YOW! 2018: A DigIO Summary
Co authored by Keren Burshtein and Samuel Clements.
On the 6th and 7th of December, 31 DigIO team members attended YOW! 2018 in Melbourne. We got together to write up a summary of some of our favourite talks from the conference for those of you who were unable to attend. Here it is, enjoy!
Day 1
An inspirational extravaganza
Day 1 kicked off with an inspirational talk by an international speaker flown here all the way from NASA. An aerospace engineer, as well as a pilot, Dr. Anita Sengupta had enough first-hand experiences and learnings to share to make us all believe that the future as predicted, or rather foretold, by TV shows like the Jetsons is only as far as funding can get us. The technology already exists, all is left is to adjust our infrastructure to make it available to the masses. She was of course talking about the hyped Hyperloop, and some other bits and bobs like an electric helicopter, experiments in the American desert and suborbital rocket flights.
The rest of Day 1 had plenty more inspiration to share. “The Future of Software Development” saw strong discussions on a future full of blockchain and AI and “Big Data, Fast Data @ PayPal” showcased an architecture scheme that is as big and complex as the data it handles in. Another talk that caught our interest was delving into an ever-repeating history that even 40 years later is diligently reinventing itself in so-called “new tech” in “1968”. The highlight for most of our team was a talk by Jessica Kerr — a passionate lead engineer at Atomist. She kindly shared her method of approaching problem-weaved application development that makes the entangling process a lot more fun. Despite the vigorous name, “Shaving the Golden Yak”, we were glad that no yaks were to be harmed by the procedure.
A particularly memorable highlight towards the end of day 1 was an amazing and uplifting display of artistic talent that is Sam Aaron, in his talk “Live Coding the intersection between the Arts, Technology and Research”. He demonstrated his love for music and education in a feat of live coding extravaganza using Sonic Pi and joining with some fellow musicians at the finale of his talk. It was great to see his realisation that in designing a simple system for kids to learn to code, he managed to also create an enjoyable and extendable experience for anyone of any age, including himself!
Still deeply technical
A varied selection of technical talks was also available to attend, many of them heavy on the devops side of software engineering. One interesting technical talk was the not-so-live but very informative “Neural Nets From The Ground Up” by Joe Albahari. He gave a demonstration of starting up a neural network from the ground up to solve a simple problem in order to explain the building blocks of how they work.
At the end of a long day, with our heads full of new ideas, and our tummies bursting from endless food, we sat down for the last keynote. Maybe not the best time to slot the most technically advanced talk of the day, about nothing other than good old performance management, and by no other than Brendan Gregg, a performance architect at Netflix and an co-author of several performance tools in MacOS; an individual from which a lot can be learnt, no doubt. And learn we did; despite the struggle to stay focused, the talk provided a comprehensive view of how an organisation of such scale would handle bottlenecks and outages and what tools to use in which scenarios. We would be sure to revisit this talk online to get a refresher, and we recommend anyone building complex software to check it out.
Day 2
Know how to share knowledge
Day 2 kicked off with a constructive talk, especially to developers, teaching us about the true essence of being a leader in technology. Again by Jessica Kerr, “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming” was revelational to some, and a simple way of defining the obvious to others, much like her previous talk. She preached that a true ace developer in a team is not the one with all the knowledge about the application being built, but rather the one that knows how to share such knowledge best. She gave a new name for software development, saying that it isn’t an art or a craft, rather it is the practice of Symmathesy — a living system of a team working, learning and growing together. We all need to be reminded not to hog memory sometimes…
In spite of a primary technical focus on devops practices in the first day, the second day gave us a couple of web talks that made the FEnders amongst us quite pleased, especially when breaking down heavy core subjects like “this” and JavaScript promises; a knowledge that may be taken for granted by some but isn’t at all apparent.
The human sides of working in tech
More inspirational talks continued throughout Day 2 to keep us all yearning for more. Amongst these, a memorable talk that got us sharing our own experiences was by Randy Shoup, a VP of Engineering at WeWork. By talking about his personal struggles, Randy helped us explore the human sides of working in tech and what it truly means to be an expert in a field, coming from an expert. A reassuring talk to make us feel that we can, if we want, and we will, if we do. All we require is a spare 10k hours to put into the same field, é voilà, you are an expert.
On a less serious note, a talk named “The importance of Laughter” came at the perfect time as the final talk of Day 2. Aino Corry told us some jokes, showed some funny videos to get us laughing and also gave insight into how laughter can help us in everyday life, as well as why people laugh in different social settings. The catch was thinking that this might not be relevant to the tech industry, and then being proven that it is in fact essential, because the tech industry is about people, as much as it is about tech.
An extreme keynote from Kent Beck
The keynote for day 2 was surprisingly scheduled in the middle of the day, straight after lunch; and it was a good show to relax to. Kent Beck, who needs no introduction (if you don’t know him, a google dive is advised), was kind enough to entertain us with what he really thought about the way Facebook operates, or particularly, about the way Facebook doesn’t operate. Beyond agile, iterations and sprints, there are companies that to the outside world seem to operate in chaos. However, there is always method in the chaos, and facebook is no different; operating under the 3X — Explore, Expand and Extract model. The different types of pressures a developer would be under while going through each of the 3X phases, although not being part of the traditional mechanisms in which most development companies currently operate, are still relatable to most developers outside of these model. We’ve all felt the freedom of cowboying through a green field project in “Explore”, or the stress of trying your hardest to innovate while your idea has taken flight so that you don’t lose the wind under your wings while “Expanding”, and the most relatable constant tension to stay relevant once you are already part of the furniture but still need a reason for a budget because bug fixing is never good enough for “Extracting” stakeholders.
All in all YOW! reminded us of the amazing world that is our profession, the inspiring community that surrounds it, the strive to always learn more and the welcoming friendly attitude inhibiting our tech conferences. From inspirational talks to get any developer revitalised and excited, to comprehensive technical talks for the tech hungry, there was something for every attendee. Overall we all felt that we would strongly recommend a YOW! Conference to anyone in the future, especially if you have not been before. Thank you to all of the YOW! Organisers and volunteers that make it the amazing conference that it is.
