YOW! September 2021
Join us for YOW! September Online, a 2‑day conference bringing software experts to you
Over these 2 days, you'll learn from thought leaders, architects and developers as you connect with like-minded people to share skills, insights, and lessons from the comfort of your laptop, be it at home or at work.
YOW! speakers are chosen based on their expertise; they provide excellent, technically rich content, appropriate to all roles in software and IT, completely independent of commercial concerns such as sponsorship or product. This means no commercials, ever, just lots of case studies and stories from the trenches.
Serious software professionals and IT leaders from all across the organisation will benefit from attending. Whether you’re a developer, architect, product owner, team lead, coach, or manager, don’t miss this learning opportunity. Our speakers have a wealth of experience they’re eager to share with you.
Online Ticket $129
YOW! September 2021 will be an online conference hosted on the Hopin platform, scheduled ideally for those in the UTC+8 time zone.
At Skills Matter, we’ve chosen to see the events of the past year as a challenge to make our content and community more inclusive and accessible to all. Beyond the COVID‑19 pandemic, we have a vision of a community where knowledge sharing and skills transfer are not limited by physical barriers.
We are excited to welcome our community from Western Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and around the world to this year’s YOW! September Online.
We hope to see you there!
Explore YOW! September Online 2021
Get involved, plan your conference, or start your learning today
View the programme
Our two-day online conference features expert-led talks including keynotes from Gregor Hohpe, Daniel Terhorst-North + Anna Urbaniak.
Speakers
Attend a workshop
Learn to understand Distributed Systems using OpenTelemetry with Liz Fong-Jones.
Learn More
Revisit previous conferences
View (or review) previous talks from YOW! Singapore in our library of SkillsCast videos.
visit the library
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Day 1: September 14
Main Track
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Session Overviews and Introductions |
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As technologists, our work is increasingly situated in highly complex socio-technical ecosystems. As much as we are encouraged to retrospectively seek a distinct and absolute root cause for an incident or outage, these complex systems are much more likely to drift into failure rather than suddenly taking one catastrophic wrong turn. What if you and your colleagues could be sensitized to the drifting safety boundaries of your systems? How would that inform the work you do? Join this session to explore these ideas through an introduction to the important new discipline of continuous verification.
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Q&A with Cat Swetel - Break |
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We've all heard the famous Facebook motto "Move Fast and Break Things" and lots of start-ups and scale-ups try to emulate that. What happens when you're building software for enterprise customers who want stability, certainty and compliance? Can you still move fast even when you're told not to break things?
Drawing on five years of experience growing a product development team from 10 to over 50, Andy looks at the important factors you should consider to meet the needs of enterprise businesses while retaining a startup spirit and pace.
growth-culture
compliance
stability
speed
product-development
About the speaker...
Andy KelkAndy is a developer by trade and with a background in ecommerce, software engineering and consulting, Andy has two decades of experience leading digital product development for businesses across Australia, Asia Pacific and the UK. Now responsible for all things product and technology at Marketplacer, a world-leading software platform for creating successful and scalable online marketplaces, Andy’s depth of knowledge and superior technical leadership makes him a vital part of the executive team. |
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leadership
replatform
technical-debt
About the speaker...
Ken ScamblerKen likes people and computers and likes it better when they can all get along. At MYOB, he is an architect focused on making tech work for people and uncovering hidden simplicity. Ken is also a long-time fan of functional programming, and is a contributor to the Compose :: Melbourne FP conference, the Melbourne Scala Users Group, and the Monocle optics library in Scala. He has presented a number of popular conference talks on programming topics. |
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Q&A with Ken Scambler - Lunch Break |
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In January 2021, we set out to aggressively scale up the R&D team at Octopus. Starting at 39 people, we set a target of 95 and called ourselves crazy, expecting to achieve something more realistic. By August, we'd done it (whoa!) and are now consolidating this growth into a cohesive high-performance team (the hardest part). In this talk, I will share what we learned along the way; recognising when it's time to grow; setting the best conditions to accommodate growth; tools to help manage growth; mistakes we made and how we corrected on the fly; consolidating and making the growth worthwhile.
leadership
scaling
growth-culture
team-culture
About the speaker...
Michael NoonanI started as a software engineer with the Running Systems team on F/RF-111C with Boeing and fell in love with software from that point on. Since that time I've worked in a variety of areas, until becoming a consultant with Readify. After seven amazing and back-breaking years as a Lead Consultant, I moved in 2015 to work with Paul Stovell on Octopus Deploy. In 2016 I took on the VP of Engineering role at Octopus helping build the world-class engineering capability we need to scale up. |
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KEYNOTE
Platforms have fueled some of the most successful business models of the past decade. However, building one for your enterprise isn't as simple as it looks - many platform initiatives are doomed from the start. This talk looks behind the buzzword to identify what makes platforms work and how you can successfully build an in-house platform.
platform-architecture
architecture
About the speaker...
Gregor HohpeAs Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, Gregor helps technology leaders transform both their organization and their technology platform. You’ll find him riding the Architect Elevator from the engine room to the penthouse, perhaps automating serverless solutions in the morning and preparing board presentations in the afternoon. His favorite pastime is dissecting buzzwords and replacing them with meaningful decisions and architectural trade-offs. |
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Q&A with Gregor Hohpe - Break |
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Research shows that on average developers spend about 58 percent of their time on reading code! However, we are not explicitly taught reading code in school or in boot camps, and we rarely practice code reading too. Maybe you have never thought about it, but reading code can be confusing in many ways. Code in which you do not understand the variable names causes a different type of confusion from code that is very coupled to other code. In this talk, Felienne Hermans, associate professor at Leiden University, will firstly dive into the cognitive processes that play a role when reading code. She will then show you theories for reading code, and close the talk with some hands-on techniques that can be used to read to any piece of code with more ease and fewer headaches!
code
software-development
readability
About the speaker...
Felienne HermansFelienne heads the PERL research group, focused on programming education. She also works at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam one day a week, where she teaches prospective computer science teachers. Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, and was one of the founders of the Joy of Coding conference. Since 2016, she has been a host at SE radio, one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web. Felienne is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” a book that helps programmers understand how their brains work and how to use it more effectively. In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research. Felienne is a member the board of I&I, the Dutch association of high-school computer science teachers, and of TC39, the committee that designs JavaScript. In her spare time, Felienne teaches a bunch of kids programming, and she loves playing board games, video games, running and dancing Lindy Hop. |
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Q&A with Daniel and Anna - Wrapup Day 1 |
Day 2: September 15
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slo
chef
terraform
honeycomb
deployment-pipeline
About the speakers...
Ian SmithHis other projects include elevatoralerts.com, using public transit APIs to provide a better user experience for disabled riders. He studied Computer Science at MIT and Linguistics at Gallaudet University. He is Deaf and a wheelchair user. 
Jessica KerrWhat we develop matters. And more: the way we develop it matters. It matters for how it changes us. Software lets us form complex systems faster, and adapt them faster, than any human-made material of the past. This means we can learn how to make better systems.
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Q&A with Liz Fong-Jones - Break |
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When we think of programming languages, we think of Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, or Python. We don’t think of CSS, SQL, or HTML. And we don’t think of Alloy, Modelica, or SNOBOL—in fact, maybe we haven’t even heard of all those. But what’s the distinction? And maybe most importantly, what can we learn as programmers from “not programming languages”
programming-languages
About the speaker...
Chelsea TroyChelsea Troy writes code on projects like the Zooniverse Citizen Science Mobile App and the NASA Landsat Image Processing Pipeline. She looks for clients who are saving the planet, advancing basic scientific research, or providing resources to underserved communities. She has been known to take projects in mobile development, web development, and machine learning. She streams some programming sessions to YouTube, so you can watch her code (and narrate!) in real time. She then turns the recordings into educational materials. Chelsea also teaches Mobile Software Development at the Master’s Program in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of chelseatroy.com and a book called Remote Work Sucks (the title is kind of a trap). She organizes two conferences: PromptConf (Chicago area, very technical) and ORD Camp (Chicago area, not nearly as technical). Chelsea flings barbells around for fun. She drives an electric cafe cruiser named Gigi. |
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How can organisations enable developers to deliver secure and compliant software without becoming a bottleneck for innovation & a drain on team morale? As a relatively new area, Compliance as Code offers a potential solution to this challenge, allowing organisations to trust their teams without losing potential for auditability and verification. Compliance as Code brings together all stakeholders including security and developers, to define rules so as to mitigate risk, protect customers and meet regulatory requirements, while not slowing release cycles. In this talk, Effy will discuss the various aspects of Compliance as Code. They will cover the benefits of Compliance as Code and automation techniques, the pros and cons of different types of controls, some of the common challenges, and lessons from their own experiences building compliance into developer platforms at large organisations.
compliance-as-code
About the speaker...
Effy EldenEffy Elden is a 26-year-old non-binary person who works as a consultant software developer for ThoughtWorks in Melbourne As an avid technologist they are passionate about DevOps enablement and cloud infrastructure, and in their spare time they pursue activism in the fields of digital privacy and queer rights. |
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If you are a developer, you know as well as me that testing your code is optional. And when we suddenly involve cloud computing, there are even more excuses not to test your applications and infrastructure. In this talk, I will explain and demonstrate some of the many options you have in Azure for testing every part of your development life cycle. I go through everything from A/B testing to performance testing to architecture testing, all sprinkled with animal photos. Join me. Enough of your excuses.
azure
performance
cloud
testing
architecture
About the speaker...
Lars KlintLars is a Senior Developer Advocate with Pluralsight, author, trainer, Microsoft Azure MVP, community leader, aspiring YouTube host and part time classic car collector. He is heavily involved in the space of cloud computing services, especially Azure, and is a published author, solution architect and writer for numerous publications. He has been a part of the software development community for the past 20 years and has co-organised the DDD Melbourne community conference for a decade, organises developer events with Microsoft, and also runs a part time car restoration business. He has spoken at numerous technical events around the world and is an expert in Australian Outback Internet. Follow Lars on Twitter @larsklint and LinkedIn at /in/lklint/. |
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Our lives changed dramatically as of March 2020 in Sydney, Australia. We were suddenly put under "house arrest", and facing a contagion never seen before.
A crucial part of leadership is change management, but how do we do that well when the change is unprecedented and on a global scale? This talk will share some of the lessons we have learned, and our takeaways. Join us as we review our leadership journey through this uncertain time.
leadership
uncertainty
change-management
About the speakers...
Lisa ZhuShe firmly believes that technology has and will bring about significant and meaningful solutions to the world. As a technologist, she loves the opportunities to learn and try new things, so it's never a dull moment. As a leader, she is passionate about seeing people succeed and achieving their full potential. She enjoys long walks, delicious food and playing board-games. 
Ted TenczaTed has been a Software/Web development professional since 1997. Ted has over 21 years of experience in Software Development, the last 13 of which have been in leadership roles. He has ran multiple teams at Atlassian, Bigcommerce, finder.com and now Prospa, with experience in both Operational and Development projects. He enjoys focusing specifically on the SaaS offerings, as well as working on improving the recruiting, hiring, and on boarding of new developers. |
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Q&A with Ted Tencza & Lisa Zhu - Break |
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Over the last years, we have built a virtual machine for microcontrollers that augments the primitive real-time operating systems on chips like the ESP32. The VM provides sandboxing and efficient execution of a high-level, memory-safe language. Armed with this, we can upgrade your devices with a cloud-based, programmatic interface that allows you to monitor, service, and communicate securely with them in production. Want to catch a glimpse?
chip
virtual-machine
microcontroller
About the speaker...
Kasper LundKasper Lund spent 12 years at Google as a senior staff engineer and site lead. He co-founded the V8 and Dart projects, and led the team that brought adaptive optimizations to JavaScript, finally making the web fast. In 2018, he started Toit and began tackling the software challenges for the internet of things. |
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Recent research summarised in the book Accelerate points to a set of practices that lead to high software development organisation performance. Simultaneously, research from the Santa Fe institute on Complex Adaptive Systems over the last 20 years seems to point to a grand unified theory of organisational design. So have we cracked it? Do we now have the answer to the question: how do we create and scale high performing software and organisations? In this talk, James explores the relationships between team structure, software architecture and the emergent phenomenon of complexity science
About the speaker...
James LewisJames is a Software Architect and Director at ThoughtWorks based in the UK. He’s proud to have been a part of Thoughtworks’ journey for over fifteen years and its ongoing mission of delivering technical excellence for its clients and in amplifying positive social change for an equitable future. As a member of the Thoughtworks Technical Advisory Board, the group that creates the Technology Radar, he contributes to industry adoption of open source and other tools, techniques, platforms, and languages. He is an internationally recognised expert on software architecture and design and on its intersection with organisational design and lean product development. As such he’s been a guest editor for IEEE Software, written articles, delivered training, and spoken at more conferences than he can remember. James defined the new Microservices architectural style back in 2014 along with Martin Fowler. Currently, the Microservices industry is worth in excess of $20 billion annually. James’ primary consulting focus these days is on helping organisations with technology strategy, distributed systems design and adoption of SOA. He freely admits that it’s only by standing on the shoulders of giants that he’s been able to make the contributions to the industry that he has. |
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Q&A with James Lewis - Wrapup Day 2 |
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Software Architecture, Team Topologies and Complexity Science
Featuring James Lewis
Recent research summarised in the book Accelerate points to a set of practices that lead to high software development organisation performance. Simultaneously, research from the Santa Fe institute on Complex Adaptive Systems over the last 20 years seems to point to a grand unified theory of...
-
Keynote: The Magic of Platforms
Featuring Gregor Hohpe
Platforms have fueled some of the most successful business models of the past decade. However, building one for your enterprise isn't as simple as it looks - many platform initiatives are doomed from the start. This talk looks behind the buzzword to identify what makes platforms work and how...
platform-architecture architecture -
Beyond Chaos Engineering: Continuous Verification
Featuring Cat Swetel
As technologists, our work is increasingly situated in highly complex socio-technical ecosystems. As much as we are encouraged to retrospectively seek a distinct and absolute root cause for an incident or outage, these complex systems are much more likely to drift into failure rather than...
software-verification chaos-engineering -
Replatform In A Year or Die; The Tale Of A Turnaround
Featuring Ken Scambler
In 2020, MYOB’s web users saw a major upgrade and a notable increase in stability and rate of feature delivery. What they didn’t see was a behind-the-scenes existential crisis of accumulated tech debt that led to a vast replatform with a hard deadline, racing against the clock to get the company...
leadership replatform technical-debt -
Scaling Up Octopus - Lessons Learned
Featuring Michael Noonan
In January 2021, we set out to aggressively scale up the R&D team at Octopus. Starting at 39 people, we set a target of 95 and called ourselves crazy, expecting to achieve something more realistic. By August, we'd done it (whoa!) and are now consolidating this growth into a cohesive...
leadership scaling growth-culture team-culture -
Move Fast but don't Break Things
Featuring Andy Kelk
We've all heard the famous Facebook motto "Move Fast and Break Things" and lots of start-ups and scale-ups try to emulate that. What happens when you're building software for enterprise customers who want stability, certainty and compliance? Can you still move fast even when...
growth-culture compliance stability speed product-development -
How to Read Complex Code
Featuring Felienne Hermans
Research shows that on average developers spend about 58 percent of their time on reading code! However, we are not explicitly taught reading code in school or in boot camps, and we rarely practice code reading too.
Maybe you have never thought about it, but reading code can be confusing in many...
code software-development readability -
2
Fast and Simple Deployments for Code & Infra
Featuring Ian Smith and Jessica Kerr
slo chef terraform honeycomb deployment-pipeline
You don’t need Kubernetes to automatically push green builds to production – learn how Honeycomb has utilized CircleCI, Terraform, Chef, a collection of home-grown scripts, and Honeycomb itself to speed up its deployments and make them safer. We’ll talk about what went wrong along the way, and... -
What Counts as a Programming Language?
Featuring Chelsea Troy
When we think of programming languages, we think of Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, or Python. We don’t think of CSS, SQL, or HTML. And we don’t think of Alloy, Modelica, or SNOBOL—in fact, maybe we haven’t even heard of all those. But what’s the distinction? And maybe most importantly, what can we...
programming-languages -
Who Tests Their Cloud Code Anyway?
Featuring Lars Klint
If you are a developer, you know as well as me that testing your code is optional. And when we suddenly involve cloud computing, there are even more excuses not to test your applications and infrastructure.
In this talk, I will explain and demonstrate some of the many options you have in Azure...
azure performance cloud testing architecture -
Trust Teams but Verify: Compliance as Code Done Right
Featuring Effy Elden
How can organisations enable developers to deliver secure and compliant software without becoming a bottleneck for innovation & a drain on team morale? As a relatively new area, Compliance as Code offers a potential solution to this challenge, allowing organisations to trust their teams...
compliance-as-code -
Give your ESP32s the Gift of Serviceability
Featuring Kasper Lund
Over the last years, we have built a virtual machine for microcontrollers that augments the primitive real-time operating systems on chips like the ESP32. The VM provides sandboxing and efficient execution of a high-level, memory-safe language. Armed with this, we can upgrade your devices with a...
chip virtual-machine microcontroller -
2
Lessons from Leading through Uncertain Times
Featuring Lisa Zhu and Ted Tencza
Our lives changed dramatically as of March 2020 in Sydney, Australia. We were suddenly put under "house arrest", and facing a contagion never seen before. A crucial part of leadership is change management, but how do we do that well when the change is unprecedented and on a global...
leadership uncertainty change-management
-
YOW! Perth Developer Conference 2022: Online
Two days - Online Conference
At YOW! Perth Developer Conference, leading software industry experts from all over the world, handpicked by our program committee, come together for two days to provide amazing networking and learning opportunities.
software-development agile leadership -
YOW! Perth Developer Conference 2022: In-Person
Two days in Perth
At YOW! Perth, leading software industry experts from all over the world, handpicked by our program committee, come together for two days to provide amazing networking and learning opportunities.
software-development leadership agile -
YOW! Perth 2020
One day - Online Conference
We're going ONLINE for September 2020 - of course you can join us from anywhere, but we'll be in your time zone, Perth!
YOW! September ONLINE is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program...
architecture discovery event-modelling quality testing people-&-process cloud architecture-&-design languages software-development -
YOW! Perth 2019
Two days in Perth
Since 2008, YOW! has brought 200+ International Software Experts from North America, Europe and countries around the world to over 10,000 software professionals in Australia. Now we're bringing them to Perth.
Come to this two-day conference to discover the latest trends and network with fellow...
architecture discovery quality people-&-process cloud architecture-&-design languages software-development -
YOW! Perth 2018
Two days in Perth
Since 2008, YOW! has brought 200+ International Software Experts from North America, Europe and countries around the world to over 10,000 software professionals in Australia. Now we're bringing them to Perth.
Come to this two-day conference to discover the latest trends and network with fellow...
architecture discovery software-development -
YOW! West 2017
Two days in Perth
Since 2008, YOW! has brought 200+ International Software Experts from North America, Europe and countries around the world to over 10,000 software professionals in Australia. Now we're bringing them to Perth.
Come to this two-day conference to discover the latest trends and network with fellow...
architecture discovery software-development -
YOW! West 2016
Two days in Perth
Since 2008, YOW! has brought 200+ International Software Experts from North America, Europe and countries around the world to over 10,000 software professionals in Australia. Now we're bringing them to Perth.
Come to this two-day conference to discover the latest trends and network with fellow...
architecture discovery software-development -
YOW! West 2015
Two days in Perth
Since 2008, YOW! has brought 200+ International Software Experts from North America, Europe and countries around the world to over 10,000 software professionals in Australia. Now we're bringing them to Perth.
Come to this two-day conference to discover the latest trends and network with fellow...
architecture discovery software-development -
YOW! West 2014
Two days in Perth
Since 2008, YOW! has brought 200+ International Software Experts from North America, Europe and countries around the world to over 10,000 software professionals in Australia. Now we're bringing them to Perth.
Come to this two-day conference to discover the latest trends and network with fellow...
architecture discovery software-development
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