I’m both excited and sad to announce that today is my last day at YOW! Conferences. In many ways this has been my dream job, and the last two years have flown by really quickly. I’m proud of every event we’ve put on, and YOW’s commitment to supporting and growing the APAC tech industry – especially with regards to diversity. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been honoured to meet and spend time with some of the smartest, most interesting folks from our community and overseas – people whose work is going to change the world. And in a way, that’s what prompted me to leave. After being around such inspirational folks tackling big problems… I suddenly realised that I missed being those people. The fun of a conference is in taking what you learn back to your team and building on it, and I need that challenge. I want to work with the teams and companies solving these big gnarly problems and see what I can do to help.
Of course, it’s super hard to leave Dave and the amazing YOW! Team. Not only are they all friendly and great at their jobs, I know what events and speakers they have coming down the pipeline – and I’m already regretting not being there for all of it! If you get a chance to attend one of our conferences, you should. (And Dave – I’m available to speak whenever you want! 😃)
Just for fun, I thought I’d add up all the events I’ve gone to on YOW!’s behalf over the last twenty months…
That’s just shy of 200 tech events (197 to be exact) across four countries. 😱
So what will I be doing with myself after today? First I’ve got a little bit of time off, and I plan to spend it catching up with friends, knitting, and watching a lot of Netflix. Then on the 25th I will be starting a new role with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Sydney in the Solutions Architecture team. I’m so excited to meet everyone and start learning new things!
And NO MEETUPS for while… at least a month. Or maybe a fortnight… or a week. We’ll see. 😜
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, 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!
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.
Another week with three more meetups! They’re all data-focused as I’m trying to get the word out about the YOW! Data Call for Presentations, which closes on March 18th.
The first was Sydney Cassandra Users, which had a special guest speaker all the way from the US – Rachel Pedreschi from GridGain!
Rachel gave us a thorough introduction to Apache Ignite – an open source caching layer that can sit on top of Cassandra. (She admitted that it’s also a database in its own right.) Not many of us were familiar with it, so it was great to get a tour from someone who knows it very well.
My second meetup of the week is one that I’ve been keen to check out from the first time I saw its inventive acronym: SURF (Sydney Users of R Forum). The speaker was Dr. Fabian Held from Sydney Uni speaking about using R for network analysis.
I found this fascinating. (You can read his whole talk here.) Dr. Held pointed out that research has shown your social network can influence your probability of being obese or having certain diseases. By mapping the relationships in the network, we can analyse it in some interesting ways. The tool used in the demos was tidygraph, an API for graph manipulation.
One of my favourite takeaways from the talk was of the existence of Zachary’s Karate Club. This was a real social club studied by researcher Wayne W. Zachary in the 70’s and the data set of relationships is available for for you play with. It’s a bit of a meme among scientists who study networks. How delightfully obscure!
My last meetup of the week was Sydney Machine Learning at the AWS offices in Sydney. I remember attending this one just after it started a year ago – it’s a huge group now!
The first speaker was Luke Metcalfe of Microburbs talking about what data science is, what makes a good data scientist, and how to hire and motivate good ones. I especially liked some of his advice for getting into data science: “Good data beats the best model.”
The second talk was Dr. Elaina Hyde, an astrophysicist and consultant at Servian. As a dyed-in-the-wool space geek, this was definitely my favourite talk of the week. Dr. Hyde talked about using data science techniques in her analysis of the Sagittarius Stream. It was fascinating!
Other Stuff
There was an interesting discussion on Twitter last week about engineers being “on call” for support. John Barton wrote a nice summary of the debate here as well as the approach he takes with his teams.
What’s your view on the AMP letter? For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with Tim Kadlec. I think giving some search engine juice to pages that are secure and load quickly is a good idea… but it needs to be based on a objective measure, not use of a single tool.
YOW!’s speaker development program for women in tech has launched for 2018! We have rebranded it as New Voices in Tech (as it’s not really about competition) and it’s open to all women in Australia. If you are selected, you’ll receive a full day of speaker training with Damian Conway (who is amazing). Well worth entering if you want to learn to be a better speaker!
I’ve done my fair share of griping about the stupid share bikes littered all over Sydney.
Yesterday though, I realised I had the perfect use case for one. The Snook’s office was having a party over at the Entertainment Quarter, and though it isn’t far from our house, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to get to on public transport. And sure, I could ride my own bike over there, but then I planned on having some beers and taking the bus back with the Snook which ruled that out. A one-way rental on a share bike seemed like the perfect solution!
First things first – which of the (many) options to choose from? I googled “Sydney share bike review” and found this article in The Australian which indicates that Mobike (the orange and silver one) and Ofo (the yellow one) were the best in terms of build quality. I quickly installed the Mobike app. Next I grabbed my own helmet – no head lice for me, thank you! Then I just needed to locate the nearest bike. OH RIGHT, THERE ARE LIKE EIGHT ON THE FOOTPATH ON MY STREET RIGHT NOW.
I used the app to unlock the nearest Mobike, which was painless and honestly kind of neat how it worked. Then I raised up the seat as high as it would go. Hm. First problem. This felt pretty low. (For the record, I’m 5’10” / 1.78m with longish legs. Tall, but not freakishly so.) I persevered though, and took a quick photo to send to the Snook (who was already at the party) to tell him to expect me in 25 minutes.
SEE? I GOT ON!
Then I headed off through Chippendale. About thirty seconds later, I went to change gears and discovered THIS BIKE HAS NO GEARS. The handlebar control that I thought was a gear shifter is just a bell. How can you offer bikes in Sydney without gears?? We’re not Santa Monica. We have HILLS. Oh, and did I mention this bike was HEAVY AS HELL? No way was I puffing through the back streets of Surry Hills on a too-small tank of a bike with no gears. I pulled over at the nearest pile of share bikes to chuck the Mobike and try another. I’d made it three blocks.
After locking that one up, I switched to an Ofo (the yellow one). The seat went a little higher on this one. Still not as high as I need, but better. Also – it has gears! I felt optimistic. I headed off through Redfern and Surry Hills.
Well. My 25 minute ride actually took me 35 minutes, and that’s not counting the couple of times I stopped for a drink of water. (It was a hot and sunny day.) Even with gears, that heavy-ass, still-too-tiny bike was murder on the hills. I even ended up walking it on a couple. I finally made it to the Entertainment Quarter though, parked, and staggered into the party – sweaty and dazed and in desperate need of a beer. On the upside, neither bike ride actually cost me anything as they’ve all got introductory specials on right now.
Results of experiment
Scenario: This was the most optimal use case I could think of for me to use a share bike – a short, one-way trip to a location inconvenient for public transport.
Good stuff: It was free. The apps were easy-to-use for unlocking the bikes. (I didn’t bother using them to find a bike since, as I previously mentioned, THEY’RE BLOODY EVERYWHERE.) I didn’t have to worry about getting my bike home or making sure somebody didn’t steal it.
Bad stuff: The bikes weigh a ton. They’re too small for people on the taller side of the bell curve. Some of them have no gears, and the ones that do don’t have very many, resulting in a painful, sweaty, very difficult ride. And then there’s the whole helmet situation (public lice helmet vs. no helmet at all), of which the only remedy is to bring your own (which you then have to carry around with you).
So yeah. That was my one experiment on a share bike. Now we can shoot them all into the sun. 🚲🚀☀
Now that the holidays are over, it seems like most of the local meetups are getting back to a regular cadence. I made it to three very different events this week – SyPy, The Big Security Debate, and Global CFP Diversity Day!
Sydney Python (or SyPy for short) was held at Optiver Sydney, which is such a great venue. The first speaker was Dr. Paula Sanz-Leon from Sydney Uni talking about pyunicorn. Pyunicorn is a Python package for the advanced analysis and modeling of complex networks. Dr. Sanz-Leon explained that “Anticorrelation and positive correlation are easy to understand, but they aren’t useful to explain nonlinear (chaotic) interactions.” If you want to visualise something complex and chaotic like brainwaves, you need to use recurrence plots.
The next talk was extremely relevant to my interests. Sean Johnson walked us through his efforts to apply home automation to his air conditioner (“because I live in Blacktown, and it’s ridiculously hot when we get home”). This is something I’ve been planning to do myself! Sean used LIRC, a Raspberry Pi, and Apple’s HomeKit to glue it all together.
Sean also walked us through some of the general pitfalls of home automation, including the security risks.
The final talk was Optiver’s own Greg Saunders giving us a gentle introduction to asyncio, a Python module that provides the infrastructure you need for single-threaded asynchronous programming. I was delighted to discover that it’s all about coroutines! (I learned about those from Svetlana Isakova at a YOW! Night last year.)
On Wednesday night I headed to Surry Hills for The Big Security Debate. This special event was run by the Meetup Madness folks who run a number of cloud and devops meetups across Australia. Several hundred people got together to watch offensive and defensive teams go head-to-head in various scenarios devised by some diabolical moderators.
I won’t go through all my tweets – as there were many – but needless to say I had a great time. The hackers had a lot of crowd support through most of the scenarios, just because their devious ideas for hacking into systems were pretty entertaining. (They also did some great trash talking.) A lot of the attacks and countermeasures reminded me of a certain television show…
The red team (aka the hackers) ended up winning the debate and were awarded embroidered hats for their trouble. Hilariously, my tweets on the night were dubbed “the most awesome” and I also won a prize!
We have plenty of Google Homes. I gave this one to my nephew. 🙂
The last event of the week was Global CFP Diversity Day. This global community event was inspired by some workshops that ScotlandJS and ScotlandCSS ran in 2016 to increase the diversity of their speaker pool. I discovered the site last December and realised that no one had volunteered to run one in Sydney. So – what the heck! – I put my name down to organise. General Assembly Sydney offered to host and YOW! came onboard to sponsor snacks.
The Sydney and Melbourne events were the first of 60+ workshops to kick off around the world. Some cities were doing a full day covering the entire process from coming up with an idea through to delivering the talk, but I decided to keep the Sydney event focused on just ideation and abstract writing. I assembled a super team of mentors, several of whom put their hands up to facilitate different activities. It was a lot of fun!
I heard some amazing talk ideas, and I really hope the participants are inspired to submit them to conferences. We finished the day with a group photo and a promise to run a sequel event (covering writing and delivering the talk) if there’s interest.
Incidentally, if you’re looking for CFPs to submit your talk ideas to, the Global Diversity CFP Day folks have created a public list curated by all the different event organisers. For Aussie events, this list from Readify is very handy. And of course it goes without saying that you should be submitting to YOW! Data and YOW! Lambda Jam, both of which have CFPs open right now! 🙂
Other Stuff
I really love this CodePen example of encoding raw text into an image using colour. I’ll have to use that to generate a design for a quilt someday…
I’ve seen my friend Charlie Gerard demonstrate some very cool “creative coding” projects over the years, many of which involve hardware. (Charlie spoke at the SydJS I curated a couple years back.) But this? This is AMAZING. Charlie is using her brain to control an image in a web browser via Javascript and a wearable EEG. 😲
It was LCA week! Last year I attended my first LinuxConfAU in Hobart, but this year it happened to be in Sydney about 5 minutes from my house. In addition to catching as many sessions as I could and trying to get a normal amount of work done, I also had the honour of being a miniconf organiser. I also went to two different meetups! It made for a hectic week.
Monday morning began with the Open Hardware Miniconf. Last year I learned to solder, so this year I had another go with the LoliBot! It took me a few goes to get back into it, but luckily I had a great teacher in Leon Wright.
I didn’t quite get to finish my robot because I had to run off for the Art + Tech exhibition that I’d organised! Eight of the speakers got together over lunch to show off some of the projects they’d be talking about the next day. It was a small logistical challenge, but thankfully the Snook was a massive help. We didn’t quite get the huge crowds I’d hoped for, but that was mostly because the conference was spread out over multiple buildings. Everyone still seemed to enjoy themselves!
One of my favourite thing to do at conferences is find folks wearing YOW! t-shirts. 🙂
I caught a few sessions at the end of the Games and FOSS miniconf. One of my favourites was by Jon Manning, a game developer and frequent YOW! speaker from Hobart. Jon spoke about the game Night in the Woods and how the team open-sourced parts of the game during development.
The miniconf ended with lightning talks, so on a whim I put up my hand to talk about the Scratch game I made for the Harvard CS50 course. It went well! It’s the first 5 minutes of this video…
Tuesday was the big day – the Art + Tech miniconf! There were so many amazing tweets during the day. Every single speaker went above and beyond what I had even hoped for. I’d like to thank all of them, as well as the organisers who helped make it happen. You can watch almost all of the videos on YouTube here:
Wednesday was the start of the conference proper. The morning’s keynote was by Karen Sandler from Outreachy, who talked about the pacemaker and defibrillator she has inside her heart. When Karen discovered that she didn’t have access to the code that was literally inside her body, it was the inspiration for a lot of her work with Open Source. I was particularly struck by the bit where she talked about having to get a replacement and discovering to her horror that every model available had wireless connectivity. She had to explain to her doctor that, as a woman on the Internet with opinions, having her heart device connected to the Internet meant she would probably have to change her career. Luckily after much effort they were able to source a single model with the capability of turning this feature off. 😵
I also saw a very cool talk by Paul Schulz on a project he helped with in Adelaide to build an array of “cosmic ray” (muon) detectors for an art festival. He had one with him, and every time a muon struck it – inside the building! – it would flash and chime. I even got some video.
My friend Katie Bell also gave a fantastic talk about a fun data project she worked on. The video is here, but spoiler: Yes. Yes, it is. 😂
Wednesday night I headed to Siteminder‘s office for the Sydney Technology Leaders meetup on “building your brand as a thought leader… or not!” The first speaker was Dave Bolton, head of engineering at WooliesX. Dave spoke about his history in technology, and some of the specific activities he recommends to build your profile within the community. The one about reviewing a professional book on Goodreads surprised me – I’ll have to try that out!
Next up was my friend and former Canva colleague Rose Powell. Rose gave us some great, practical advice on dealing with the media and how to craft an attention-grabbing conference talk or article title.
The third speaker was meant to be a public speaking coach, but unfortunately both of the ones we lined up got sick! So I had to step in, and I already told you about that…
We finished the night with a panel, which was great as always. Special shout out to my friend Mick Pollard who basically functioned as a fifth panelist, giving some great advice from his experience running the Devops Sydney meetup group.
Thursday I made it back to LCA for a few more sessions, including one by the other Devops Sydney organiser, Lindsay Holmwood. Lindsay spoke about Conway’s Law about how it can be applied to open source communities.
I also saw a really cool talk by Andy Botting and Glenn Guy on the work they’ve done to reverse engineer different Australian catch-up TV services to work on the open source Kodi media player. As someone who used to work on one of those services, this was fascinating to me! (The guys actually saw my tweets and came up to me the next day to ask me about it.)
Thursday night I skipped the Penguin Dinner at LCA and headed over to Google for the GDG Sydney meetup. It was a small but lively group, and the theme of the night was Open Source and Google. We heard a lot about the Summer of Code program as well as the Google Code-In, and many of the attendees were folks who had participated in the programs in one way or another. There were lots of lightning talks about the work they’d done, and it was really inspirational to see!
Friday was the last day of LCA, and frankly I was pretty much conferenced out. After a very entertaining and super informative keynote about containers from Jessie Frazelle, I headed over to see my friend Hannah Thompson talk about her project to recreate the Clueless app. You know, the one that Cher uses to pick out her clothes for the day! I loved every single aspect of this talk. Hannah did a fantastic job. So much Jane Austen, and computers, and clothes, and code, and fun. ❤️
I also really enjoyed Sam Thorogood’s talk about the “death” of the Web, and how progressive web apps can be used to provide app-like functionality within your website. He even did a fun demo turning OFF wifi and showing how your site can still work off-line.
The last session of the day consisted of fourteen different lightning talks, and they were all pretty excellent. My favourites were from my friend Stephen Dalton of the Gold Coast TechSpace, Benno Rice and his Aristocrat-inspired take on Bitcoin, and Fraser Tweedale teaching me about Hackyll and giving me Haskell flashbacks.
Overall my second LCA was a great experience. The Snook came along with me to most sessions, and it was the first time we’d ever been to a tech conference together. Being able to duck home for lunch and to sleep in my own bed each night was amazing, and I’m definitely going to miss that the next time I travel to one! I also enjoyed hanging out with so many cool technical women, and the impromptu knitting circles that kept happening during tech talks. 🙂
Did you see you can now play old Nintendo games in the browser in this Javascript emulator? Kiss your productivity goodbye.
And don’t forget – there are two upcoming YOW! events in Sydney with open Calls for Presentations! YOW! Data will be held on May 14-15 and is looking for speakers on data-driven technologies and applications. YOW! Lambda Jam is coming up on May 21-23 and is all about functional programming.
I’m one of the organisers of the Sydney Technology Leaders group, and we held a meetup last night on building your personal brand. One of our planned panellists was a public speaking coach, but unfortunately illness caused them to drop out at the last minute. So with a few hours’ notice, I was drafted in as a replacement. (I’ve got a fair bit of experience, and my job with YOW! Conferences means I attend a lot of tech events.) I gave a short “everything I know about public speaking” lightning talk with no slides, and thankfully it went really well! A few attendees asked if I’d share my notes publicly, so I thought I’d post them on LinkedIn in case others find them useful. Just head over there to read!
On paper it seems like this was a light week… but not really. Technically I only made it to one official meetup though – the Android Australia User Group – Sydney. It was a special one too, as it was Georgina’s final meetup as organiser (after 4.5 years!). Before the 😭, we had a couple talks, both of which built on topics I had learned about from YOW! speakers last year…
The first was by Quirijn Groot Bluemink from The Iconic. Quirijn’s talk was an introduction to Flutter, a new mobile app SDK to help developers and build mobile apps for both iOS and Android. Flutter uses Dart, a programming language that Google developed and uses to run some very large apps.
I learned about Flutter and Dart last December from Kasper Lund‘s talk at YOW! 2017. Basically it saves you from having to reimplement your app’s functionality for each platform – you can literally use the same code for both! I was amused that both Quirijn and Kasper mentioned the Hamilton app as one of the most well-known apps built with Flutter.
The second talk of the night was Mitch Tilbrook giving us a peek at Kotlin “backstage.” Kotlin is a programming language that runs on the JVM but can also be compiled to JavaScript source code. While it’s been around since 2011, it got a big push this year when Google announced first class support for Kotlin on Android at I/O.
I was lucky enough to see two talks on Kotlin last year by Svetlana Isakova, one of the core developers of Kotlin at JetBrains. She gave a keynote at YOW! Connected 2017 called “You Can Do Better With Kotlin” (video here) as well as as a YOW! Night that dived deeper into features like support for coroutines.
After the two talks, there was a special presentation of thank yous and flowers to Georgina for everything she’s done for the group. Well done, G!
I’m not gonna lie – this was hard. The instructors were great and my fellow students were all friendly, but the reality is that this is literally a semester’s worth of university-level content covered in three 8-hour days. Not just that, but FP in general is quite a mind-flip from other programming paradigms. I found that I would hit a wall every couple of hours where things would suddenly stop making sense. That would trigger a stressful fight-or-flight response, and it was really hard to push through. (Massive thanks go to assistant instructor Dave and my friend Jed for helping me as best they could.)
The fact that I returned after that first day is solely down to the Snook persuading me that I could do it. (I really, really didn’t want to go back.) I survived though, and even if I didn’t understand everything, I have a much better grasp on the concepts that I did before I started. I learned a lot of vocabulary and demystified some of the more arcane bits of FP jargon. The next time I crack open my Haskell book, things will be easier.
Other Stuff
I’m going to India! I was honoured to be invited to speak at this year’s Agile India 2018 in Bangalore in March. I’ll be talking about Building Software That Lasts. If you’re in the area, you should definitely attend.
LinuxConfAU kicks off tomorrow! Tomorrow I’ll be hosting an art exhibition during the lunch break, and on Tuesday the 23rd I’ll be running the Art + Tech Miniconf. (There are a limited number of miniconf-only tickets available for purchase for Tuesday, so let me know ASAP if you want one.)
Tickets are still available for Sydney’s Global CFP Diversity Day event on February 3! If you’ve got a goal of speaking at a tech conference, you should come along to this workshop.
Curious about what Webpack actually does? I found this excellent Reddit comment that explains it in straightforward English. If you’ve ever wanted to know why we don’t just add <script> tags to a page anymore, read that.
The YOW! team often shares links to interesting stories in tech via our internal Slack. I especially liked this one from my boss Dave: Your Next T-Shirt Will Be Made by a Robot. I will be very curious to see if this company can pull it off. I’ve seen videos of robots trying to fold towels, and they are so flummoxed by soft fabrics that they have to move verrrrry sloooooooowly.
And one more reminder – we have two upcoming YOW! events in Sydney with open Calls for Presentations! YOW! Data will be held on May 14-15 and is looking for speakers on data-driven technologies and applications. YOW! Lambda Jam is coming up on May 21-23 and is all about functional programming.
A few months back, I was chatting to someone in the tech industry in Sydney who mentioned he missed the blog posts I used to write about attending meetups. “Really? I didn’t think anybody read them!” He said that as someone who couldn’t get to many events, he still liked reading about them. So I promised him that I’d give it another go.
So here we are in 2018, and the first groups are starting back up after the Christmas holiday. Strap in folks! (Did I mention I went to 124 meetups in the past year??)
My first meetup of 2018 was actually one I was speaking at! Tech Talks @ Pivotal Labs is a weekly group that hosts speakers from a range of fields: technology, product design, engineering and Lean startup methodologies. I’ve attended many times, but this past Tuesday was my first turn on the other side of the podium! (The lovely photo at the start of this post was from my friend Sharon Lu at the Tyro FinTechHub.)
I was reprising my talk from DDD Perth: “The Campsite Rule: Leaving the Tech Industry Better Than We Found It.” It’s about all the things in tech that can burn you out, and how mentoring is one way that you can make a difference and feel better about it. There were probably a hundred attendees, and they all seemed pretty engaged! There were even some nice comments on the Meetup page afterwards, including someone taking my suggestion to put their hand up as a mentor. 🙂
The funniest part was how I told everyone that CES was about to start so we’d soon be inundated with news stories about ridiculous tech gadgets. But even I never envisioned robot strippers… 🙄 🤖
Tuesday evening I headed over to ING’s offices to a brand new meetup: Tech Share Sydney. This group is organised by OCTO Australia, and they plan to have a different theme every month. This first one was all about data… which just so happens to be my major focus, as YOW! Data is coming up on May 14-15th! (We’re looking for speakers right now.)
The first speaker was Matt Howlett from Confluent giving us a tour of Apache Kafka. (Matt lives and works in Palo Alto but he’s an Aussie, so he was taking advantage of being home for the holidays to give a meetup talk!)
Matt said that a lot of folks think of Kafka as just a “pub/sub” message queue, but you can also think of it as “a commit log for your organisation.” Kafka’s advantages are all about scaleability and moving around massive amounts of data. You should use Kafka if you’ve got lots of data or your organisation/architecture is very complex. I was impressed with some of the numbers Matt showed us.
We also got a sneak peek of KSQL, “an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed streaming SQL engine that enables stream processing against Apache Kafka.” Matt made it look super easy to join data together from multiple streams and write meaningful queries against it!
The second talk of the night was a tag team case study from Nicolas Guignard and Arthur Baudry from OCTO. They walked us through a project they’d worked on to build a sustainable enterprise-wide reporting system using Apache Spark and Amazon Web Services.
I was especially interested to learn about a tool they’d used that was new to me: FitNesse. It fostered collaboration by allowing the business analysts on the project to write requirements in a sort of wiki that then actually ran as acceptance tests. Pretty neat!
My third meetup for the week was another data-focused one: Web Analytics Wednesday. Unusually, this is a meetup that’s held in a pub! We were all squished in pretty tightly, but the drinks were free and everyone was super friendly. (I highly recommend the $10 burger special!)
The first speaker was Johann de Boer from Menulog giving a fascinating case study on a project he worked on for a previous employer that provided predictive segmentation of website visitors. Basically the end goal was to guess the goal of someone visiting the website based on their behaviour and then customise the experience towards that.
During the Q&A, I raised my hand to ask Johann about questioning users directly. That was something we did whenever anyone signed up to Canva, and was curious why they hadn’t done it on this project. We ended up having an interesting discussion about qualitative vs. quantitative data, and how you can use one to test assumptions against the other. I also chatted with Johann during the break about the minimum number of “pages” you need to track to make an accurate guess about what users are doing. It’s smaller than you think!
The second talk of the night was Jakub Otrzasek from Datalicious giving us a veteran’s view on what an analytics newbie needs to know. There’s massive demand for folks who know how to interpret all the web data that’s being generated, but not a lot of folks to fill the positions! I agree with Jakub – if you’re looking to hire an analyst, your best bet is actually to grow one from your existing team.
Other Stuff
That’s it for meetups. Here’s a few other things keeping me busy:
Congrats to my old colleagues at Canva on becoming Australia’s newest unicorn! I know what a big goal that was for the team, and I’m so proud to have contributed in a small way. 🦄
Next week I’ll be attending Data61’s 3-day Functional Programming Course taught by Tony Morris. I’m expecting to be challenged. (Eeep. Time to cram more Haskell.)
LinuxConfAU is coming in one more week! I’ll be attending again this year and I’m really looking forward to it. The first two days are dedicated to miniconfs. On Monday the 22nd I’ll be building a robot at the Open Hardware Miniconf, and on Tuesday the 23rd I’ll be running the Art + Tech Miniconf. (I’m super excited about Art + Tech. I managed to get pretty much my dream lineup of speakers!)
On Saturday, February 3rd I’ll be hosting the Sydney branch of Global CFP Diversity Day. This global series of workshops has a goal of encouraging newbie speakers from underrepresented groups to put together their first talk proposals. Special thanks to Sydney GA for hosting and to all the mentors who have volunteered to help!
Along with several of the Sydney Girl Geeks, I’m slowly working my way through HarvardX’s CS50: Computer Science course. For my first assignment, I had to build a game in Scratch. Naturally, I made one inspired by Roald Dahl! You can try it out here.
And lastly – don’t forget that we have two upcoming YOW! events in Sydney with open Calls for Presentations! YOW! Data will be held on May 14-15 and is looking for speakers on data-driven technologies and applications. YOW! Lambda Jam is coming up on May 21-23 and is all about functional programming. Special note: This year we’ve added on an extra day for LJ that will be a full-day workshop aimed at providing an “on-ramp” to FP. (If you can’t make it to Tony’s 3-day course, you should definitely sign up for the LJ one!)
I leave you with a truly cool bit of music: Microsoft’s Spectre & Meltdown KB4056892 Patch converted into MIDI. These security bugs are an ongoing nightmare, but hey – at least we can dance to it! 💃
Since I don’t have a fixed office at YOW!, I need to carry my “office” with me. For the past fourteen months that’s been in a battered black Herschel backpack. The “leather” is starting to flake off though, and I was getting tired of rummaging around inside to find my keys or wallet. So I’ve been thinking about getting something a little more professional looking. Over the weekend I asked a couple friends as well as Twitter if there were any messenger/satchel/laptop bags they’d recommend.
EDC, if you haven’t heard of it, stands for “everyday carry.” There’s a whole, like, scene around it, with websites and subreddits dedicated to showcasing the carefully curated toolkits that folks in various jobs carry around at all times. Here’s mine, as photographed fifteen minutes ago at my coworking space:
Nothing too unusual or “tactical” there, really. Starting in the middle and going around clockwise: I’ve got my 13″ MacBook Air (chosen for lightness when travelling), long USB-to-Lightning cable, power cable, notebook and pen (both swag from a Twitter event), power brick (more Twitter swag), another short braided leather USB-to-Lighting cable, Orla Kiely wallet (with business cards inside), tissues, keys (with bottle opener keychain), umbrella, AirPods, wired ear buds (in a custom 3D-printed “pill” that Developer Steve made me), and sunglasses. Not pictured: chapstick, paracetamol, and other assorted lady necessities as needed. 🙂
A lot of folks kept recommending Crumpler messenger bags to me. I’m not a huge fan of the style though – they all look too much like neoprene camera bags to me. They’re also huge! And having to undo those clips to get inside would annoy the crap out of me. (I notice that a lot of folks in photos leave them unclipped and dangling.) I also find the names of their product lines pretty cringeworthy. “Moderate Embarrassment”? No. Clearly this is aimed at a much hipper demographic than me.
Fossil have some very nice messenger and “work bags,” but the marketing is aggressively masculine. Like, we get it dudes, you’re way too manly to be carrying a purse, right? Ugh. Similarly, Code Republic do some very nice handbags that are secretly laptop bags. They’re not my style, but I appreciate the effort. Still, I’d prefer my bag to be as gender neutral as possible.
A few folks pointed me towards the new dedicated “EDC Bag” that Adam Savage recently launched. While I can appreciate the concept, it’s a little too “tactical” for my needs. I don’t need recycled sailcloth and exposed hook-and-loop and a clamshell spring opening. (Frankly, it reminds me of Mary Poppins’s carpet bag just rendered in recycled materials.) The fact that they’re hand-numbered takes this more into the realm of an expensive collectible to me than an everyday item.
Ultimately I narrowed it down to just a few choices:
Proyager. They’re an Aussie company, and I liked the look of the Thao Vat Laptop Messenger Bag. Their bags are all canvas though, and I know from experience with my canvas Queen Bee bags that I’m really hard on them. I’d prefer something more waterproof and durable.
Toffee Cases. They’re very local (the office is just down the street in Pyrmont!), and their stuff is stylish and unisex. I really liked the Fitzroy Satchel, but the colours weren’t super inspiring. (There’s a photo of a navy blue one which I loved, but doesn’t look like you can order it.) They’re also out of stock in the 13″ for the next few weeks. The Commuter Satchel was also very nice, and I actually had the navy version in my shopping cart for a while…
STM Bags. Another Aussie company with a good reputation. I noticed there was a stockist inside the Broadway Shopping Center, so I popped in to check out the Judge Laptop Brief in person. It seemed like it would carry all my stuff and allow easy access; there were plenty of pockets and compartments; the materials and workmanship seemed good; and it came in actual non-embarrassing COLOURS. It also has some useful features like a fleece lined pocket for your sunnies, and an opening between the main and front compartments for your charging cords.
The STM bag was the same price in the shop as online, as well as $70 cheaper than the Toffee Commuter. I decided to go for it! I’m still working out the best way of organising everything, but so far so good. I personalised it with a bunch of pins I’ve been collecting over the past couple years. (I’ll probably have to take those off when I travel, I’m guessing…) Thanks to everyone who gave suggestions!
