DDD Melbourne Conference: Asking JuniorDevs to Dance
This is how it went down when the JuniorDev Community was invited in to run a Junior Dev Track at a massive 500+ Not For Profit conference, here’s the challenges, and the highlights!
DDD Melbourne is a non profit community event run by developers for developers. Originating in the UK, the event now exists in Scotland, Ireland, and Australia. This is the eighth year the event has run in Melbourne, Australia, and this year Luke Mesiti and I, as JuniorDev, were pretty excited to be involved to help craft the conference to be accessible, inclusive and deliver value to Developers and all in Software, especially our JuniorDev Community!
Luke and I have been working on JuniorDev for over a year now, and it was through our work colleague Alex Mackey, organiser of DDD Melbourne, and other fellow Xero colleague and DDD volunteer Peter Cook, that we got involved. We were invited to run a JuniorDev Track within the conference, something that hadn’t been done before at any of the DDDs, and potentially a new concept for Tech Conferences in general!
One goal of the JuniorDev Track was to help increase the experience-level diversity at DDD Melbourne. It has for the last 7 years, in general, been a Conference that attracts more Senior Developers. Its roots are in the .NET stack, and although the Conference has expanded to include many more topics over the years, from all accounts, it’s not cracked through to the Junior scene.
But, this is the perfect conference for Junior Developers! It’s only $49! FORTY NINE DOLLARS! That’s insane, and it’s on a SATURDAY! Which means, you don’t have to ask for time off work, which as a Junior, often you don’t want to do! Luke and I crafted a mini-campaign around “The Perfect First Conference” for Twitter, and we really believe it can be!
DDD Melbourne has a unique problem, it sells out instantly! Wow, what a terrible problem to have, I hear you say rolling eyes! 🙄 But really, for us, this was definitely a problem! When the conference sells out from the same network of people that have been attending over the last 7 years, it’s pretty hard to get new people involved! So as part of the JuniorDev and Diversity initiatives, we withheld a certain number of tickets from the General Release, and we sold them using a specific JuniorDev promo code.
We didn’t want to just give the tickets away for free though, at $49 it is a reasonable cost, and people do tend to drop out when things are free. We had a super limited number in our JuniorDev allocation, so the prospect of having wasted tickets was not something we wanted to risk.
We also offered a Hardship scholarship for a certain number of tickets as part of our broader organising efforts, which did capture a few Juniors and allowed them to attend.
Ideation Night
We decided to run an Ideation Night for Talk Topics aimed at Junior Developers a few weeks before the Conference. 💡 This fed into our larger JuniorDev Community goals of encouraging and supporting Junior Developers to talk at meetups, events and conferences, but of course well timed to encourage submissions to DDD from Junior Devs. Although the JuniorDev Track wasn’t aimed to only be Junior speakers, it certainly would encourage them as well to know they could submit to our Track, if they didn’t want to submit to the General Track.
We hosted it at General Assembly and had four awesome tech industry people come and speak about their tips for coming up with topics and presenting. Mark Dalgleish, Amelia Schmidt, Adam Beck, and Liam Esler, all awesome knowledgeable people, who have done speaking around Melbourne, and for some, the world!
We used Lucy Bain’s awesome resource from her blog as a template for the night, so after the speakers we had printed worksheets and had them go at it! We encouraged people to come up with three ideas, and then did “speed dating” where they chatted with another attendee to hash out the idea. At the end the goal was the have one topic to submit, in theory anyway, even if they didn’t actually submit! 💌
The night itself resulted in about 5 submissions to DDD directly, which was a great result, and we got great feedback from people in general that it helped them identify areas they could talk about in the future.
We selected four talks from both the Ideation Night submission and via the other DDD Melbourne Submission process. We ended up with two x 20 minute, 2 x 40 minute, as we didn’t actually want to fill in the whole day, there was plenty of other great content that Junior Devs could attend too! We had one drop out so we ended up with 2 x 20 minute talks and 1 x 40 minute talk.
On The Conference Day
It was finally upon us! I know it took a while to get to this point in the article, but so much of the work happens pre-event, Luke and I had spent countless hours working on this, everything from getting speakers to selling tickets, we had hustled our butts off! So it actually felt good to wake up, and head to the venue at 6am! 😋
The Agenda meant that we didn’t actually have a talk in the JuniorDev Track until 12noon, which was before the lunch break. But we didn’t want JuniorDevs to wander for half the day without a friend or two, so we had promoted for Juniors to come and meet each other at the morning tea!
A highlight of that was getting to finally meet Hugo who was active in our online community, yet I personally hadn’t had a personal interaction to match the internet ones yet! People had pastries, and mingled, it was cool! And then after catching some other cool talks, 12 noon rolled around, for our JuniorDev Track to kick off! 🎉
Mark Brown II — Crossfit and Coding Skills
I never thought I would like anything to do with crossfit, to be perfectly honest. But Mark’s talk was an absolute riot! Not only did Mark eloquently show us the transferable skills that apply to both these elements of his life, his Beyonce Icebreaker was a massive hit and I learnt a little something about mental fortitude, which I definitely need when it comes to my own exercise routine! Mark is an engaging and entertaining speaker, and I am so glad he joined our JuniorDev Community and we have him in our lives!
Allison Ravenhall — When is a Div Not a Div? When it’s a button
When you’re Junior Developers, you don’t even know what you don’t know. And frankly, Accessibility hasn’t always been the first thing people dive into when they learn to code. But that needs to change, and Allison who is an #a11y consultant at Intopia Digital, took us on the journey of someone who has severe vision impairment, and helped us understand semantic HTML and how to make use of ARIA markup. This talk is relevant for all Devs, and it was cool to see some folk in the room who were not Juniors too!
Erin Zimmer — Git. What the **** is it doing anyway?
Erin is crystal clear with explaining the inner workings of Git, it’s seriously a skill of hers. Erin’s down to earth manner of explaining technical concepts was perfect for digesting information at the Junior Level! Her breakdown on branches, git structure, how commits and staging work, and in general the demystifying the Git Magic was useful for all!
The JuniorDev Track was a success, as much as it can be without an actual metric of measurement (happy to hear ideas on how to measure this!). Each talk got good feedback, Juniors appreciated the topics, non-Juniors attended and got value from the talks too! We saw people from our JuniorDev Community hanging out, mingling with others throughout the day, and we helped deliver experience-level diversity to DDD Melbourne overall.
Some Learnings
- Get involved and plan things earlier; the JuniorDev Track was a bit of an after thought for the conference, and many things did happen last minute. We made it work, but it would of been better if we had more time.
- Have a backup speaker or two. We had a small lineup to start with, so someone dropping out made an impact.
- Shout louder! We were conscious of “spamming” our community with the DDD Melbourne promotion, but we’ve since spoken to many Junior Devs that never heard about it, even though they are on our Twitter, Slack, Facebook, etc. Timelines bury things, when something has value to your community, it is worth sharing!
- Schedule a JuniorDev Track talk first thing in the morning, that way everyone can meet pre and post talk and be friends for the rest of the day!
- Signage about what the JuniorDev Track is for, what it’s about, at the venue on the day. We assumed people would get it, or know about it, but not everyone reads the emails, looks at the Agenda etc.
- Don’t drop your phone in the toilet the night before. That was me, whoops. It meant Luke had to loan me his phone as I had general DDD Twitter duties, but it reduced his ability to engage with our community online and made it harder for us to communicate about logistics to each other during the day.
- Do your best and give it a go! At the end of the day, Luke and I had never been involved in organising a conference or event at this scale, we learnt a load, had great fun, made a positive contribution to the conference and left it a little better than what we found it.
A huge thank you to Mark, Allison and Erin for speaking in the JuniorDev Track, to anyone that attended from our Community, and to DDD Melbourne for giving us this opportunity! We had a blast and look forward to doing it again next year, and at any other conferences in the future! Get in touch 😉
We also worked on the other Diversity initiatives that DDD implemented this year, and we will be writing about our experiences with that soon. By no means have we done all we can, and all we will, on the Diversity and Inclusion initiatives for DDD Melbourne, this is a step and positive change, and we welcome feedback and suggestions! Ta!
