DDD Brisbane – A weekend well spent

This weekend (that is December 1st, 2018, Saturday), I along with a few of my colleagues from the office got an opportunity to attend DDD Brisbane conference. All thanks to my Employer, Youi, which was also the gold sponsor of the event. (We are hiring). If you do not know what is DDD conference is – It is short for Developer, Developer, Developer. It is a conference for, from, by, to, with, along, only, whatever…. Developers.

Attending a conference on a weekend can be a challenging discussion with the spouse. It is not easy to justify why I would wake up 5 o’ clock on a Saturday morning to go to Brisbane and return late at night. Really grateful to my wife for her understanding and support. I have promised that I will make it up to her 🙂

This was my first time at a DDD conference, but certainly not the last. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, listening to excellent speakers, food, free coffee, and goodies.

Here are my few key takeaways from the conference:

• The conference was very well organized. At the registration process was smooth, the organizers were friendly and helpful.
• Excellent food, free coffee, a lot of goodies and so many prizes to be won (unfortunately, I did not win any).

• It was a “green” conference in the true sense. The attendees were encouraged to bring their own coffee mugs. The coffee mugs, including the lid, were recyclable. The food plates, cutlery was made of bamboo, hence compostable. The reusable bags (or as they called it “swag bags”) were made of waste cloth by the local community.

• It was refreshing to see so many women attendees and speakers. DDD had by far the highest ratio of women attendees and speakers of any of the conferences I had previously attended.

• DDD offered Free Child Care facility. Again, this was the first time I saw any conference which offerred such facility.

• The speaker line up was a mix of first-timers and experienced speakers. I enjoyed all the sessions which I attended.

• Enough gap between the two sessions – there was no information overload.
• There was something to learn in every session. None of them were a waste of time.
• Few sessions also validated that we follow the industry-wide and recommended development practices at work. In fact, we are probably ahead of rest of industry in some area :). In particular, code snippets from clean architecture with .NET Core 2.2 session looked to be straight out of our private repo.
• It was great opportunity to interact with fellow developers
• Special mention to keynote speaker Jessica Kerr. But the highlight of the day for me was locknote from Neal Ford on “Support Constant Change”. There was just so much to learn in his 45 mins talk.

All-in-all it was a great weekend spent learning new things.