TL;DR: I spoke at Boiling Frogs — the conference I consider the best in Poland. I was afraid my topic wouldn’t be good enough for that room. It was. But the most valuable part of the day had nothing to do with my talk.
Boiling Frogs is the conference I registered for without checking the agenda first.
One day. Three tracks. No filler. The selection is tough by design — hundreds of submissions, a handful of slots. The result is a room full of people who actually care. Engineers, architects, CTOs, QA specialists, product people — all choosing your talk over two others running in parallel.
I’ve been attending every year. Getting accepted to speak there meant something to me ☺️
Oh wow — it’s already over, but I’m still riding the emotions from this conference. That’s why I’m here, writing this article for you. I hope you can learn something from my experience and maybe you’ll soon find yourself as speaker/trainer at your very first conference — either in your country or abroad 🙂
I’ve been a public speaker since 2023, and ever since then I’ve been applying to multiple conferences. I’ve spoken at events across Poland, sharing my experience and ideas, but for a long time I couldn’t quite make it happen abroad… until SymfonyCon 2025! I’m truly happy it finally worked out 🔥
In this article, I want to cover everything related to this trip, so treat it as a practical guide on how to apply, prepare, and perform on an international stage — especially if you’re thinking about submitting your own talk or workshop.
SymfonyCon is the flagship annual conference for the Symfony community — the main event for anyone building with Symfony in PHP. There’s only one SymfonyCon each year, but the ecosystem also includes local SymfonyDay and SymfonyLive conferences/meetups, as well as SymfonyOnline, the online-only conference.
I’ve decided to apply with multiple talks and one workshop, but only the workshop got selected – Refactoring towards Clean Architecture. In this workshop I teach how to refactor the application written in a framework way into Clean Architecture. You can find more (what it is about, outcomes, agenda, etc.) on the dedicated page.
