ITP Techblog

Imagine if there was a conference in Auckland where you could hear from some of the most talented and experienced people in the software industry. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could learn about cutting-edge techniques including continuous delivery, production testing, containerised micro-services, and even the mysterious art of "devops"? How about if those talks were delivered by experienced engineers from the likes of Facebook, Netflix, Slack, Microsoft, GitHub, Dropbox and more?

The thing is, there *is* a conference that provides all of this. It's right here in Auckland, has been running for seven years, and the 2018 event is happening next week! There's just a handful of tickets left.

Ian Randall and I put Codemania together because we wanted to attend a conference for software developers, run by software developers. Not some for-profit event company jumping on a bandwagon, nor a bunch of vendors trying to sell you stuff: Codemania is just techniques and advice directly from practioners that will help you be a better engineer and a better leader.

Every year we invite a mix of speakers from New Zealand and around the world to talk about what they do and how they do it. We try to get a blend of hard-tech, super-nerd talks along with a couple of "softer" talks about leadership and community. The tech talks don't align to a specific language or platform. It's not a Java conference or a Web conference or a Microsoft conference. It's a software development conference. We strongly believe (and experience tells us), that the best talks provide important lessons regardless of platform or language.

There's simply no other opportunity to see software development speakers of this calibre, for this price, in Auckland.

- Michael Lopp heads up Engineering at Slack (pretty much hottest startup on the planet right now), and has been delivering life-changing advice for engineers and managers since before blogging was a thing. Before Slack, Michael worked at Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple.

- Tammy Butow helped implement chaos engineering at Dropbox. If you haven't heard of chaos engineering, it's where you deliberately break parts of your infrastructure to make sure your systems are as resilient as you think they are. Imagine being able to do that at your company!

- Jana Beck builds data visualisation in JavaScript at Stitch Fix (look them up - they do amazing things with machine learning), and has been exploring ways to use JavaScript to improve accessibility for the web.

- Sacha Judd is MD of Hoku Group, host of Refactor, and is deeply connected to the New Zealand tech/startup firmament. She has some fascinating insight on where software engineers come from, and how our community can excel.

And that's just one third of our sensational speaker roster. We'd love your support to keep this thing running for more years. Ask your boss to buy you a ticket I reckon.

 

Ben Gracewood is Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Vend, and co-founder of Codemania. He likes dogs more than cats.