# A Gentle Guide to Your First JuliaCon Review **URL:** \ **Category:** General Usage\ **Tags:** juliacon, review\ **Created:** [January 25, 2023, 10:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-gentle-guide-to-your-first-juliacon-review/93537 "2023-01-25T22:26:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![TheCedarPrince](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/thecedarprince/32/17323_2.png) [@TheCedarPrince](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/TheCedarPrince)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2023, 10:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-gentle-guide-to-your-first-juliacon-review/93537/1 "2023-01-25T22:26:25Z")
Hi folks! JuliaCon is just around the corner and I wanted to more publicly share this resource I put together for new reviewers of the (fantastic) annual JuliaCon. Hope it helps! * * * As there have been some questions about how to make reviews for JuliaCon, I made a small guide on making your own reviews for a proposal if you have any concerns about how to write a review. To start, here are the comments that I received for the lightning talk I gave, Using Julia for Observational Health Research: > ### Reviewer 1: > > This sounds like an incredibly interesting talk and well worth the 10minutes (lightning talk format) > > ### Reviewer 2: > > This may be an interesting application of Julia in another area. > > ### Reviewer 3: > > It appears that this talk showcases the efforts of a large group of contributors in a variety of organizations and therefore potentially the effectiveness of composability in the Julia ecosystem. As you can see, the reviews can be very concise. I try to make mine more direct and more detailed for the submitters depending on the familiarity I have with a particular submission topic. Here is an example of one review that I created (with relevant pieces redacted): > A word that comes to mind when I see this package is: innovative. I have not only followed the development of this package but also used it myself. As a developer who finds myself constantly within the Julia REPL, I am impressed by the extensibility brought to the Julia REPL by this package. There have been packages such as RCall.jl which introduce new modes within the REPL – this package extends the base Julia mode in ways I have never seen before. I rank this package very high in interest to the Julia community due to its technical feats but due to the niche of [redacted], its applicability may be somewhat limited. However, as the author states, even though [redacted] may be niche, the idea [redacted] is highly pervasive. I would like the author in their presentation to more explain the technical details and challenges encountered within their experience in creating this package. I would, nonetheless, recommend it for a slot as a JuliaCon Talk. It can vary widely in terms of how much or how little you can write in a review as you can see. The main philosophy I keep in mind is this, “if I were to receive this review, would I find it useful in creating an excellent X?” (X being a poster, talk, etc.). Importantly, at the end of the day, choose kindness in writing your reviews. Hope this helps and feel free to follow-up with questions or your insights! 😄 * * * ~ tcp 🌳 ---
**Author:** ![danny.s](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/41988e/32.png) [@danny.s](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/danny.s)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2023, 7:57pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-gentle-guide-to-your-first-juliacon-review/93537/2 "2023-02-01T19:57:38Z")
Some simple Q&A based on points I don’t think are clear due to the unique nature of the relationship between submitters/reviewers for JuliaCon. I included the answers from the julia slack as subpoints. - Is reviewing a package you use/have used is okay? If I use `[redacted].jl` in my day-to-day work, does reviewing it constitute a conflict of interest even if I don’t have any relationship with the developer? - Some proposals may include instructions to, e.g. execute a command in your shell to run an example script perhaps using this as a substitute for a better description. Is this allowed and/or good practice? - On workshops: with 30min talk proposals that seem quite niche, I might a put a comment like “this might be more appropriate as a lightning talk due to its niche nature and limited time available in the conference” and put slightly lower on applicability and contribution to community. Should I evaluate workshops in a similar manner, or are even the most niche workshops to be accepted as long as they are “sound”? - Should the score take into account the requested format? E.g. giving a high score for an experience talk would mean “this is a very good fit for an experience talk”, right? - How should we recommend to change a full-length talk to a lightning talk? - Since there aren’t online lightning talks, how should we approach online talks that might benefit from shortening to ~10 minutes? Should we just recommend for acceptance in that case? ---
**Author:** ![TheCedarPrince](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/thecedarprince/32/17323_2.png) [@TheCedarPrince](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/TheCedarPrince)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2023, 3:47pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-gentle-guide-to-your-first-juliacon-review/93537/3 "2023-02-03T15:47:29Z")
@logankilpatrick or @kslimes , would you accept this as a PR somewhere to the JuliaCon website or somewhere on the Julia website? Trying to think of how we could socialize this information further. ---
**Author:** ![logankilpatrick](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/logankilpatrick/32/38123_2.png) [@logankilpatrick](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/logankilpatrick)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2023, 1:20pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-gentle-guide-to-your-first-juliacon-review/93537/4 "2023-02-05T13:20:29Z")
Adding a PR to the JuliaCon site would be cool with me!