Proceedings of the Raptors Conference

Aims and scope

The Raptors Conference is about software that is already running. The talks it selects come from engineers describing systems they built, operated and had to fix: production incidents and what they cost, systems under load, migrations carried out while users were on them, data platforms, applied machine learning that has to hold up outside a notebook, and the security of all of it.

The Proceedings exists because a broadcast is not a record. A conference talk is watched once and then it is difficult to find, difficult to cite and impossible to quote precisely. The work behind it deserves an address that still resolves in five years. That is the whole purpose of this publication.

The scope is deliberately narrow. This is an engineering proceedings tied to one event, not a general-purpose journal, and it does not accept work outside the subject matter of the conference. A submission is in scope when it reports something the author has done, in a production setting, that another engineer could learn from.

What is published here

Each entry in the Proceedings consists of the title of the talk, the author, an abstract of 100 to 200 words written by the author or drafted from their own submission and approved by them in writing, a link to the presentation slides where these have been supplied, and the date the paper was accepted. Nothing is published under an author's name that the author has not written or approved.

Full papers are not required. Authors who want to submit a longer text alongside the abstract may do so and it is published with the entry. The abstract is what the conference asks for, because the primary work being recorded is the talk.

Frequency and numbering

The Proceedings is published annually, one volume per edition of the conference. The current volume is Vol. 1 (2026), which is in preparation and publishes in October 2026, following the conference on 21 October 2026. Papers accepted for it are listed on this page and each already has its permanent address.

Volume numbering runs in sequence from Vol. 1 (2026). The title of the publication does not change between volumes.

Identifiers, archiving and access

An ISSN has been requested from the ISSN UK Centre at the British Library. The Centre assigns an ISSN after a first issue is published, so the number will appear on this page when it has been allocated, and not before.

Hackathon Raptors is a member of Crossref, under DOI prefix 10.68495. Every paper receives a DOI registered against the permanent address it already holds, which is why those addresses were fixed before any DOI existed. A DOI is shown on a paper's page once Crossref resolves it.

Every paper is published open access on this site with no fee to the author and no fee to the reader. There is no charge of any kind for publication. Slides are served from this site rather than linked to a third-party drive, so the material does not disappear when a link is revoked.