tanking performance, tuning runtimes, dealing with oversubscription, and annoying OS scheduling pauses. Share the optimization tricks that actually made a difference.

Debugging & Monitoring:
How do you actually figure out what's going wrong in async code, especially in production? Share your debugging and monitoring setups that work.

Rust Everywhere:
Can Rust really work everywhere, not just for high-performance systems? Real experiences using async Rust for typical applications, what's working, what's still missing, and what we'd need to get there.

Testing Async Code:
How to actually test this stuff without pulling your hair out, catching those sneaky cancellation bugs before they hit users, and the practices that help you ship reliable async systems.

Team Adoption:
The real story of adoption - what worked when convincing your team, the training that actually helped, the failures and false starts, the common concerns and roadblocks you hit, and how to build codebases that your whole team can work with.

What's Next:
Industry shifts and emerging technologies that will impact how we build async applications. New paradigms, AI, evolving infrastructure - what's coming that async Rust developers should be thinking about?

How to Submit

Have something the community should hear about? We're accepting submissions through December 8, 2025. Submit your proposal at https://sessionize.com/tokioconf-2026. We'll be making the final decisions late January 2026.

Questions about your talk idea? Reach out to us at hello@tokioconf.com - we're happy to help you figure out if your experience would make a great talk. There is also a #tokioconf channel on the Tokio project Discord, another good place to ask questions.

What Happens Next

We are busy planning the conference and will be announcing more details over the coming months. Sign up for email updates at tokioconf.com, or follow us on Bluesky or Mastodon to get updates.

Looking forward to hearing what you've learned building with async Rust.