The YOW! Conference is back in Brisbane in December 2022.
At YOW! Brisbane Developer Conference 2022, leading software industry experts from all over the world, handpicked by our program committee, come together for two days to provide amazing networking and learning opportunities.
Meet your favourite authors and bloggers. Network with people who truly care about delivering great software.
YOW! Speakers are chosen based on their expertise; they provide excellent, technically rich content, appropriate to all roles in software and IT, completely independent of commercial concerns such as sponsorship or product. This means no commercials ever. Just lots of case studies and stories from the trenches.
Software professionals and IT leaders from all across the organisation will benefit from attending. Whether you’re a developer, architect, product owner, team lead, coach, or manager, don’t miss this learning opportunity. Our speakers have a wealth of experience they’re eager to share with you.
In-Person Tickets
Join us at Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, where you'll interact and network with hundreds of like minded developers while learning from leading thought leaders, architects and developers from the software industry.
In-Person Tickets include access to the Online event.
Online Conference
Difficult to attend to the In-Person conference? Check out YOW! December online!

YOW! Brisbane Developer Conference 2022 will be an in-person conference.
We are excited to be back in Brisbane in person and to foster community growth in Australia.
We hope to see you there!
Book with Confidence
We know these are uncertain times and it can be hard to commit to future events. Should COVID restrictions make it impossible for us to host Brisbane Developer Conference 2022 in person, your ticket will be converted to a YOW! December Online ticket and you will be refunded the price difference, less $20 for your conference attendee t-shirt. (We will organise a date for pick-up of shirts in Brisbane post-conference.)
Explore YOW! Brisbane Developer Conference 2022
Stay tuned for more details...

Become a volunteer
Volunteering is a great way for students to learn from and network with the best in the industry.
Volunteer
Revisit previous conferences
View (or review) previous talks from YOW! Brisbane Developer Conferences in our library of SkillsCast videos.
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Adrian’s Greatest Hits, B-Sides and Re-issues
Adrian retired from Amazon in June 2022, and like a classic rock band on a farewell tour, Adrian will rerun and comment on excerpts of talks he's given in the past, including some of the original Netflix Architecture content from Qcon SF 2010, Microservices from MicroXchg Berlin, the GigaOM Cloud Trends talk from 2015, Communicating Sequential Goroutines from 2016, and AWS talks featuring animated kitchen sinks and lego spaceships. It will rock! Headbanging optional.
Engineering for Software - How to Amplify Creativity
In most disciplines "Engineering" means the stuff that works, an application of scientific reasoning to solving practical problems. In Software, depending on your background, it either means something bureaucratic that doesn't work, or it is just another name for software development.So what are the ideas that we can use as tools to give real, practical advantage in our work in the way that other disciplines achieve? What ideas should we treat as "the tools of our trade" whatever the technology or problem before us? This presentation explores two "tools" that we can use, Testability & Speed.
Simple Functional Effects with Tag Unions
There are many ways a programming language can support effects. For many years, side effects were the only game in town. Today, there are a variety of ways to model effects in a more functional way, with each effect system having its own set of tradeoffs.
This talk introduces a simple, high-performance effect system based on tag unions - which can be implemented in the Roc programming language, as well as in OCaml using polymorphic variants. The system allows for easily mixing I/O operations that can fail in different ways (such as HTTP requests and file I/O), while still offering exhaustiveness checking on all the error cases. It also makes it easy to tell which functions are using which effects (for example, "this part of the code base does HTTP and reads from the filesystem, but is guaranteed not to write to the filesystem"), and to enforce at compile time that certain calls may result in some effects but not others.
If you're interested in a simple, high-performance effect system with these characteristics, come see what it's all about in this talk!
Managing to your SLO in the face of chaos
Setting a Service Level Objective for your service is only the start of your quantified reliability journey. What do you do when you've had a few too many incidents and blown your error budget? Or had a pile of near-misses that burned the team out even though the user-facing SLO wasn't violated? What if the incident trigger was the infrastructure refactoring meant to improve, not harm, reliability & maintainability?In this talk, you'll learn how the team at Honeycomb handles incidents, chaos engineering, and the engineering feedback loop for reliability with social practices and architectural design.
Sabotaging a Transformation
Transformation efforts must overcome a myriad of challenges to achieve success. Some of the inhibitors we will discuss include:
- Executives unaware of the transformation
- Failure to engage all the necessary parties
- Individuals losing power with the transformation
- New roles and disappearing roles
- Lack of an effective Change Agent
- Success conservatism
- Lazy buyers
- Blame-oriented cultures
For each of these inhibitors, we will cite a) situations where this occurred, b) mitigation actions to overcome the inhibitor, and c) the effectiveness of these efforts.
We will conclude by suggesting some best practices we are currently employing in anticipation of likely inhibitors, including our newest proposal process of only selling complete solutions to our clients (not just body-shopping people).
Systems Architecture at Massive Scale: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simplicity
Building distributed systems that work is quite challenging. But systems that provide customer value will grow and evolve, and scaling those systems by multiple orders of magnitude is even harder. Citing specific failures and successes from internet-scale consumer properties like Google and eBay, and measuring customer value through the architecturalilities, this session deep-dives into the often counterintuitive architectural principles of simplicity, orthogonality, asynchrony, and feedback.
Simplicity helps us turn seemingly intractable problems into discrete and solvable ones. We will discuss component responsibilities, single-threaded straight-line processing, and making changes in small steps.
Orthogonality allows us to compose separate concerns and bound the complexity of each dimension of the problem. We will discuss processing abstractions like mixins and addons, as well as communication abstractions like channels and pipes.
Asynchrony and eventual consistency further reduce complexity and lead us to drive the system design directly from what really matters – what is actually changing in our core business domain. We will explore events, caching, and dataflow.
Finally, fast and consistent feedback help us continually maintain and improve a complex system. We will discuss quality feedback in the small, as well as systems feedback in the large.
You will take away some interesting anecdotes, as well as actionable insights you can put into practice in scaling your own systems.
Geeta Schmidt & Kresten Krab Thorup
Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality
Code quality is an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers' time, causing stress and uncertainty, as well as making our job less enjoyable than it should be. Without clear and quantifiable benefits, it's hard to build a business case for code quality.In this talk, Adam takes on the challenge by tuning the code analysis microscope towards a business outcome. We do that by combining novel code quality metrics with analyses of how the engineering organization works with the code. We then take those metrics a step further by connecting them to values like time-to-market, customer satisfaction, and road-map risks. This makes it possible to a) prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements, b) communicate quality trade-offs in terms of actual costs, and c) identify high-risk parts of the application so that we can focus our efforts on the areas that need them the most. All recommendations are supported by data and brand new real-world research. This is a perspective on software development that will change how you view code. Promise.
Simon Wardley
Simon Wardley
Simon is a former CEO, former advisory board member of startups (all now acquired by US Giants), fellow of Open Europe, inventor of Wardley Mapping, a regular conference speaker and a researcher for the LEF. He uses mapping in his research for the LEF covering areas from Serverless to Nation State competition whilst also advising / teaching LEF clients on mapping, strategy, organisation and leadership.
Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre
Glenelg St, Brisbane, QLD 4101, AU
View details, travel and nearby hotels
Diversity Matters Scholarship
Is it rare that you see someone at tech conferences that reminds you of yourself? Then you’re probably underrepresented at tech conferences.
At Skills Matter we are committed to supporting diversity in speakers, conference participants, and the wider technology community regardless of regardless of ability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious views (or lack thereof) and socio-economic status.
To increase diversity at Skills Matter events we offer scholarships to people from underrepresented groups in tech who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend.
If you believe you are a member of a group that is underrepresented within the tech community or at technical conferences we encourage you to apply.
Apply

Volunteer at YOW! Brisbane Developer Conference 2022
We are inviting students to volunteer at our upcoming YOW! Brisbane Developer Conference 2022.
Volunteering at YOW! Events is an excellent networking opportunity for students just starting out, and you’ll be exposed to a wide range of innovative ideas. Mingle with some of Australia’s best and brightest people in the software industry.
All crew volunteers will work approx. 12 hours during the conference days. In return for helping with the conference, crew volunteers will have free access to the conference and social events.
Crew volunteers need to be available to attend a 2-hour briefing session the evening before the conference.
Volunteers assist with a range of duties, including and not limited to:
- packing conference bags
- assisting attendees with registration
- ushering attendees to available seats
- collecting feedback after every session
The following meals at the conference are included for confirmed volunteers:
- Morning tea
- Lunch
- Afternoon tea
- Reception - light snacks and beverages
Conditions
- A limited number of volunteer slots are available for each conference.
- The free ticket is available only at the conference for which you are volunteering.
- These tickets cannot be sold and are non-transferable.
- Applicants may apply to volunteer for as many conferences as they like, so long as they are available on the dates required.
For further information, please email melissa.loh@skillsmatter.com

Become a YOW! Sponsor
Whether you're looking to attract talent to your team or accelerate adoption of your tools and products, sponsoring YOW! is a terrific way to support and connect with our global community of software professionals.
We offer a variety of opportunities for continuous visibility and continuous engagement. Community is at the heart of all we do at Skills Matter, and we believe it is mutually beneficial to foster genuine connections between our members and truly innovative businesses.
Rather than a typical ad hoc event sponsorship, we’ll work with you to create bespoke opportunities that benefit both your business and the Skills Matter community. Whether you’re looking to develop one-to-one relationships with our members, or to showcase your product and spread brand awareness, we’d love to find a way to create meaningful interactions between you and our community.
For further information, please email sabine.wolf@skillsmatter.com
Hold tight, skillscasts coming soon!
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YOW! 2020 Brisbane
Two days - Online Conference
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery web engineering big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2019 Brisbane
Two days in Brisbane
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery web security tech-future game-design engineering cloud big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2018 Brisbane
Two days in Brisbane
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2017 Brisbane
Two days in Brisbane
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2016 Brisbane
Two days in Online Event
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2015 Brisbane
Two days in Online Event
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2014 Brisbane
0.0 days in Online Event
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2013 Brisbane
Two days in Online Event
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages -
YOW! 2012 Brisbane
Two days in Online Event
YOW! Conference is designed by developers for developers, and each speaker has been invited because of their development expertise by our independent international program committee. At YOW! Conference you'll get straight tech talk by world-class experts and networking with like-minded...
architecture discovery mobile-&-iot quality engineering ai-&-ml cloud mobile-&-web performance-&-security big-data architecture-&-design people-&-process languages