Join us for the return of YOW! December online conference bringing software experts to you.
Over these conference 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 with no sales pitches, just lots of case studies and stories from the trenches.
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 $399 incl GST

This will be an online conference hosted on the Hopin platform.
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 Australia and around the world to this year’s YOW! December Online.
Explore YOW! December 2022
Get involved, plan your conference, or start your learning today

View the programme
Our two-day online conference features expert-led talks including keynotes.
Coming Soon
Revisit previous conferences
View (or review) previous talks from YOW! Developer Conferences in our library of SkillsCast videos.
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Adrian’s Greatest Hits, B-Sides and Re-issues
Adrian retired from Amazon in June 2022, and like a classic rock band on a farewell tour, Adrian will rerun and comment on excerpts of talks he's given in the past, including some of the original Netflix Architecture content from Qcon SF 2010, Microservices from MicroXchg Berlin, the GigaOM Cloud Trends talk from 2015, Communicating Sequential Goroutines from 2016, and AWS talks featuring animated kitchen sinks and lego spaceships. It will rock! Headbanging optional.
Engineering for Software - How to Amplify Creativity
In most disciplines "Engineering" means the stuff that works, an application of scientific reasoning to solving practical problems. In Software, depending on your background, it either means something bureaucratic that doesn't work, or it is just another name for software development.So what are the ideas that we can use as tools to give real, practical advantage in our work in the way that other disciplines achieve? What ideas should we treat as "the tools of our trade" whatever the technology or problem before us? This presentation explores two "tools" that we can use, Testability & Speed.
Simple Functional Effects with Tag Unions
There are many ways a programming language can support effects. For many years, side effects were the only game in town. Today, there are a variety of ways to model effects in a more functional way, with each effect system having its own set of tradeoffs.
This talk introduces a simple, high-performance effect system based on tag unions - which can be implemented in the Roc programming language, as well as in OCaml using polymorphic variants. The system allows for easily mixing I/O operations that can fail in different ways (such as HTTP requests and file I/O), while still offering exhaustiveness checking on all the error cases. It also makes it easy to tell which functions are using which effects (for example, "this part of the code base does HTTP and reads from the filesystem, but is guaranteed not to write to the filesystem"), and to enforce at compile time that certain calls may result in some effects but not others.
If you're interested in a simple, high-performance effect system with these characteristics, come see what it's all about in this talk!
Managing to your SLO in the face of chaos
Setting a Service Level Objective for your service is only the start of your quantified reliability journey. What do you do when you've had a few too many incidents and blown your error budget? Or had a pile of near-misses that burned the team out even though the user-facing SLO wasn't violated? What if the incident trigger was the infrastructure refactoring meant to improve, not harm, reliability & maintainability?In this talk, you'll learn how the team at Honeycomb handles incidents, chaos engineering, and the engineering feedback loop for reliability with social practices and architectural design.
Sabotaging a Transformation
Transformation efforts must overcome a myriad of challenges to achieve success. Some of the inhibitors we will discuss include:
- Executives unaware of the transformation
- Failure to engage all the necessary parties
- Individuals losing power with the transformation
- New roles and disappearing roles
- Lack of an effective Change Agent
- Success conservatism
- Lazy buyers
- Blame-oriented cultures
For each of these inhibitors, we will cite a) situations where this occurred, b) mitigation actions to overcome the inhibitor, and c) the effectiveness of these efforts.
We will conclude by suggesting some best practices we are currently employing in anticipation of likely inhibitors, including our newest proposal process of only selling complete solutions to our clients (not just body-shopping people).
Systems Architecture at Massive Scale: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simplicity
Building distributed systems that work is quite challenging. But systems that provide customer value will grow and evolve, and scaling those systems by multiple orders of magnitude is even harder. Citing specific failures and successes from internet-scale consumer properties like Google and eBay, and measuring customer value through the architecturalilities, this session deep-dives into the often counterintuitive architectural principles of simplicity, orthogonality, asynchrony, and feedback.
Simplicity helps us turn seemingly intractable problems into discrete and solvable ones. We will discuss component responsibilities, single-threaded straight-line processing, and making changes in small steps.
Orthogonality allows us to compose separate concerns and bound the complexity of each dimension of the problem. We will discuss processing abstractions like mixins and addons, as well as communication abstractions like channels and pipes.
Asynchrony and eventual consistency further reduce complexity and lead us to drive the system design directly from what really matters – what is actually changing in our core business domain. We will explore events, caching, and dataflow.
Finally, fast and consistent feedback help us continually maintain and improve a complex system. We will discuss quality feedback in the small, as well as systems feedback in the large.
You will take away some interesting anecdotes, as well as actionable insights you can put into practice in scaling your own systems.
Geeta Schmidt & Kresten Krab Thorup
Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality
Code quality is an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers' time, causing stress and uncertainty, as well as making our job less enjoyable than it should be. Without clear and quantifiable benefits, it's hard to build a business case for code quality.In this talk, Adam takes on the challenge by tuning the code analysis microscope towards a business outcome. We do that by combining novel code quality metrics with analyses of how the engineering organization works with the code. We then take those metrics a step further by connecting them to values like time-to-market, customer satisfaction, and road-map risks. This makes it possible to a) prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements, b) communicate quality trade-offs in terms of actual costs, and c) identify high-risk parts of the application so that we can focus our efforts on the areas that need them the most. All recommendations are supported by data and brand new real-world research. This is a perspective on software development that will change how you view code. Promise.
Simon Wardley
Simon Wardley
Simon is a former CEO, former advisory board member of startups (all now acquired by US Giants), fellow of Open Europe, inventor of Wardley Mapping, a regular conference speaker and a researcher for the LEF. He uses mapping in his research for the LEF covering areas from Serverless to Nation State competition whilst also advising / teaching LEF clients on mapping, strategy, organisation and leadership.
Become a YOW! Sponsor
Whether you're looking to attract talent to your team or accelerate adoption of your tools and products, sponsoring YOW! is a terrific way to support and connect with our global community of software professionals.
We offer a variety of opportunities for continuous visibility and continuous engagement. Community is at the heart of all we do at Skills Matter, and we believe it is mutually beneficial to foster genuine connections between our members and truly innovative businesses.
Rather than a typical ad hoc event sponsorship, we’ll work with you to create bespoke opportunities that benefit both your business and the Skills Matter community. Whether you’re looking to develop one-to-one relationships with our members, or to showcase your product and spread brand awareness, we’d love to find a way to create meaningful interactions between you and our community.
Hold tight, skillscasts coming soon!
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