Live Coding systems encourage us to think extremely differently about programming languages. In addition to considering standard requirements such as reliability, efficiency and correctness we are also forced to deal with issues such as liveness, coordination and synchronization all whilst working in real time.

Live Coders not only run and modify code live — they often perform with it on stage in front of large crowds of people who really don't want the code to miss a beat. In this code and demo-heavy talk, Sam will introduce the motivation for Sonic Pi - a system designed specifically for live coding music - before taking a deep technical dive into the internal ideas and innovations. The audience will explore Sonic Pi's novel temporal semantics which allow multiple concurrent threads to execute in synchronization along with live hot-swapping of code.

Ultimately, everyone will discover an exciting area of programming language research in an approachable and instructive manner all whilst making some sick beats and drops.

Genomic produces more data than Astronomy, twitter, and YouTube combined, having caused research in this discipline to leapfrog to the forefront of cloud technology. Dr. Denis Bauer provides an insider’s view into the development of a Spark-based machine learning framework that is able to find disease genes in the 3 billion letters of the genome. She will also cover serverless, which is pitted to become a $8 Billion market for its ability to accelerate software development, akin to how pre-fabrication has sped up the construction sector over bricklaying. Her serverless “search engine for the genome” enables researchers to use genome engineering for next-generation medicines.

Genomic produces more data than Astronomy, twitter, and YouTube combined, having caused research in this discipline to leapfrog to the forefront of cloud technology. Dr. Denis Bauer provides an insider’s view into the development of a Spark-based machine learning framework that is able to find disease genes in the 3 billion letters of the genome. She will also cover serverless, which is pitted to become a $8 Billion market for its ability to accelerate software development, akin to how pre-fabrication has sped up the construction sector over bricklaying. Her serverless “search engine for the genome” enables researchers to use genome engineering for next-generation medicines.

YOW! presents two great talks on testing today's complex software, from experts in the field.

Serverless microservices: test smarter not harder - Matt Fellows

Modern distributed architectures are increasingly composed of large numbers of decoupled, asynchronous components. In AWS, these components are plumbed together via services like SQS, Kinesis and S3 often integrated via small and frequent numbers of microservices or lambdas. But how do you test these architectures if they are cloud native?
It’s 2019, and we can do better than deploying the entire stack and running a battery of E2E tests against them.

In his talk, Matt will demonstrate how you can scale development of large-scale systems across teams, technology and process, and unlock the agility of your cloud-native architecture.

Taming the Beast: Automated Testing for Complex Data Pipelines - Trish Khoo

Massive datasets. Complex data pipelines. Machine learning. When faced with such a beast, how do you test it effectively? When your tests results are less "pass" and "fail", and more "sort of" and "not really", how do you automate testing?

Trish Khoo draws upon her experience in testing complex data systems to demonstrate proven strategies for testing in this field. Her experience working on ultra-large-scale systems at Google in Mountain View, California shaped her technical approach to testing which she applies in her work as a consultant today.

YOW! presents two great talks on testing today's complex software, from experts in the field.

Serverless microservices: test smarter not harder - Matt Fellows

Modern distributed architectures are increasingly composed of large numbers of decoupled, asynchronous components. In AWS, these components are plumbed together via services like SQS, Kinesis and S3 often integrated via small and frequent numbers of microservices or lambdas. But how do you test these architectures if they are cloud native?
It’s 2019, and we can do better than deploying the entire stack and running a battery of E2E tests against them.

In his talk, Matt will demonstrate how you can scale development of large-scale systems across teams, technology and process, and unlock the agility of your cloud-native architecture.

Taming the Beast: Automated Testing for Complex Data Pipelines - Trish Khoo

Massive datasets. Complex data pipelines. Machine learning. When faced with such a beast, how do you test it effectively? When your tests results are less "pass" and "fail", and more "sort of" and "not really", how do you automate testing?

Trish Khoo draws upon her experience in testing complex data systems to demonstrate proven strategies for testing in this field. Her experience working on ultra-large-scale systems at Google in Mountain View, California shaped her technical approach to testing which she applies in her work as a consultant today.

Click here to view photos

Velocity. Sprints. More points, more speed.

An obsession with speed often overtakes the core values of agile software development. It's not just development of software; it's development of working software. Sprints are not about sprinting; they're about sustainable pace. Time to market is less important than time in market. Full-stack development is normally a statement about technology, but it also applies to individuals and interactions. The full stack touches both the code and the world outside the code, and with that view comes responsibility and pause for thought. Doing the wrong thing smarter is not smart. The point of a team is its group intelligence not its numbers. Is scaling up the challenge, or is scaling down the real challenge?

The distraction and misuse of speed, velocity, point-based systems, time, team size, scale, etc. is not the accelerant of agile development. Agility lies in experimentation, responsiveness and team intelligence.

Velocity. Sprints. More points, more speed

An obsession with speed often overtakes the core values of agile software development. It's not just development of software; it's development of working software. Sprints are not about sprinting; they're about sustainable pace. Time to market is less important than time in market. Full-stack development is normally a statement about technology, but it also applies to individuals and interactions. The full stack touches both the code and the world outside the code, and with that view comes responsibility and pause for thought. Doing the wrong thing smarter is not smart. The point of a team is its group intelligence not its numbers. Is scaling up the challenge, or is scaling down the real challenge?

The distraction and misuse of speed, velocity, point-based systems, time, team size, scale, etc. is not the accelerant of agile development. Agility lies in experimentation, responsiveness and team intelligence.

Automation has come a long way in assisting with regression testing efforts. Teams worldwide are successfully running hundreds of functional regression tests at every check-in. While this provides a great source of confidence, critical regression bugs are still missed using this approach. That’s because these tests can only assert on what their human programmer asks them to. Additional errors with functionality, UX, and usability often go uncaught using today’s most common test automation techniques.

For this reason, the top companies in all sectors of the industry are turning to visual validation. Visual validation is a relatively new concept that can be used to enhance existing automated tests and provide an easy way to perform those difficult checks for things like UX, localization, usability, responsive design, and cross-device testing.

In this talk, you’ll learn how visual validation works, see a live integration into an existing test code base, and discuss the pros and cons of using various visual validation techniques.

We all know how fast technology changes. But, we sometimes fail to understand how fast our process needs to change to keep up. This talk is about how 21st century software development has thrown out most of the process assumptions you might have originally learned. Jeff Patton will explain how Product Thinking, Lean Startup Thinking, and Continuous Delivery have fundamentally changed how we design and build software.

No matter how utopian your agile working environment, if you're building a commercial product, at some stage you will be asked the inevitable question - When will it be done? This talk will provide you with tools and techniques to use when you hear your manager say "We just need to get better at estimating". If you have ever wished for a crystal ball to help you predict the team's future, this talk is for you!

YOW! presents two great talks on Agile Product Development:

Is it done yet? (How about now?) - Michele Playfair

No matter how utopian your agile working environment, if you're building a commercial product, at some stage you will be asked the inevitable question - When will it be done? This talk will provide you with tools and techniques to use when you hear your manager say "We just need to get better at estimating". If you have ever wished for a crystal ball to help you predict the team's future, this talk is for you!

Is this (really) what we are supposed to build? - Jean Looi (& Eyung Lim)

Engaging users when developing digital solutions helps the agile development team to understand their needs. This talk will share with you how design thinking and agile methodology complement each other and work to amplify the benefits that bring to the product development on one of our Whole-of-Government initiatives, Moments of life app. This app aims to deliver integrated information and services to citizens at key stages of their life.

Click here to view photos.

YOW! presents two great talks on testing today's complex software, from experts in the field.

Microservices: Test Smarter, not Harder - Beth Skurrie

Microservices have become mainstream now. Writing and deploying small, independent services has many benefits, but on the downside, it increases the number of integration points, which increases the amount of integration testing required. How can we be confident that all our services will work correctly together, without being burdened by increasingly complex and brittle integration tests? Learn how Pact solves this problem by using consumer driven contracts, allowing you to escape Integration Testing Hell and ship your code with speed and confidence.

Taming the Beast: Automated Testing for Complex Data Pipelines - Trish Khoo

Massive datasets. Complex data pipelines. Machine learning. When faced with such a beast, how do you test it effectively? When your tests results are less "pass" and "fail", and more "sort of" and "not really", how do you automate testing?

Trish Khoo draws upon her experience in testing complex data systems to demonstrate proven strategies for testing in this field. Her experience working on ultra-large-scale systems at Google in Mountain View, California shaped her technical approach to testing which she applies in her work as a consultant today.

Dave Thomas: NewSQL - The New Universal Query Language for Everything.

Back to the Future! In 2020 many new and legacy data systems, such as Spark, Teradata, Mongo, Cassandra, Splunk, Kafka, Flink, Azure, Google, Oracle…, will support a NewSQL.

We begin with a very brief review of the current state of data engineering practice - NoSQL, Big Data, Streaming, Time Series, BASE versus ACID, Graphs; DSLs, Map Reduce, Functional Programming etc. We look at the challenges presented by the plethora of different data formats, languages/tools and eventual consistency.

What if we didn’t have to deal with the challenges of sharding and eventual consistency? We discuss the recent increased use of new distributed ACID databases such as Google Spanner, AWS AuroraDB, Azure CosmosDB etc.

What if we didn’t need to worry about different languages, APIs for programming different databases? What if we could use one language for both batch and streaming? Very recently, at the ACM SIGMOD 2019 database conference, a new emerging data language was presented which seeks to provide a solution.

We refer to this emerging standard as NewSQL, which extends SQL to deal with both streaming and batch. It removes major limitations in SQL and provides the additional capabilities to SQL needed to deal with the velocity, volume and variety of diverse data sources. In this talk, we describe the evolution and major features of the new language. We conclude with a brief discussion of the impact on data engineering, data science and data consumers.

Danial Tham: Mystique - The Fight Against Rego Plate Cloning

In the rise of AI technologies, there is no doubt that privacy is a very popular topic which normally revolves around the negative impact of AI to our privacy. However despite the norm, we at Carsales built and deployed an AI tech called Mystique which fights crimes and protects user privacy. Mystique detects a rego plate in a photo and blurs it, protecting our private seller and dealer from rego plate cloning.

Rego plate cloning “involves falsifying a genuine number plate and attaching it to another vehicle which is often the same make, model and colour. The criminal may then use the car with cloned plates to drive on tollways without consequences, drive dangerously or conduct other criminal activity, with the genuine vehicle owner often sought to pay fines or tolls.”

In this talk, we are going to share the story about how we built and delivered Mystique and more importantly what lessons we learned in deploying tech at this scale, which processes 150,000 photos a day and touches many areas of business at Carsales.

It appears that there is a complexity conspiracy seeking to make the development of even straightforward applications difficult.

To be successful today one needs to cope with the full-stack - a constantly changing collection of languages, APIs, tools and frameworks.

It appears that complexity begets complexity? Yet most applications are not intrinsically complicated!

In this talk, we look at simple proven techniques which provide improved productivity and quality. They have stood the test of time, but unfortunately, are not well known to most developers. These techniques reduce the gap between the product owner and developer usually reducing amount code which must be developed. They have been applied to problems in almost every industry banking to real-time control. They don't depend on a particular language or technology hence large portions of an application can be moved easily from legacy technology to modern technology. We discuss the techniques and provide case studies of their use in major applications.

It appears that there is a complexity conspiracy seeking to make the development of even straightforward applications difficult.

To be successful today one needs to cope with the full-stack - a constantly changing collection of languages, APIs, tools and frameworks.

It appears that complexity begets complexity? Yet most applications are not intrinsically complicated!

In this talk, we look at simple proven techniques which provide improved productivity and quality. They have stood the test of time, but unfortunately, are not well known to most developers. These techniques reduce the gap between the product owner and developer usually reducing amount code which must be developed. They have been applied to problems in almost every industry banking to real-time control. They don't depend on a particular language or technology hence large portions of an application can be moved easily from legacy technology to modern technology. We discuss the techniques and provide case studies of their use in major applications.

Dave Thomas: NewSQL - The New Universal Query Language for Everything.

Back to the Future! In 2020 many new and legacy data systems, such as Spark, Teradata, Mongo, Cassandra, Splunk, Kafka, Flink, Azure, Google, Oracle…, will support a NewSQL.

We begin with a very brief review of the current state of data engineering practice - NoSQL, Big Data, Streaming, Time Series, BASE versus ACID, Graphs; DSLs, Map Reduce, Functional Programming etc. We look at the challenges presented by the plethora of different data formats, languages/tools and eventual consistency.

What if we didn’t have to deal with the challenges of sharding and eventual consistency? We discuss the recent increased use of new distributed ACID databases such as Google Spanner, AWS AuroraDB, Azure CosmosDB etc.

What if we didn’t need to worry about different languages, APIs for programming different databases? What if we could use one language for both batch and streaming? Very recently, at the ACM SIGMOD 2019 database conference, a new emerging data language was presented which seeks to provide a solution.

We refer to this emerging standard as NewSQL, which extends SQL to deal with both streaming and batch. It removes major limitations in SQL and provides the additional capabilities to SQL needed to deal with the velocity, volume and variety of diverse data sources. In this talk, we describe the evolution and major features of the new language. We conclude with a brief discussion of the impact on data engineering, data science and data consumers.

Agustinus Nalwan: Mystique - The Fight Against Rego Plate Cloning

In the rise of AI technologies, there is no doubt that privacy is a very popular topic which normally revolves around the negative impact of AI to our privacy. However despite the norm, we at Carsales built and deployed an AI tech called Mystique which fights crimes and protects user privacy. Mystique detects a rego plate in a photo and blurs it, protecting our private seller and dealer from rego plate cloning.

Rego plate cloning “involves falsifying a genuine number plate and attaching it to another vehicle which is often the same make, model and colour. The criminal may then use the car with cloned plates to drive on tollways without consequences, drive dangerously or conduct other criminal activity, with the genuine vehicle owner often sought to pay fines or tolls.”

In this talk, we are going to share the story about how we built and delivered Mystique and more importantly what lessons we learned in deploying tech at this scale, which processes 150,000 photos a day and touches many areas of business at Carsales.

Dave Thomas: NewSQL - The New Universal Query Language for Everything.

Back to the Future! In 2020 many new and legacy data systems, such as Spark, Teradata, Mongo, Cassandra, Splunk, Kafka, Flink, Azure, Google, Oracle…, will support a NewSQL.

We begin with a very brief review of the current state of data engineering practice - NoSQL, Big Data, Streaming, Time Series, BASE versus ACID, Graphs; DSLs, Map Reduce, Functional Programming etc. We look at the challenges presented by the plethora of different data formats, languages/tools and eventual consistency.

What if we didn’t have to deal with the challenges of sharding and eventual consistency? We discuss the recent increased use of new distributed ACID databases such as Google Spanner, AWS AuroraDB, Azure CosmosDB etc.

What if we didn’t need to worry about different languages, APIs for programming different databases? What if we could use one language for both batch and streaming? Very recently, at the ACM SIGMOD 2019 database conference, a new emerging data language was presented which seeks to provide a solution.

We refer to this emerging standard as NewSQL, which extends SQL to deal with both streaming and batch. It removes major limitations in SQL and provides the additional capabilities to SQL needed to deal with the velocity, volume and variety of diverse data sources. In this talk, we describe the evolution and major features of the new language. We conclude with a brief discussion of the impact on data engineering, data science and data consumers.

Agustinus Nalwan: Mystique - The Fight Against Rego Plate Cloning

In the rise of AI technologies, there is no doubt that privacy is a very popular topic which normally revolves around the negative impact of AI to our privacy. However despite the norm, we at Carsales built and deployed an AI tech called Mystique which fights crimes and protects user privacy. Mystique detects a rego plate in a photo and blurs it, protecting our private seller and dealer from rego plate cloning.

Rego plate cloning “involves falsifying a genuine number plate and attaching it to another vehicle which is often the same make, model and colour. The criminal may then use the car with cloned plates to drive on tollways without consequences, drive dangerously or conduct other criminal activity, with the genuine vehicle owner often sought to pay fines or tolls.”

In this talk, we are going to share the story about how we built and delivered Mystique and more importantly what lessons we learned in deploying tech at this scale, which processes 150,000 photos a day and touches many areas of business at Carsales.

This is the first YOW! 90 Minutes talk delivered as part of the YOW! Online Membership. To enjoy this and other great quality members-only content as well as discounts to online conferences and workshops, join YOW! Online today!

In this talk, we’ll look at software architecture, team organization and the interplay between technology and humans. We’ll address some of the patterns and anti-patterns that can be observed when organizations try to evolve towards more decentralization and autonomy, and take a look at some strategies to ensure technology supports and enables the desired outcome.

Functional Programming has shown the benefits of removing mutation and side-effects, resulting in programs fundamentally simpler and more composable. Nonetheless, many of these programs still rely on applying side-effects to external systems such as databases, file-systems or external services. What happens if we apply these ideas to systems and application architecture, can it make whole systems fundamentally simpler to reason about, build and operate.

Functional approaches to architecture have other key benefits such as being naturally suited to audit and reversion of state to previous versions. They tend to have lower operational risk associated with them. Functional architectures significantly reduce complexity in distributed systems.

This talk looks at the history of systems and applications built with an underlying functional architectures such as journaled file-systems and databases, event sourcing, and content-addressable storage, as well as how these ideas enable.

We’ll see that there is an underlying philosophy of FP that can be brought to most aspects of system design and architecture, even while presenting a mutable face to the world.

Functional Programming has shown the benefits of removing mutation and side-effects, resulting in programs fundamentally simpler and more composable. Nonetheless, many of these programs still rely on applying side-effects to external systems such as databases, file-systems or external services. What happens if we apply these ideas to systems and application architecture, can it make whole systems fundamentally simpler to reason about, build and operate.

Functional approaches to architecture have other key benefits such as being naturally suited to audit and reversion of state to previous versions. They tend to have lower operational risk associated with them. Functional architectures significantly reduce complexity in distributed systems.

This talk looks at the history of systems and applications built with an underlying functional architectures such as journaled file-systems and databases, event sourcing, and content-addressable storage, as well as how these ideas enable.

We’ll see that there is an underlying philosophy of FP that can be brought to most aspects of system design and architecture, even while presenting a mutable face to the world.

Functional Programming has shown the benefits of removing mutation and side-effects, resulting in programs fundamentally simpler and more composable. Nonetheless, many of these programs still rely on applying side-effects to external systems such as databases, file-systems or external services. What happens if we apply these ideas to systems and application architecture, can it make whole systems fundamentally simpler to reason about, build and operate.

Functional approaches to architecture have other key benefits such as being naturally suited to audit and reversion of state to previous versions. They tend to have lower operational risk associated with them. Functional architectures significantly reduce complexity in distributed systems.

This talk looks at the history of systems and applications built with an underlying functional architectures such as journaled file-systems and databases, event sourcing, and content-addressable storage, as well as how these ideas enable.

We’ll see that there is an underlying philosophy of FP that can be brought to most aspects of system design and architecture, even while presenting a mutable face to the world.

Sharing some true stories about the journey of ‘Leadership’ to ‘First Time Parent’ to ‘Working Parent’ and all the bits in between. I have recently been through this journey myself and want to share some of my experiences as well as other leaders, both mums and dads, who have recently been through this experience, with the view to making this better for the next people to go on this incredible journey.

Our community talks a lot about what companies should provide women once they have had a baby, however I believe we are missing the crucial stages; before/during/after, where our new parents really need help. I am going to talk about some recent experiences of becoming new parents in our industry and what other areas we are not talking enough about as leaders of our industry to make this journey better for all involved.

I will reflect on what I believe are the four key stages of this journey and share stories, with the view to opening a discussion about some other topics for us to start improving as a community.

1. Pre-pregnancy

2. During pregnancy

3. Parental Leave

4. Becoming a working parent