I joined YOW! Conferences as Executive Director in July this year. My first official trip was to Perth for the YOW! Night with Gojko Adzic. On this visit I had a tour of the Spacecubed community, and spaces FLUX and Riff (thanks Kali!) and started to meet members of the Perth development community as I spent the day dropping in and out of the sites.
My second official trip with YOW! was back to Perth in August for DDD, where YOW! Was a sponsor. I had a great time meeting the other sponsors and organisers of DDD as well as chatting with all the Perth attendees who stopped by the YOW! booth.
By the time YOW! Perth rolled around on 5th and 6th of September, I was starting to feel a bit like an adopted local by the now-familiar faces, which was comforting since this was the first YOW! Conference that I was working instead of attending. I wasn’t the only new thing about YOW! Perth this year - for 2018 we moved the date to September, changed to a single track program and instead of nominations had “Invited Speakers”. We also held workshops prior to the conference for the first time, quite a few of which were snapped up in their entirety by forward-thinking Perth companies keen to bring the experts in-house!
Next thing I knew, ‘twas the night before YOW! Perth and all through the night… well OK not exactly but the conference area of the Hilton was definitely buzzing starting about 4pm on 4th September with sponsors getting set up: Bankwest planting their orange grove, Microsoft building what could have been a giant movie set? And the YOW! Volunteer team assembling to learn about the iPad Feedback App and the fine art of t-shirt folding. By 8am on the 5th, the coffee was flowing and the conversations were already starting in the foyer as the attendees assembled.
YOW! Perth was a great start to my YOW! Experience with a great crowd of engaged software professionals. Our international expert speakers Gregor Hohpe, Jeff Patton, Dave Farley, Heidi Helfand and Michael Nygard and our Aussie talent Simon Raik-Allen, Dr Denis Bauer, Erin Zimmer, Katie Bell, Mark Hibberd, Sebastian von Conrad, Vincent de Smet and Cameron Joannidis were all well received by the attendees. I had a few comments from folks who were initially sceptical about the change to a single-track conference but then realised this is a great option with such a strong speaker lineup as it means you don’t miss a thing! Based on the feedback we’ve received I think the Perthians are happy with the changes that we have made to YOW!Perth, and we’re really excited about returning with our conference next year.
(My only request is maybe next year don’t everyone leave their ticket purchases to the last minute please and thank you as it costs me a lot to cover the grey hairs that causes ;) )
With continued support from the Perth developer community and sponsors such as BankWest, Simple Machines, Thoughtworks, Microsoft, Hays, JourneyOne, DDD Perth and of course, Spacecubed, I hope that YOW! Perth 2019 will be even bigger and better.
Look forward to seeing you all again soon, Perth!
On 11 December Dr Sam Aaron - researcher, software architect, computational thinker and the inventor of Sonic Pi - will bring his Live Coding performance from the east coast YOW! tour across to Perth. Live Coding systems encourage us to think extremely differently about programming languages. In addition to considering standard requirements such as reliability, efficiency and correctness we are also forced to deal with issues such as liveness, coordination and synchronization all whilst working in real time.
If you’d like to come along you can sign up online here.
