Apologies for the extended radio silence! It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I’ve been travelling all over.

On March 1st I headed to Perth for our very first YOW! Night of the year. Evan Leybourn was presenting on “business agility” to an eager crowd at Bankwest headquarters.

If you want to learn more about business agility, you’re in luck – we’re bringing the Business Agility Conference to Australia this year!

I also got to let everyone know the big news that YOW! West is now YOW! Perth, and it’s moved to September to line up in a tour with Singapore and Hong Kong. Should be fun and allow us to bring even more amazing folks to that part of the world!

After Perth I headed to INDIA for the first time ever! I was speaking at Agile India 2018 in Bangalore. I didn’t get to see much of the city outside the conference, but the speakers and the community were wonderful. It was also nice to catch up with so many folks from the extended YOW! family like James Stewart, Jeff Patton (who actually did smile, I swear!), and Fred George.

I was still fine tuning my own presentation, but I did manage to catch some great talks over the three days I was there. One of my favourites was from Dan Makoski, the VP of Design at Walmart.

Dan talked about making design more human, humble, and accessible, I especially liked this observation:

“Only two industries call their customers ‘users.’ Software development… and the illicit drug industry.” – Dan Makoski

Dan actually had us do some creative exercises during his presentation. In one of them, we used small cans of PlayDoh to imagine a futuristic toothbrush. (Mine was a pill “full of nanobots” that you chew on. 🤖) In another, we had 60 seconds to draw the person next to us. I made a new friend in the process!

There was a fascinating panel on diversity in leadership facilitated by Teresa Brazen from Cooper in San Francisco. The panelists were Reema Diwan of Taj Resorts, Poornima Girish from Shell, Dr. Sujitha Karnad from Sekai Solutions, Sue Cooper from Cooper, Mary Wharmby from BBVA, and Deepa Bachu from Pensaar. Some observations that I shared from it:

My new friend Sohan Maheshwar from AWS gave a talk on building voice-enabled experiences with Alexa. Obviously this is a topic in which I have some interest! There are interesting challenges around feature discoverability when you talk about “zero UI.”

Jeff Patton‘s session was super popular, as always. He uses a technique where he mixes slides with live sketchnoting, which he projects using a fixed camera above the lectern. It’s a great way to keep an audience engaged with that you’re saying!

I was fascinated by Nils Kappeyne‘s talk about Shell, one of the largest companies in the world. (Roald Dahl worked for Shell in Africa during the 1930’s!) They’re investing huge amounts of money in IoT, AI/ML, renewable energy, and even working to disrupt themselves in various ways.

My talk was on Friday, and I started the day with an EPIC STACK – falling flat on my face in front of half the audience! Luckily only my pride was bruised, and I had plenty of time to recover before I spoke. 😂

The focus on the last day was on DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and it started with a keynote from my friend Gregor Hohpe. Gregor’s talks are always entertaining and filled with useful info! I especially liked his challenge to those who judged their current level of test coverage acceptable…

My session was called “Building Software That Lasts,” and you can see my slides here. I said that too often in technology, the immediate response when inheriting legacy code is to chuck it out and start over. This is rarely a good idea. I talked about some of the trade-offs and choices you can make to build software that lasts and evolves over time. I had a small but engaged crowd, and I got some good questions after too! I even convinced someone he needs to look into property-based testing.

I also saw an informative session from Nikhil Barthwal on chaos engineering. One technique he mentioned in particular was running Game Days with your team – events to simulate how you’ll respond in the event of a real service failure.

My friend James Stewart from the UK spoke about cloud security. James said that security is about gaining trust through demonstrating competence, and every breach you suffer erodes that trust. Customers these days have more and more options, and they will leave (that even goes for government sites).

The award for my favourite talk title at the conferences goes to Thierry de Pauw for his session “Feature Branching is Evil.” Thierry told us about his experience introducing version control to a team that had never used it before, and he made a lot of good arguments in favour of trunk-based development.

After Agile India, I headed from Bangalore back to Singapore for a couple more meetups. The first was the excellent Women Who Code Singapore, where I spoke on giving “Better Tech Talks.” Thanks to the excellent folks at Engineers.sg, you can watch it online now! The night also featured a panel of folks covering other aspects of speaking – like coming up with ideas and handling Q&A sessions.

On the last night of the trip, I attended the Junior Developers Singapore meetup. This is an offshoot of the community that started in Melbourne and has now spread to Perth and beyond!

There were four excellent talks on the night, but the one that really touched me was by Mai Jianlong. He spoke plainly and bravely about his struggles with depression, and he gave advice to those starting out in tech for how to deal with mental health issues and recognise when you need to get help. It’s a powerful talk, and you can watch it online here:

It was a wonderful but exhausting two weeks, and I’m definitely happy to be home now!

Other Stuff

  • The Call for Presentations for YOW! Data and YOW! Lambda Jam has been extended to Friday, so you’ve still got time to get in a submission! Don’t delay any longer though…
  • We have several upcoming YOW! Nights happening in Brisbane, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Perth over the next few weeks – including a very special one we’re doing in conjunction with the AWS Summit!
  • Did you read this Jon Skeet’s post on Stack Overflow Culture? He proposes a covenant for both askers and answerers that basically boils down to: “Don’t be a jerk.” AskMeFi has struggled with this one as well and has some nice guidelines that are worth a look.