I've just spent the day reviewing sessions submitted for this years JavaOne conference. Thankfully I don't have to review every session, in fact there are so many that I only get to review sessions from people who's name starts with one of two letters and for one track. I'm not revealing the exact details, so nobody can either try to bribe me to get their session in (very unlikely) or complain to me when their session doesn't get accepted (more likely).

As ever, we're trying really hard to address the feedback we get from people about the level of technical content, the skills of the presenters and so on. This is always a bit of a juggling act since until you actually see the presentation it's very difficult to judge what it will really be like. Also, what might be the perfect session for one person is not for someone else (remember, you can't please all the people all the time).

If anyone wants my advice on what makes a good submission here's a few things I'd recommend based on the last few hours of looking through sessions that ranged from the exceptional to the down-right bizarre. (I'm not giving specifics, but there were a couple of sessions that reminded me of a quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "I think I speak for everyone here when I say, huh?").

• Title needs to be catchy, but is not the most important part of the submission.
• If there is a section for abstract and separate section for presentation summary, fill them both in and make them different.
• Give sufficient detail without being too verbose, which is obviously like saying cut a piece of string to the right length. Let's just say that a single sentence is too short and presentation summary that takes ten minutes to read is too long.
• If you're submitting a session for a Java conference, you'll really should mention the word Java at least once in your submission (or at the very least something connected to Java like JVM).
• Think about what would make you want to go to a session if you were reading the abstract, give it an interesting angle that will attract an audience. This will also work with reviewers.

Best of luck to anyone who's submitted a session.