10th year of conferences for YOW!

A range of inspiring speakers and cutting-edge content will be on show at this year’s 10th YOW! Conference.

The event will provide strategic networking opportunities for software developers and engineers.

YOW! was founded in 2008 by Dave Thomas, a Canadian-based software visionary. Since launching in Australia 10 years ago over 30,000 people have attended YOW! events, and it is now the largest independent event organiser in Australia for software development.

In 2018 YOW! presents another fantastic line-up at its signature conferences held in November–December in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, featuring 40+ world-class experts that have been hand-picked to share their insights. Keynotes will be delivered in each city by industry luminaries such as Dr Anita Sengupta, Brendan Gregg, Jessica Kerr and Kent Beck.

Finding performance wins in the cloud

How does Netflix get both happier customers and lower costs? It has a dedicated performance team conducting root cause analysis on any issues with applications, runtimes, operating systems and hypervisors, in an environment of 150k cloud instances that undergo numerous production changes each week. Brendan Gregg, a senior performance architect at Netflix and an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing, will share the Netflix environment, procedures and tools it uses to undertake root cause analysis on cloud performance issues.

The future of mobility: from flying cars to the Hyperloop

The cartoon myth of the flying car has been replaced with the reality of the Hyperloop, a magnetically levitating, electromagnetically propelled, passenger vehicle in a vacuum tube — essentially space travel on Earth’s surface. Dr Anita Sengupta, a rocket scientist and aerospace engineer who for the past 15 years has enabled the exploration of Mars, asteroids and deep space, will discuss how space-age tech coupled to the VC-funded innovation environment is enabling the revolution in green transportation from suborbital rocket flights, to electric airplanes, to space travel on the ground with the Hyperloop.

The origins of opera and the future of programming

Jessica Kerr, lead engineer at Atomist, will tell a story of musicians, artists, philosophers, scientists and then programmers. Her story contains a truth that leads to a new view of work and sees beauty in the painful complexity that is software development. Starting from The Journal of the History of Ideas, Kerr will trace the concept of an ‘invisible college’ through music and art and science to programming. She will reveal the dark truth behind the 10x developer, a real definition of ‘senior developer’ and a new name for our work and our teams.

3X: explore, expand, extract

You’ve heard of XP but how about 3X? Before you can evaluate a style of software engineering, you have to understand its goals. Quick execution of experiments? Rapid scaling in the face of unexpected bottlenecks? Sustained, profitable growth? Each goal requires a different style and yet we talk about software engineering as if it should be one thing. Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained (‘The White Book’) and consistent challenger of software engineering dogma, will introduce 3X and the ways software development, quality assurance, design, management, financing, planning and staffing change depending on the goal of development.

Attend the 10th Anniversary YOW! Conferences in Sydney on 29–30 November; Brisbane on 3–4 December; and Melbourne on 6–7 December.

Workshops

Alongside the conferences, YOW! offers a series of Depthfirst Workshops providing attendees with maximum learning through interaction with the experts in their field. All workshops are hands-on in a small group environment. This year you could learn how to create high-performance organisations that can innovate at scale from Barry O’Reilly (co-author of Lean Enterprise); how to build evolutionary architectures with Neal Ford (co-author of Building Evolutionary Architectures); how to program in Elixir by ‘Pragmatic’ Dave Thomas (author of Programming Elixir 1.6); and more. See the full list here.

YOW! Workshops will be offered in Sydney on 27–28 November and Melbourne on 4–5 December.

Images courtesy of YOW!