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

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

"DevOps" is the operations people’s crafty plan to make developers do other people's work, but we are smart enough to see right through this naive rebranding trick!

I suggest you think about it: we, the developers, have written all the code. It passes all the tests; it obviously works, and works well (Are we a little proud? We are!); so we are DONE.

Now, out of the blue, a bunch of "thought leaders" (all with an operations background, mind you!) are trying to tell us that we have to learn YAML, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform to deploy our software because suddenly it is our concern?!

In this talk, we'll discuss why developers do or don’t need DevOps. We'll consider arguments made by DevOps visionaries and see whether they hold water. Hopefully, by the end of the talk, we'll understand whether DevOps really helps developers to deploy better code to production more often, or if it is just another scam made up by marketing and evangelists.

Baruch Sadogursky

DevOps for developers (or maybe against them?!)

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

Functional programming combines the expressiveness and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics. If you start reading about it it's full of words like category theory, monad, functor, combinator, lambda calculus, currying and expressions like Y=λf.(λx.f(xx))(λx.f(xx)). Also, most of the people you meet talking about it are like they are in some kind of a cult, uniform and trying to convert you to the one true way. And you just want to write better code - not a doctoral thesis!

This talk is not like that. This talk focuses on how you can use functional programming techniques as additional tools in your toolbelt - tools that you can use when and if they are needed, where they are needed. Tools that you use in addition to, not instead of everything you've learned until now. Tools and techniques that will enable you to, sometimes, make your code more reliable, more predictable, more readable, and more maintainable,

May Contain Jargon. No Math Required.

Векослав Стефановски

Functional Programming for mere mortals

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

PWA has seen a huge surge in recent years and businesses have been benefiting a lot from them. But many of them still struggle in making a better product experience, hence questioning the intent of a web app over a native app in terms of user experience. 

This talk is about decreasing the difference between what is a PWA and a native app. We will see some design practices and patterns that can be helpful to remove this void ultimately providing an awesome user experience. This will include SPA, PWA, TWA, service workers, designing, native web API usages, and more.

Aman Sharma

Making Web more Native

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?

Are you a mid-level developer or an architect who’s curious about API Security and how to achieve it? In that case, we’re excited to help!!
As you already know APIs are the building blocks of your application network. They are the medium of communication and participate in a lot of data transactions. As per Gartner’s report, API abuse will be the most frequent vector attack, and it’s quite evident. We have heard about API abuses and attacks quite often.
To protect your APIs and provide complete security we will adopt the Zero Trust Security model. We will learn about the Zero trust model and its architecture. We will also understand how to implement Zero Trust Security in easy steps.
By the end of the presentation, you’ll have a fair idea about API Security and how to protect your API ecosystems using Zero Trust Security. Come along with your queries for us! 


2022 Agenda

Registration

Welcome and Housekeeping

Keynote: Julie Lerman

Will AI Coding Assistants like GitHub CoPilot Make Me Irrelevant?

Morning Tea

Chris Schaller

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

Векослав Стефановски

Functional Programming for mere mortals

Andrew Murphy

Building a Culture of Healthy Conflict in Tech Teams

Samaa Kanani

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

Changeover

Garima Singh

Coding your Career: Navigating and Evolving your Career

Michael Crook

The way you write dotnet is about to fundamentally change

Simone Bennett

Automate Your Way to a Zen-Like Workday

Aman Sharma

Making Web more Native

Changeover

Susan Brander

Continuous Improvement: Crafting the Habit of Self-Development

Ted Tencza

Technical Interview Processes - Surely We Can Do Better

Jaswanth Manigundan

Take your first step towards observability for your automated tests.

Rebecca Scott

Minimum Viable Programmer

Lunch

Sarah Young

Arbitrary code execution, I choose you!

Aaron Powell

I've burnt out, now what

Akshata Sawant

Zero Trust Security for your APIs

Baruch Sadogursky

DevOps for developers (or maybe against them?!)

Changeover

Mark Cheeseman

Why is Functional Programming so Hard?

James Hercock, James Trotter

Choose your own pen-test adventure!

Peter Eijgermans

Micro Frontends in Action!

Arjan Noordhoek

System Thinking and Event Driven Architecture

Afternoon Tea

Selena Small, Michael Milewski

Developer Smackdown

Shaw Innes

Documentation for Developers

Donna Edwards, Akanksha Malik, Gretchen Scott

Navigating salary reviews and promotions in a climate of redundancies.

Julian Burr

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

Changeover

Locknote: Ivan Sun

Software Disasters for Fun, Horror and Enlightenment

Closing

Afterparty

Handbook

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

All Agendas