DDD Perth 2018 - the value of a strong developer community

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This past weekend I was in Perth to attend DDD Perth as part of Microsoft's sponsorship and thought I'd write up my experience.

For those of you unfamiliar with DDD (Developer! Developer! Developer!), it is a community-organised event that started in the United Kingdom in 2005 and has run in various cities in Australia over the last few years.

If you take a look through the published agenda for Perth for 2018 you will see a fantastic variety of content and speakers - ranging from deep tech through to personal well being - all voted for by the community. This is a clear guide that developers are looking far beyond what could be considered traditional interest areas and making the most of personal growth opportunities available at events like DDD.

I didn't get a chance to take any photographs, but I'm sure the DDD Perth blog will post a bunch when the committee has recovered from running the event for 400+ people! What I can talk a bit about here though is the types of discussions I had at the Microsoft booth.

  • Does Azure have a free tier? Yes. You can easily get started at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/.
  • How can I learn more about Azure? There are a bunch of different ways, but a good general platform overview is delivered at Azure Discovery Days. You can find the list of upcoming Australian events at https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/azurelearningpathways/upcoming-event.
  • Are Azure Functions production-ready? Yes, they are. The confusion here stemmed from the 'v1' (production-ready) and the 'v2' (in-preview) versions of the runtime. This is a reminder to me that people not close to a platform often don't get the subtleties and simply hear "not production ready" as the message.
  • How do I migrate between Azure Regions? Well... I could write an entire (never ending) series on the number of ways to achieve this! I will leave it at "it depends"....
  • What do I need to do to get a t-shirt, book or sticker? (Hint: play one of our games, give us feedback, join our OSS4Good project)

There were a lot of other discussions on the day with the team on the booth and we had our two games up and running (I'll keep those under wraps for now as a surprise for others) as well as launching our Open Source for Good project which you can head over to Github to learn more about (if you'd like to get involved feel free to leave a comment below and we'll invite you).

I tweeted how amazing this day was, and the organisers need to be proud to have built such an amazing and accessible event! If you didn't get a ticket for this year, then I'd certainly keep an eye out for next year's event.

If you live in the following cities then you're in luck because your 2018 DDD is yet to happen. Sydney is up next on 18 August, so make sure to get your tickets soon!

I'll be at these events so please drop by and say hello!

😎