Every December, while everyone else is arguing about mince pies and putting the tree up too early, a chunk of the tech community does something a bit different: it opens an advent calendar made entirely of blog posts and videos. That’s the Festive Tech Calendar, and if you’ve never come across it, October is exactly the right time to start paying attention, because the call for speakers opens well before the doors start opening in December.
What is the Festive Tech Calendar?#
The Festive Tech Calendar is a free, community-run event that fills December with fresh new tech content every single day - one door, multiple contributions, all month. It grew out of the old Azure Advent Calendar and has since broadened into “by the communities, for the communities,” covering pretty much any technical subject rather than being locked to a single product or vendor.
It’s organised by the Cloud Family team, and the format is deliberately low-friction: contributors submit either a blog post or a video (ideally 15+ minutes if it’s a video), give it a festive spin if they fancy it, and it gets scheduled against a door on the calendar for December. Content goes out on the Festive Tech Calendar YouTube channel and gets promoted across social media as each door opens, so contributors get exposure well beyond their own following.
It’s also for a good cause - the 2026 edition is raising money for the Beatson Cancer Charity, so on top of the content itself, there’s a fundraising angle running alongside it.
Why it’s worth taking part in#
Its pretty simple:
- It’s low pressure. You’re not competing for a conference slot or fighting through a formal CFP review process against hundreds of other talks - it’s genuinely open to contributors from any community, any experience level.
- Everyone who submits gets accepted. This isn’t a competitive CFP where most submissions get rejected - if you submit, you get at least one session on the calendar. There’s at least one piece of content going live every day in December, and on busier days that can stretch to three, four, or even five.
- You get a say in your date. You can roughly choose which day your content goes live, so if you want to line it up with a specific date, avoid a day you know you’ll be offline, or just get in early before the calendar fills up, you can ask for it.
- The topics are wide open. Deep technical walkthroughs, practical demos, soft-skills content, personal stories, AMAs, Twitch streams - if it’s technical and you’re excited about it, it fits.
- It’s a great first step into public speaking or content creation. A 15-minute video or a blog post is a much smaller commitment than a 45-minute conference talk, which makes it a good place to get comfortable putting yourself out there.
- You get discovered. Because everything is aggregated on one calendar and pushed out door by door in December, you end up in front of an audience that wouldn’t normally find your blog or channel on its own.
How to take part#
As a contributor:
- Head to the Festive Tech Calendar Sessionize page and submit your idea - a title, a short abstract, and whether you’re planning a blog post or a video.
- Pick a topic you actually know something about and are happy to go a bit deep on. A festive theme is encouraged but not compulsory - don’t force a Christmas pun into your title if it doesn’t fit.
- Everyone who submits gets accepted for at least one door - there’s no gatekeeping to worry about here. You can also flag roughly which day in December you’d like your content to go live, so pick a date that suits you if you have one in mind. Get your content finished ahead of that date - videos go up on the Festive Tech Calendar YouTube channel, blog posts get linked from the calendar and shared out on socials.
- Keep an eye on submission deadlines - they close well before December, so don’t leave it until the last week of November to pitch an idea.
As an audience member:
You don’t need to submit anything to get value out of this. Just:
- Bookmark festivetechcalendar.com and check back through December as new doors open.
- Subscribe to the YouTube channel so video content lands in your feed automatically.
- Follow @_Cloudfamily on Twitter/X for daily door announcements.
Thirty-one days, covering everything from cloud platforms to dev tooling to career advice - it’s a genuinely good way to pick up a broad spread of tech knowledge in December, and an even better way to dip a toe into speaking or writing if you’ve been putting it off.
I’ll be organizing this year’s calendar and will likely put something together myself - if I do, I’ll link it here once my door opens. If you’re thinking about submitting something, don’t overthink it. Pick something you know, keep it practical, and get it in before the CFP closes. (CFP will be open all of October)
