Are you a fan of the pyramid? Or the trophy? Or some other shape to describe your testing strategy? Or are you on the lookout, trying to find the shape that fits your project?

The truth is, there is no silver bullet for testing. Instead, let's have a look at all those different methodologies and learn from them. 

What do they have in common? What are their differences? And how do you choose the right elements to cater to your specific circumstances?

Julian Burr

"Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane?" — The Weird Shapes We Use To Talk About Testing

Did you hear about the arbitrary code execution hardware vulnerability in the Nintendo Switch discovered a few years back? In this talk we’re going to delve into this vulnerability in more detail and look at some other notorious home console security issues over the years from Nintendo, Sega, et al., the fallout from them and how they were fixed. This is not talk about breaking things but how companies got their act together, and how home consoles improved (or didn't) with tackling security issues over the years. This isn't a talk about homebrew stuff either.

Key takeaways:

Understand that security mistakes are a combination of human and technical failures
Discover that we have been making the same security mistakes since time immemorial and to become more conscious of this in every day work 
Learn about some fun security stories that show that security issues happen to everyone, no matter who you are.

Sarah Young

Arbitrary code execution, I choose you!

Mastering IT Efficiency: Strategies and Tools for Organizing Your Day*

Unlock the secrets to supercharge your IT productivity and organization! In this dynamic session, you'll dive into a treasure trove of proven strategies and cutting-edge tools that will revolutionize the way you tackle your IT tasks.

Join us to discover the power of centralized task management, as we explore how to seamlessly integrate your emails, Teams messages, and recurring tasks into a single source of truth. Learn how to transform your workdays into agile sprints using Planner boards, even if you're not on an agile project.

But the magic doesn't stop there! We'll delve into the world of automation with Power Automate and reveal how to turn mundane, time-consuming tasks into a thing of the past. Say goodbye to tedious data entry and hello to efficiency as we walk you through setting up Power Automate for work tasks. 

We'll also explore the psychology of habit formation, demonstrating how to incorporate proven habits into your IT routine for effortless daily organization. From blocking out your calendar to maintaining focus, you'll leave with an arsenal of tricks to give your brain a well-deserved rest.

This session isn't just about IT theory; it's about practical, real-world solutions that can be applied immediately to make a difference. Don't miss the chance to boost your IT efficiency and productivity - join us and transform your workday into a well-organized, highly productive IT powerhouse!

Simone Bennett

Automate Your Way to a Zen-Like Workday

Conflict is a natural and inevitable part of working in teams, and as leaders it’s important to understand how to recognise and resolve both unhealthy and healthy conflict. In my experience, understanding the difference between these two types of conflict, and how to move between them, is key to creating a productive and collaborative team environment.

In this talk, I’ll cover the negative impacts of unhealthy conflict and the positive impacts of healthy conflict. I’ll discuss how to recognise and understand the differences between the two, and how to move from an unhealthy to a healthy conflict. I’ll also provide a model to help you move from an unhealthy conflict to a healthy one.

Healthy conflict is essential for teams to thrive, and I believe that it’s one of the most important skills for leaders to develop. It’s how we can make a positive impact on our teams and our organisations.



Andrew Murphy

Building a Culture of Healthy Conflict in Tech Teams

In this interactive talk, we'll perform a live pen-test on a vulnerable website, with the audience deciding what to try next.

At each stage, vote on what approach to take, witness the results, and learn what the website's developers did right/wrong in securing their website.

Embark together on an adventure taking us from website user to server admin, and learn some security and pen testing tips along the way!

This talk is aimed at developers with an interest in security/pen-testing.

James Hercock

James Trotter

Choose your own pen-test adventure!

In an ever-evolving landscape of technology and development, my mission is to empower developers to traverse their career journeys with clarity and purpose. This presentation aims to equip developers with the knowledge and tools they need to make well-informed decisions regarding their career paths. We'll delve into strategies for not only choosing the right direction but also for addressing and overcoming the common concerns and challenges that inevitably arise as developers progress in their careers, take on new positions, and face unfamiliar terrain. How often we ask or tell ourselves about "Are we hands-on enough?" or "The role may not allow me to code!".

Throughout the talk, we will explore various aspects of career growth, including skill development, job transitions, and professional advancement. By sharing practical insights, and real-world experiences, attendees will gain the confidence and resilience needed to thrive in an ever-changing tech ecosystem. The aim is to empower developers to proactively shape their destinies, seize opportunities, and have the right conversations. Join us on this journey to master the art of navigating the developer's career landscape.

Garima Singh

Coding your Career: Navigating and Evolving your Career

Dive deep into the transformative habit of continuous self-development with our CTO, uncovering its remarkable influence on accelerating career trajectories. This talk offers a roadmap, illustrating how to seamlessly integrate self-improvement into your daily routine, making career conversations and performance reviews not just effortless but empowering.

Key Takeaways:
 - Strategic Self-Selection: Learn how to identify and prioritize areas for personal development, ensuring that your efforts align with career aspirations and organizational needs.
 - Securing Organizational Support: Discover effective strategies to garner necessary backing and resources from your organization, optimizing your self-development journey.
 - Visibility of Growth: Uncover the art of showcasing your continuous improvement, making your professional evolution apparent and valued by peers and managers alike.

Propel your career to new heights by embedding the powerful habit of continuous self-improvement into the fabric of your professional life.

Susan Brander

Continuous Improvement: Crafting the Habit of Self-Development

Most of us use databases regularly, but have you ever wondered how they work? Despite being the foundation of fifty years of technological progress databases are a black box to most people who use them, and that's sad, because they are awesome. Non-stop academic and industrial progress, from System R to Clickhouse, has made database systems outstanding monuments to the engineering excellence our field is capable of, but rarely achieves. 

You may have heard that the data fetching and transformation within a database is performed by bearded gnomes. That's ridiculous. Database gnomes don't have beards. As the magical school bus shrunk us down for strange and wonderful journeys through the human body, so this presentation will be an action-packed, day-in-the-life blast through database query execution, including simplified, but real demonstrations of query parsing, planning and execution. 

Ever wanted to know how an index actually works? What's the difference between row-oriented and column-oriented storage? How does schema vs schema-less affect database performance? Come learn why databases deserve your love and respect. 



Liam McLennan

Databases Are Amazing

You know the drill, there are a lot of fundamentals Developers disagree on. Tabs vs Spaces, GraphQL vs REST, and Majestic Monoliths vs Micro Services - get behind your preferred point of view in this live on-stage, developer vs developer Smackdown!

In this animated presentation, two developers will debate and fight out both sides of various topics. Classics like Tabs vs Spaces to more modern arguments like SQL vs NoSQL, traditional vs new tech, TDD vs shipping written code, and Trunk vs Branches and you end up with quite a review of current practices, with all the pros and cons. There will also be some more nuanced topics like Agile vs Wagile (waterfall agile) and pairing vs soloing.

From two presenters who both worked very closely in a strict pairing, trunk-based development shop and have since converged on new preferences, be ready for a roller coaster of thoughts and arguments as well as some late twists and even a bit of developer comedy. This will be a talk not to be missed.

Selena Small

Michael Milewski

Developer Smackdown

It's well known that as developers we all cringe at the thought of documentation.  In my work as a consultant I've collated a number of code-first approaches to documentation that are light-weight, and easy to maintain. 

In this talk I will cover topics including: tooling for creating documentation-as-code, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), the C4 Model, Plant UML, Markdown and how all of this can be used together to minimise the onboarding time for new developers to your projects.

Shaw Innes

Documentation for Developers

Now that the DevOps hype cycle has reached the "Plateau of Productivity", a GitOps wave has come along to solve all the other problems that we didn't know we had in our CD pipelines. 

Lets take a look at what GitOps really solves for us through a live walkthrough. We will discuss the questions it doesn't answer, and misconceptions that can sow confusion or result in teams bending over to create processes that perhaps aren't really necessary.

Robert Erez

GitOps - The best thing since DevOps, but what's missing?

Monitoring web performance used to be easy - all you had to do was track how long it took for the page to load. However, the extensive use of client-side JavaScript has introduced a raft of new ways modern websites can suffer from poor performance.

New performance problems require new metrics.
With this in mind, Google promotes a set of new metrics known as Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals go well beyond directly tracking page load times, instead relying on a set of user-centric metrics that focus on loading, interactivity and visual stability.

In this talk, learn how to capture Core Web Vitals metrics from end users in real time and perform continuous monitoring to quickly react to performance regression as they happen.

Macklin Hartley

How fast is your website really? Shining a light on web performance with real user monitoring

I grew up a technologist and always loved technology. Whether it's pulling apart old radios to figure out they work or writing my first LOGO Writer application to see the turtle do something, I craved it, so becoming a software dev was always on the cards. Throughout my 20 years in the industry I've had a lot of jobs and always loved where I worked.

COVID came and like everyone, I had my struggles with lockdowns and home schooling, but I was already a remote worker so the isolation aspect wasn't a real "bother" for me, I'm naturally introverted after all.

Then in late 2022 I just… stopped. I stopped enjoying my job. I stopped looking forward going to work. I avoided technology outside my scheduled work hours. I'd find myself losing hours a day just staring at a computer screen.

It took me probably 6 months to admit there was a problem, and that problem was I was burnt out.

But what comes next? It's one thing to accept you're burnt out but where do you go from there? Let me share my journey, from being on the cusp of a performance improvement plan to someone who is back do loving what they do and can't wait to get started every day.

Aaron Powell

I've burnt out, now what

Microservices have gained significant popularity in recent years as organizations seek to overcome the limitations of monolithic backends.

However, the challenges of 'monolithic frontends' persist for many companies.

In this session, I delve into a growing trend that aims to break down front-end monoliths into smaller, more manageable pieces. This architectural approach not only enhances team effectiveness and efficiency but also unlocks new possibilities.

I begin by sharing an engaging anecdote of my adventure with a rhinoceros in Nepal, drawing parallels with the concept of monoliths that need to be overcome before embracing micro frontends. The presentation then focuses on establishing a robust Micro Frontends architecture, providing attendees with valuable insights into best practices, determining when and why to utilize micro frontends, and taking the initial steps towards implementation.

Moreover, I showcase strategies for converting a monolith into a micro frontend application, offering practical guidance and demonstrating real-world scenarios.

One of the key aspects covered is establishing seamless communication between Micro Frontends, ensuring smooth collaboration and integration within the architecture.

Peter Eijgermans

Micro Frontends in Action!

Life moves fast. There is overwhelming pressure to stay on top of technologies, and we feel like we need to know everything about our craft to be a productive programmer.

Here's the big secret though: You don't need to.

Learn about how to apply the principle of "Last Responsible Moment" to how you approach work, including reducing cognitive load, deferring learning, asking good questions, understanding cost vs benefit, logical and risk fallacies, and how to make good (or "good enough") decisions in the face of limited data. Know the rules so you know when to break them.

Rebecca Scott

Minimum Viable Programmer

The current economic climate has resulted in many companies undergoing redundancies, restructuring, and cost-cutting measures. This has created a challenging environment for employees seeking salary reviews and promotions. In this panel discussion (featuring a combined 50+ years experience in the tech industry) we will share strategies and best practices for individuals navigating these conversations and answer some of your burning questions with an interactive discussion. 

Donna Edwards

Akanksha Malik

Gretchen Scott

Navigating salary reviews and promotions in a climate of redundancies.

Find out how One-Time-Passwords (OTPs) can be a game-changer for your user accounts. With recent data breaches making news in Australia, it's more crucial than ever to think beyond traditional passwords which could leave you vulnerable to data leaks.

This talk will give you insights into why OTPs can serve as a viable alternative to traditional passwords. It will also show you practical steps for crafting an OTP system from scratch, along with the significance of implementing security measures such as timeouts and maximum login attempts. You’ll also hear the lessons learned from real-world challenges faced during the OTP system's development.

This talk is designed with authentication newcomers, rather than industry veterans in mind.


Samaa Kanani

One password to rule them all (for a few minutes)

There are many aspects of software development that we don't often talk about and instead must be experienced. Once the product is viable, the growth stage poses new architectural challenges that we thought we saw coming but are often not properly prepared for. 

We will dissect 3 common but different monolithic product architectures and the decisions that were made to take them to market and the discuss the reality that got in the way. 

There are good reasons to avoid micro-services in startups, for those applying the more traditional approach I hope you will leave this session knowing what to expect and how to avoid the mistakes I made as you scale your applications.

Chris Schaller

Scaling a Monolith - What to expect if your product idea actually takes off

Software outages, failures and disruptions, big and small are often reported as software or technical issues. As software engineers, testers and developers, we are the humans behind the systems that broke down, and the stories we will share about software disasters will in turn entertain you, fill you horror... and perhaps help you understand a bit more about how and why software disasters happen. Only then, perhaps, we can better deal with them.

Ivan Sun

Software Disasters for Fun, Horror and Enlightenment

Discover how system thinking combined with EDA can effortlessly bridge the gap between business architecture and  project implementation. Allowing you to come up with a socialtechnical architecture that will empower people on both sides of the equation.
Showing how, and the importance of, keeping things simple to conquer the complexity of nowadays technology stacks.
A no nonsense talk for people that want to extend their horizon and challenge their existing processes. Discover how you can remove bias from the requirements gathering process and in doing so lower risk, cost and delivery time.

Arjan Noordhoek

System Thinking and Event Driven Architecture

Test Automation has been growing so much over the last few years. It all started with unit testing and UI based testing. Over the years, it has grown so much so, that it’s become so hard to keep track of them and keep the relevant. The biggest puzzle here is to understand what value each of the tests provide compared to effort it requires.
Lately, I’ve been struggling to keep track of tests written at different levels by different people and different teams. 

How do you make sure tests don’t overlap? How do you make sure someone is notified of something failed ? What if you have a company that has 20+ teams with so much happening around you.

This is when I can across observability, specifically for test automation. Abby Bangser has been instrumental in getting my understanding of observability for test frameworks up to the mark.

After learning about it, I started implementing it slowly at my work and it has been a transformative journey.
We tried to implement it across different levels of testing but also try to balance between over doing and under valuing.

In this talk, with live demos, I’ll show you how I took my first step for implanting observability practices in test frameworks and I’ll explain how it provides value to you and your company as a whole.

Jaswanth Manigundan

Take your first step towards observability for your automated tests.

A lot of people have known for a lot of years that the technical interview process has many, many flaws. From pseudo-code white boarding to writing complex algorithms, to multi-day take home tests, bad practices still abound. Additionally many interviewers suffer from lack of focused training (the belief that once you have 5 years coding experience you are a skilled interviewer), gatekeeping, and the belief that the interviewer should be the interrogator.

This talk will cover some better ways to set up the interview process (and culture) for technical hires. They include:

What should be avoided
How to set up a interview training program
What types and how many interviews should your process contain.
Understanding candidate care and the philosophy that interviewing is a two way street.
How to evaluate your companies interviewers and how you can make them better

Ted Tencza

Technical Interview Processes - Surely We Can Do Better

Over the last two releases of C# more and more functional paradigms have made their way into the language. We are now able to easily work with immutable data via records which avoid entire classes of bug types through immutable guarantees. Following down the functional path, we also got pattern matching and most critically, pattern matching with switch expressions.

All of these changes that the language has seen over the last few years have been growing to a point of critical mass in which all that is needed is a final push for a fundamental re-working on how every day C# is written. I believe that Discriminating Unions is the final piece to this equation and when it becomes a part of the language, an entirely new way of writing API's and consuming them will take over the industry. With this one feature we will finally be able to rid ourselves of code that compiles but fails due to unhandled edge cases and start to write truly reliable code.

In this talk I will highlight how recent additions to the language have enabled safer, more elegant code to be written, but also their limitations and why maybe you are yet to see any of your team working on them. Next we will do a deep dive into a currently in progress feature: Discriminating Unions: What are they? What is the syntax going to look like? Finally, how can we use all of these together. The future is bright and it has a lot of hidden Exceptions being thrown!

Michael Crook

The way you write dotnet is about to fundamentally change

Everything is easy - when you know how.
It's learning how that is difficult!

In this presentation I will look at some of the common approaches and problems encountered in helping programmers learn functional programming.

We will run through the progression I typically walk developers through in learning functional programming, examining what is significant at each step along the way. Examples will be primarily drawn from Typescript, incorporating the fp-ts library.

It will conclude with some observations on actual usage of services in a company using functional programming on an occasional basis, and the pro's and con's of doing so. Finally, I will answer the question, "is it worth it?" - but you already know the answer to that don't you (it depends :-) ).

Mark Cheeseman

Why is Functional Programming so Hard?

Many of us are worrying about AI coding assistants, and specifically GitHub CoPilot. Will they erase the need for our coding experience. And also, isn't it cheating? How will we show off our skills? These were also concerns for Julie, who has over 30 years of building software under her belt. But minds were changed, worries erased. Let's see together how AI can be your partner and sous chef, not your competition.

Julie Lerman

Will AI Coding Assistants like GitHub CoPilot Make Me Irrelevant?

When we build a website these days, there’s a 110% chance that it’s got some form of JavaScript on it. Whether it’s a full framework, for animations, to trigger a popup or as a tracking script, JavaScript is all around us.

But what if I told you that you didn’t have to use JavaScript at all? Not even as a build process? Thanks to updates in browser technologies, there’s now a plethora of native browser features that allow building modern, functional websites, sans JavaScript.

So together, we’ll build out a *completely* static website, a collection of HTML and CSS files, no tracking, no scripting, no servers, no third-party resources. Let’s build a website the way we used to (but no marquees).

Agenda

All Agendas

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors