I attended YOW! Melbourne 2022 conference this week. I was looking forward to learning about other perspectives on their experience of developing and supporting systems, and the conference delivered.
YOW! Describe themselves as:
"YOW! Conferences bring together internationally recognized speakers and developers for an in‑depth look at emerging technologies and best practices in the software industry – regardless of technological platform or language — without commercial hype."
My organisation was one of the sponsors and I had the opportunity to staff our booth. This had the added benefit of meeting more people and learning more about other tech organisations than if I was just attending the conference. In the future, if your company is one of the sponsors I would recommend staffing their booth. This will help refine your public speaking skills and increase the number of industry connections.
These were some of the sessions I attended:
A Kafkaesque Series of Events by Lily Mara
Managing your SLO in the face of Chaos by Liz Fong-Jon
Sensible defaults for tech management by Michelle Gleeson
One of the themes I noticed in a lot of the talks was the theme of test and learn. I enjoyed listening to WAR Stories and Lily Mara's "A Kafkaesque series of events"; Liz Fong-Jones's "Managing to your SLO in the face of Chaos" did not disappoint. My takeaways from both of their presentations were to be aware of the context of the problem and to evolve your ways of working as the system grows. Given the massive volumes of traffic, both OneSignal and Honeycomb manage daily. It was an interesting insight into the importance of observability and clear communication with all your stakeholders. This is the key to growing your business.
The most significant item I learned from the conference was the number of Female Senior Engineers who leave our industry after 10 years due to a lack of promotion and investment. Michelle Gleeson outlined her lived experience and shared some horrific workplace experiences and also some ways to combat the issue.
Some of my company's fellow Engineering Managers also attended this talk and it sparked some discussion on how we can start to develop and change practices to ensure we do not lose talented engineers to the same issue and how we can make this a key strength for our company in a tight hiring market.
Michelle is one of the co-founders of Tech Leading Ladies a meetup and coaching group, this community is designed to break down the barriers to promotion for women in Tech.
Speaking to other attendees at the booth or on the conference floor there was a theme of all companies attempting to work in a hybrid world. Most progressive companies hold an office day for the team to meet face-to-face. Meetings focused on planning and problem solving, with the remainder of the sprint focused on delivering and staff deciding where they needed to work.
Another theme was what was coming in 2024. The tech hiring freezes and redundancies reported overseas had put some Australian companies in a more cautious frame of mind. Others spoke about aggressive hiring targets for 2024.
If I see any links to the above talks I will post them later.
PS A tip, the mech moves fast, get in early to the booths
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