YOW! Perth 2023
2023-09-11..2023-09-12
Perth, Australia
who it's for
platform engineers, backend engineers, engineering managers, devops engineers, software architects, data engineers, security engineers
topics
WebAssembly sandboxes with WASI; Wasmtime and fast isolates; platform abstractions over cloud services; Elixir Livebook and BEAM concurrency; OCaml in production systems; event sourcing and event modeling; GitHub Copilot and code completion; data mesh for operational analytics; deterministic execution with replicated logs; contract-driven development; Kubernetes cost optimisation (FinOps); service level objectives for platform reliability
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Don't Trust Anything! Real-world Uses For WebAssembly | Katie Bell | 48m |
Demonstrates running untrusted code safely by compiling it to WebAssembly, using WASI to grant only specific IO, limiting memory and instruction “fuel,” and… | ||
| Build Abstractions Not Illusions | Gregor Hohpe | 48m |
Argues that useful platform abstractions must introduce a new vocabulary and surface essential runtime details rather than just compose services like Lambda… | ||
| Livebook & Elixir: Where AI, Web & Concurrency Meet | José Valim | 47m |
Livebook demonstrates Elixir on the BEAM running 1 million processes in seconds, inspects each process’ memory/reductions, and produces Kino visual traces and… | ||
| Analogue Evolution, Digital Revolution: Tipping Points in Technology | Dylan Beattie | 58m |
Argues that technology shifts happen at identifiable tipping points backed by concrete examples: the Nikon D1 turning digital photography mainstream at Sydney… | ||
| OCaml for Fun & Profit: An Experience Report | Tim McGilchrist | 46m |
Practical experience shows OCaml ships production systems: Docker Desktop components and MirageOS kernels, a CI-backed opam pipeline that builds ~27,000… | ||
| Event Modeling from Beginner to Expert | Adam Dymitruk | 46m |
Introduces a workflow that uses event sourcing everywhere with explicit timelines, projections as live reports and command handlers to capture intent; claims… | ||
| GitHub Copilot: Coding Will Never Be The Same Again | Ryan J. Salva | 50m |
GitHub Copilot powers code completion with GPT‑3.5‑turbo for ~300–400ms completions and GPT‑4 for chat, deletes prompt context, blocks suggestions over ~150… | ||
| There's No Such Thing As Plain Text | Dylan Beattie | 50m |
Asserts there is no neutral “plain text” and shows why with concrete failures: ASCII’s teleprinter design, IBM code pages and code page 437, collation bugs in… | ||
| Is Software Engineering Real Engineering? | Hillel Wayne | 40m |
Interviews with 17 engineers across six disciplines and 12 recorded hours produce a concrete claim: software counts as engineering — 15 of 17 crossover… | ||
| Data - The Land DevOps Forgot | Michael Nygard | 47m |
Operational analytics handles petabytes per day with a 100,000-node DAG that runs on about 15,000 EC2 instances and nightly batches that now take three to four… | ||
| Moldable Development with Glamorous Toolkit | Tudor Girba | 47m |
Demonstrates Moldable Development by building live custom tools on the spot with Glamorous Toolkit (gtoolkit.com): parsing package.json to extract 41… | ||
| Trust Deterministic Execution to Scale & Simplify Your Systems | Frank Yu | 39m |
Claim: making core business logic a deterministic single-threaded finite state machine and replicating it via a replicated log lets the system rerun requests… | ||
| Programmer’s Apprentice Season 2: Future Directions in AI-assisted Coding | Erik Meijer | 45m |
Claims that developers are the last generation to write code by hand and that general LLMs replace years of custom models are backed by concrete work: deployed… | ||
| Java Renaissance | Georges Saab | 47m |
Java 21 ships with concrete wins: virtual threads (Project Loom) goes final and lets the JVM spawn millions of lightweight threads so IO-bound servers scale… | ||
| Continuous Integration: That’s Not What They Meant | Clare Sudbery | 56m |
Argues that true continuous integration means commit daily to main, every commit triggers an automated build and test, and the build is back to green within 10… | ||
| The Joy of Building Large Scale Systems | Suhail Patel | 45m |
Argues modern hardware is underused and gives concrete wins: switching Java to ZGC produces submillisecond GC pauses, pinning network IRQs cuts tail latency by… | ||
| Building Modern Web Applications with @Remix-Run | Jake Ginnivan | 45m |
Built a DnD‑inspired Spotify clone called Bardic Beatz that actually plays music across navigations and works with JavaScript disabled. Uses Remix with… | ||
| Contract-Driven Development | Naresh Jain | 50m |
Shows a workflow that turns OpenAPI/AsyncAPI specs into executable contracts using Specmatic, generating tests and stubs without hand‑coding. Live demo starts… | ||
| How Flow Works & Other Curiosities | James Lewis | 50m |
Argues that work is information flowing through value streams, models it with agent‑based simulation (NetLogo, a C behavior‑tree prototype, and… | ||
| Layers of Leadership | Lee Campbell | 40m |
Argues leaders must fix three concrete gaps—competency, performance and alignment—by shipping actionable tools: a reference implementation (example Dockerfile)… | ||
| Why Is My App SLOw? Defining Reliability in Platform Engineering | Jez Humble | 47m |
Platform engineers get a concrete method: use structured logs, F1 and Monarch to build per-cohort baselines (mean and stddev) from 30 days of data, convert… | ||
| Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality | Adam Tornhill | 45m |
Claims that poor code causes measurable business harm with evidence: analysis across commercial repositories in 14 languages links a 25-factor code health… | ||
| Cloud FinOps & Kubernetes Optimisation at Scale | Matt Callanan | 48m |
Expedia Group processes billions of cloud billing line items into a Spark/Hive S3 data lake, reconciles missing instance types, and aggregates to application… | ||
| When Customers Don't Share A Language | Chris Simon | 41m |
A 2015-born healthcare and disability insurance claiming platform models three phases: build a claiming context and plan tracking to let providers submit… | ||
| Infobesity - How to Cope with the Overload of Information | Fabio Nudge | 44m |
Claims that people make ~35,000 decisions a day and that 241 million emails are sent every minute frame a diagnostics-first approach; measured habits include… | ||
| Paving the Road to Effective Software Development | Sarah Wells | 52m |
Argues for a paved road platform that ships concrete outcomes: provisioning time drops from six months to ~15 minutes, microservices enable ~2,500… | ||
| Simplicity as a Superpower | Sarah Taraporewalla | 41m |
Argues that cognitive biases and neglected TDD with refactor steps create accumulating complexity, shows practical countermeasures: add the refactor step in… | ||
| Hedy: Creating a Programming Language for Everyone | Felienne Hermans | 01h 05m |
A gradual beginner language that runs in the browser and transpiles to Python shows concrete results: 18 staged levels that add syntax slowly, readable… | ||
| Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems with Architecture for Flow | Susanne Kaiser | 46m |
Claims a practical method: combine Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies to turn a monolithic online-school into modular bounded contexts… | ||
| Interviewing & Hiring Like a Boss | Kristine Howard | 46m |
Has done nearly 300 interviews and codifies the process: a reusable question bank and markdown template (uses Obsidian) with STAR/SBI note fields, blind CV… | ||
| I Connected My Farm to the Internet – Now What? | Lars Klint | 46m |
Farm network uses Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi, OBS -> Azure Media Services for llama streams, and Azure Custom Vision to detect llamas; bandwidth… | ||
| Shifting from Syntax to Secure Software Development Processes | Laura Bell Main | 45m |
Conference data shows security teams are tiny — examples range from 2 security people for 1,000 engineers to 3 security people for 150,000 devs — so shift from… | ||
| The Many Faces of Identity | Radia Perlman | 50m |
Claim: blockchain only replaces certificate authorities for one tiny function—storing a name-to-key binding—but it fails to fix DNS lookups, phishing from… | ||
| Static Kotlin Bug Hunting | Marharyta Nedzelska | 43m |
Sonar replaces the old generalized-tree pipeline with a Kotlin-native analyzer (extracted to a separate repo) and ships SonarKotlin 2.0, using the Kotlin… | ||
| Organizational Sustainability with Platform Engineering | Lesley Cordero | 46m |
Argues that Platform Engineering reduces organizational risk by combining DevOps principles, a community support model and a shared developer platform; shows… | ||
| Living on the Edge | Erica Pisani | 32m |
Shows converting a Next.js homepage from SSR to a static CDN page with Next.js middleware to edge that uses request.next, response.replaceText and setPageProp… | ||
| Java, Code Coverage & Their Best Friend: Bytecode | Evgeny Mandrikov | 46m |
JaCoCo inspects class files and implements bytecode pattern filters so coverage matches what was written in source, not the compiler noise: it ignores… | ||
| Why Security Initiatives Are Doomed to Fail & What You Can Do About It | Josh Armitage | 35m |
Enterprises buy a CSPM that costs about $1M a year and just spits out more alerts while posture erodes; throughput improves by shaping work around the real… | ||
| Sensible Defaults for Tech Management | Michelle Gleeson | 43m |
A documented career growth framework codifies technical skills, examples and glue work so promotions and feedback are data driven rather than subjective. Teams… | ||
| Cultivating Instinct | Katrina Owen | 30m |
Argument: train the perceptual side of expertise with short classification trials plus feedback using huge noisy datasets so brains learn which features… | ||
| Building Owly: An AI Comic Video Generator for My Son | Agustinus Nalwan | 34m |
An end-to-end system generates personalized comic videos from a title and a few toy photos using Amazon Bedrock LLM to write multi-paragraph scripts and a… | ||
| Riding Waves of Change: From Motorbike Novice to Career Crossroad | Anne-Marie Charrett | 34m |
Argues for intent‑based leadership where engineers say “I intend to…” to take action, and for replacing formal docs with co‑creation pairing that trains people… | ||
| Jump to Hyperspace: Light Speed, User Agency & Moving Past the Cloud | Brooklyn Zelenka | 45m |
Argues that rebuilding around local‑first reduces ops, latency and vendor lock‑in by using CRDTs and capability tokens instead of central servers. Shows… | ||
| Insights About Places with Deep Learning Computer Vision | Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe | 39m |
Uses 217,000 images with ~1.5M scenic votes to train CNNs that predict place beauty, showing natural scenes and characterful built elements score high while… | ||
| Creative Stances of Impactful Product Leadership | Anjali D Leon, Nadezhda Belousova | 42m |
Presents a six‑stance model called Product Leadership Stances and validates it with live Mentimeter polling (72% label product leadership a craft). Frames each… | ||
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