You may have heard the acronym SOLID. It is one of the most widely-referenced sets of software design principles, appearing everywhere from architecture guidelines to job descriptions. It's also closely associated with the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm.

This talk builds a critique of OOP through an exploration of the SOLID design principles. You may be thinking something along the lines of "overengineering" or "unnecessary complexity". But this talk makes a different point: that the simple, maintainable software engendered by SOLID principles may be best achieved by thinking outside of OOP.

Troy Gerwien

A SOLID takedown of OOP

HTML, the foundation of the web! With so much time being spent on typed javascript, functional programming, unit tests, visual regression testing, tools, frameworks and a drive to write better more efficient code we often forget that the web starts with HTML.

Let’s talk HTML and semantics and why choosing the right HTML elements will help you write more accessible, efficient and maintainable code not just in your HTML but your CSS and Javascript as well. 

Most importantly we’ll explore why HTML is so vital in improving your projects overall functionality for people and for bots. 


Mandy Michael

Advanced HTML for Good Developers

How do Facebook and Netflix build these great big scalable mega-systems?

And how do Jane Street and Optiver build these ultra-low-latency trading platforms?

With a few fundamental concepts up your sleeve, you'll be able to understand and reverse engineer databases and runtimes; the beating hearts of these behemoths.

Nicholas Sia

Demystifying Performance

Great teams have a foundation built on shared understanding, with communication going beyond what's been written down on the user story. Everyone on the team ends up with a clear vision and understanding of the work required. 

This talk explores how it impacts your teams, and shares some tools and techniques that help build a culture of shared understanding. Whether you're an individual contributor, or trying to build consensus with a wider team, there's something in it for everyone. 

No more glassy eyed slow nods to fast forward to the end of the conversation, but more excitement knowing you're actually on the same page.  

Joel Tan

Do you get what I mean? Building a culture of shared understanding

In the world of cybersecurity, where hackers lurk in the darkest digital dungeons, everyone must face the music—especially seasoned tech wizards like yourself. While we may have mastered the art of basic security hygiene (no more clicking suspicious links, right?), the question remains: Are you prepared for the ultimate boss battle? Can you navigate the treacherous maze of a cyber crisis with grace and finesse? Or will you be caught off guard like a goblin stumbling into a gelatinous cube?

But fear not, brave adventurers! Our session is here to equip you with the comedic +5 sword of knowledge and the hilarious cloak of preparedness. We'll explore the whimsical parallels between running a successful security crisis response and leading an epic D&D campaign. Together, we'll slay misconceptions, dodge digital fireballs, and emerge victorious, ready to face whatever the realms of cybersecurity throw our way. So grab your dice, gather your team, and get ready to embark on a quest that will have you laughing in the face of cyber danger!

Jessie Gallagher

George Coldham

Dungeons, Dragons, and Data Breaches: Exploring the Synergy of Security Crisis Response

Unlock the full potential of edge computing with this session. We'll dive deep into what edge computing is, how it works, and how it can enhance the software you build.

Learn about new runtimes and frameworks like Deno and Fresh that can take advantage of edge computing. See how easy it is to deploy to the edge and understand what it means to deploy your code as close as possible to your users and the benefits it brings.

The session will give you real-world examples and uses cases of edge computing so you can apply it to your work. We'll also cover the limitations of the edge and when it may not be the best fit for your project. 

You will walk away from this session with the knowledge and skills to get the most out of edge computing.

Alexander Karan

Falling off the Edge: Practical Uses for Edge Computing

As a software professional it can be an amazing experience to see your company grow rapidly - winning new markets, shipping new features to customers, and welcoming a swathe of new colleagues along for the journey. At some point though, the rocket you're riding in breaks free of the atmosphere and settles in for the long haul on its journey to sustainability - and it's at this moment that you might begin to notice some problems.

Why is it that when you search for "release process" in the wiki that you now find five pages instead of one? When did setting up a new dev environment for the new starter become a two week long headache? Why does your phone keep pinging with alerts from three different monitoring systems? And how do I pronounce Kubernetes, let alone use it?

In this talk, we'll explore how one individual saw this myriad of scale up side-effects as an opportunity to create a new function within their company dedicated to improving the day to day experience of engineers. We'll cover what it took to bootstrap this function, the challenges that must be overcome, and why your workplace could benefit from a more direct focus on the engineering experience.

David Meacock

Investing in your Engineering Experience

This session will cover the life cycle of an Identity and associated accounts in an organisation.  It will cover the  complete flow including best practices around provisioning, de-provisioning , privileged password management and Identity Governance. Also I will cover what are the security risks & mitigation at each stage.

Tarun Kumar

Journey of an Identity

Writing tests can be more like programming! Property-based testing is an under-known alternative to menial example-based tests. Learn how to write more robust tests in a way you'll want to skip less. I found a bug in my code the first time I tried it, find out how you can catch some too.

Wes Toleman

Less Boring Tests - An Introduction to Property-Based Testing

The current economic climate has resulted in many companies undergoing redundancies, restructuring, and cost-cutting measures. This has created a challenging environment for employees seeking salary reviews and promotions. In this panel discussion (featuring a combined 50+ years experience in the tech industry) we will share strategies and best practices for individuals navigating these conversations and answer some of your burning questions with an interactive discussion. 

Donna Edwards

Akanksha Malik

Josh Sewell

Navigating salary reviews and promotions in a climate of redundancies.

Ever watched Air Crash Investigation? You may not be an aviation nerd, but there are so many fascinating parallels between security and the aviation industry: the layering of safety controls, making sure there are different types of security controls in place, the improvements made after bad things happened, etc. 

In this talk I'll discuss some of some notable examples in both the aviation and security industry and what we can learn and take away from that as security professionals.
Note: You don't have to be an aviation geek to enjoy this talk, promise!

Sarah Young

Nerds on a plane: what we can learn from the aviation industry

Observability ( o11y )  is a practice that helps provide better insights into application behaviour,  to enable the earlier identification and rectification of application defects.  
Most developers come across o11y  when assigned a bug report from IT OPS with a log file attached, this log file usually contains any information that has been pumped to stdout() !!  .... usually not that helpful. 

  There is a lot more to o11y than this.  Using concrete examples this session we will go through what developers should know to improve their applications observability when running on AWS.  We will highlight some best practices, tools and services that you can leverage to help with observability on various application stacks.

Derek Bingham

Observability for Developers

The best problem solvers are the best problem finders. But they don’t just find any problem, they find the right problem that needs solving.
Problem solving is a fundamental skill that we are taught throughout our school years. However, I believe we are only taught half the process. We are taught how to look for solutions and solve for the problem in front of us. 
However, what about how to find the problem? Or how to find a better problem? 
You might be thinking, I have enough problems already why would I want to find more? But I propose – we will always be presented with problems in every aspect of our lives, we need to be selective with the ones that we are solving, and by teaching ourselves how to identify problems, we can give ourselves the option to select which ones we want to solve.
Let’s consider what we might need to know about finding some new better problems, and how to move past potential obstacles to problem finding. 
In this talk I cover the 4 key pillars of successful problem finding (curiosity, creativity, embracing uncertainty and collaboration) and how to overcome potential obstacles.

Samantha Di Lena

Problem finding, not solving.

Follow a journey of discovery trying to reverse engineer an IKEA LED pixel lamp and turn it into an interactive, WiFi connected showcase for procedural artwork.

This session will briefly cover a range of technologies and topics from graphics and generative art to embedded and low level programming.

Drew Alexander

Procedural Art with a Hacked IKEA Lamp

Space flight has evolved rapidly in the past decade - where are we in 2023? Join Richard Campbell as he assembles all the current developments in space flight to paint an overall picture of the progress to lower the cost to orbit, expand satellite networks, evolve space stations, return to the Moon, and even explore Mars! Could we all take a vacation in space? What about work opportunities? When does humanity become a space-faring race? There's a lot to talk about!

Richard Campbell

Space Flight in 2023

Single page apps (SPA's) have become a very popular way to build web applications. They offer incredible developer experience and allow the web to become far more ‘app like’ than ever before.

There is one problem with SPAs though; they actually suck.

In this talk I will take you on a practical deep dive show you how we can do better than the SPA  model. We'll revisit our roots in traditional web apps and learn how we can use the same motivations that made SPA's so popular and re-apply them in a way that will make the web a better place.

Jake Ginnivan

SPAs: where did it all go wrong

The aspiration for a comprehensive suite of automated tests is universal, yet the desire to maintain these often fragile and hurriedly constructed tests is scarce. Ignored test failures accumulate, while the necessary time and effort to rectify them seem to be perpetually out of reach.

What if we could change that? What if we could harness software engineering's best practices to make our automated tests not only more robust but also more efficient and easier to maintain?

This talk explores the transformative impact of applying SOLID principles and the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle to your testing code. These strategies lead to tests that are quicker to write, offer improved coverage, and - most importantly - are easier to amend when the underlying codebase or its dependencies change.

Drawing from my craftsmanship, I will illustrate how these principles have revolutionised my testing approach for both front-end and back-end code. I'll share my journey of creating a test suite that can be adapted rapidly to changing dependencies and provides such extensive coverage that errors can be pinpointed to their exact point of failure.  

Join this talk to discover how to leverage your software engineering prowess to craft robust, comprehensive tests that remain effortless to maintain.


Ryan Oakley

Stop writing fragile tests: Use SOLID Principles

Discover how system thinking combined with EDA can effortlessly bridge the gap between business architecture and  project implementation. Allowing you to come up with a socialtechnical architecture that will empower people on both sides of the equation.
Showing how, and the importance of, keeping things simple to conquer the complexity of nowadays technology stacks.
A no nonsense talk for people that want to extend their horizon or just want to understand the power of Event Driven Architecture.

Arjan Noordhoek

System Thinking and Event Driven Architecture

As digital transformation is sweeping across every aspect of life and business processes are becoming more complex, the software testing function in IT projects has become more crucial than ever. The ever evolving technological solutions and constantly developing business needs are taking software quality assurance to the next level where some burning questions are yet to be answered:

Why is software testing still vital to the success of any IT project?
Why is it so challenging to perform testing effectively?
How will AI shape quality assurance?
How to find the best approach tailored to the individual needs of a company?

In the quest of finding answers to these questions, most IT professionals quickly encounter the prospect of Testing as a Service (TaaS) as a viable solution. A true TaaS model not only guarantees scalability of resources but also successfully bridges any knowledge gaps in a project.

A carefully selected automation strategy combined with the most recent, highly innovative automation testing tools grants a seamless and accelerated testing process. This allows human resources to be utilized for more focused and complex work, so that 'humans can do that computers can’t'.

The rapid emergence of sophisticated AI solutions are taking software testing to new dimensions. Leveraging AI in testing enables the combination of existing testing tools, artifacts and processes which will result in better software quality, therefore a better quality of life for all.

Anita Kupcsik-Sandor

The New Dimensions of Software Testing

We all love problem solving, but leave me in a room without one and I'll eat the couch.

This talk will provide you with some practical tips for designing better software. It will cover a range of areas including product discovery, architecture, design and a code example.

Recently I've worked with a number of software teams in Perth and spoken with many companies about how they're building software. We've come a long way since waterfall and we now have some new problems. This is a good thing, we've made progress! But we still have a long way to go. These tips will help alleviate some of these common problems.

I hope there will be a little bit in here for everyone. 


Matthew James

The Problem with Problem Solving

Metrics… 
We all talk about it, we all want to use it but do we really understand the impacts of the act of observation? 

The Observer Effect was first studied by Schrodinger in the classic "Schrodinger's Cat" experiment. If you're unfamiliar with Schrodinger's Cat, it's as follows. 

In this classic thought experiment, a live cat is placed in a box with a poison that can be released at an unpredictable time. Later in the random future, you (the Observer) decide to open the box. You find the cat is dead; but the question is, was the cat dead the instance before you opened the box? Physics says it's impossible to say because of the unpredictable poison and the random time to open the box; therefore your decision to open the box had a quantifiable impact on the cat's death.

Is there a correlation between the Schodinger's paradox and metrics? …. I believe there is. 

In this talk I'll share some of my experiences working with delivery teams and seeing how they modify their behaviour in response to their awareness of being observed. I'll also share which agile metrics are best to use, based on the outcome you're looking for. 

**disclaimer: I am an animal lover and no actual cats were ever used during this experiment :)


Estie Boteler

The Schrodinger's paradox and metrics … does our curiosity kill the cat?

It's easy to tell stories about people whose experience in the tech industry is unusual. Some of those stories are focused on innovators, but many are about 'trailblazers' from marginalised and under-represented groups. These articles often focus on the strength, perseverance, and resilience that it took to get there. However, that's only one part of the story. The ways in which under-represented people enter, experience, and hopefully thrive in our industry are far more complex.

Very few people advance their careers on positive attributes alone. The experience of people from marginalised groups depends on the managers, companies, and communities who put in the time and effort to identify, employ, and sponsor them through their careers. Technical communities have a role to play in this process; they're a frequent first point of contact for young folks and potential career-changers, and a place where people are free to learn and make mistakes with the support of mentors and long-time community members.

In this talk, we'll analyse what it means to be successful when nobody in the room looks like you, and break down the narrative of the trailblazers in the tech industry. Then, we'll look at the role that tech communities play in increasing diversity and fostering a sense of belonging in the industry. By the end of the session, you will have learned how to shape communities where difference is both ordinary and celebrated, and translate these skills into a commercial workplace.

Dawn Cooper

The Stories We Don't Tell

Ever wonder how some technical people are recognized and promoted quicker than others with the same skillset? Yes, there is a formula to make it more likely. We will explore the habits of well known developers outside of their coding chops, to identify what additionally allowed them to become a trusted and known voice in their environment. This approach can be a benefit to you, no matter how junior or senior you are.

Heather Downing

The Visible Developer: Why You Shouldn't Blend In

ICT delivery is often presented as a binary choice between extremes:
●	Everything Waterfall – all solution requirements are defined up-front or early in the project lifecycle, and the project follows a pre-defined, largely predictable process with outputs delivered in order. 
●	Agile or Nothing – the project uses a framework of agile ceremonies and rituals to continuously discover, review and reprioritise solution requirements, developing and refining outputs incrementally.

This binary view of is increasingly being challenged. Many initiatives involve the delivery of both digital products normally associated with agile approaches, and physical deliverables traditionally managed using waterfall methods. In addition, many initiatives are required to follow prescriptive processes, such as governance and approval processes - regardless of the delivery approach used.

This presentation considers when and how agile and waterfall approaches can be used in combination to deliver work. It discusses factors that can determine whether and when different approaches are combined on an initiative, as well as considerations for ensuring the delivery of holistic solutions that satisfies business needs.


Anna Rajander

To Agile or Not to Agile: An Iterative Dilemma

In this talk, I want to dive into the realm of data quality assurance through Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practices. We explore how a CI/CD pipeline acts as a safety net, catching data inconsistencies and errors before they impact the end-users. From automated testing to timely data validation, I will discuss how these principles increase data reliability and trustworthiness. Revealing how I have leveraged CI/CD to create a robust data quality assurance framework.

Matthew Carter

Trust but Verify: Ensuring Data Quality with CI/CD

What separates success from mediocrity? How do you turn that brilliant idea into reality? Why is everyone else so successful?

Questions of how to shape your life are never simple to answer and they always present more problems once you try. In this talk our speaker provides simple, yet hard answers to many of the questions we want answered to succeed in life. Based on decades of soul searching, failures, wrong decisions and a mountain of hard work, our speaker shares all the nuggets of what works and what doesn’t. 

Lars Klint

Turning Dreaming into Doing - A Life Manual for Nerds

We love code. We love new languages and language features, elegant architectures and ingenious algorithms. We love it so much that sometimes we get blinded by the pizazz and forget about the all the other parts of writing software beyond the code; the countless hidden dangers that can sink your software project.

In this session, we'll look up from the keyboard and broaden our horizons. We'll look at common bottlenecks, tools we take for granted, processes we don't think about, and relationships that go unspoken. We’ll focus on the bigger picture and see how going outside the confines of code can make us more valuable to the companies we work for and the teams we work with. Code is great, but it’s only a detail in a much larger organism. 

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