DDD for Night Owls

As a member of the DDD Perth organising committee, it is with a significant degree of pride that I look back and see how the conference has grown and evolved over the past number of years. From the inaugural event held back in 2015 with mainly developer focused content, we have seen the number of attendees almost double year on year and the topics become more diverse to encompass all aspects of software delivery. As an organising committee, we deeply believe in the importance of championing diversity and inclusion in order to grow an even stronger Perth IT community. This year we have taken a number of measures to improve this further, such as providing day care facilities and redefining our Code of Conduct (opens in a new tab) to ensure we create an environment in which everyone feels safe to be themselves. As you can no doubt appreciate, a huge amount of effort goes into organising a conference such as DDD Perth, and it is really a labour of love for all involved. It is far from a selfless act however, the feeling you get when everything comes together on conference day is massively exhilarating. Dare I say even addictive 😊

In 2017 we had over one hundred submissions in response to our call for proposals. While this number was gratifying in and of itself, we as an organising committee were truly thrilled by the variety of the topics and diversity of our wonderful submitters. One of the unique aspects of DDD is that the agenda is democratically chosen by the community. This however does not prevent the organising committee from sharing both the elation and disappointment of our submitters should their session be voted in or narrowly miss out. This was particularly agonizing last year as the quality of submissions was universally excellent (and seeing those that have come through so far, 2018 is going to take it into in the stratosphere). After taking some time to relax after the frantic conference period, the organising committee sat down late last year and considered approaches we could take to showcase some of the speakers that did not have an opportunity to present at the main conference. DDD by Night was born. DDD by Night events are effectively mini DDDs that will be held a number of times throughout the year. Each will see curated topics aligning to our goals of providing diverse thinking, content and opinions to the Perth IT Community. As an added bonus, they also provide another dose of community driven positivity to the DDD crew!

The first DDD by Night event was held in May and saw three amazing talks by three equally amazing speakers. First up, was Mandy Michael (opens in a new tab), Fenders Perth founder, CSS aficionado and variable font evangelist (I could go on but will stop there, if you couldn’t tell we think Mandy is fantastic!) talking about why CSS is awesome. Next up, was the equally impressive Rimma Shafikova (opens in a new tab) teaching us how we can leverage the capabilities of graph databases to improve the efficiency with which we can learn Mandarin. Rimma’s ability to explain complex topics in an engaging and simple manner was massively impressive. We rounded off the night, with Tony Morris (opens in a new tab) giving a very gentle (thanks Tony!) and engaging introduction to functional programming with Haskell. The recordings and videos from the event are available on YouTube (opens in a new tab) and Flickr (opens in a new tab) respectively, and if you love the content as much as us then please subscribe.

DDD Perth has come a long way in the past three years and the DDD by Night events represent another step on this journey, one that we are incredibly excited about. We look forward to seeing you at the next one.