YOW! Brisbane

I recently had the opportunity to attend two days of the YOW! conference in Brisbane. WTF is YOW!? Essentially, it's a conference by developers, for developers (as per their by-line). The great thing that I like about this conference is all the things that it's not: it's not vendor specific; it's not technology or language specific; nor is it job-function specific. If you have pretty much anything to do with the SDLC, you'll (probably) find something to interest you here.

Beyond hearing about new/experimental features of your favourite language and weird side-projects that people have done in their spare time (perl can go back in time?), it was also fascinating to see just how much development is going on in the Brisbane community - it appears to be genuinely thriving.

Highlights for me included:

• Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Martin Fowler
• 60 Years of Innovative & Agile Work by Nigel Dalton
• Why We Need Architects (and Architecture) on Agile Projects by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
• Product Engineering by Mike Lee
• Augmented Reality is the UI for Pervasive Computing by Rob Manson
• Domain-Driven Design for RESTful Systems by Jim Webber
• Asynchrony in C# 5: Deep Dive by Joe Albahari
• .NET Performance and Concurrency by Joel Pobar and Patrick Cooney

Roll on next year's YOW!