Summer in Australia is Tech Conference season. We had DevOpsDays Sydney last week, and this week it’s time for my favourite conference of the year: Yow.
Every year I attend Yow I come away feeling like I’ve had my brain stretched in several new directions and wishing that I could skip sleep for the next month to try out everything I’ve learned.
Yow have a strict policy of no sales and marketing during a session. Even to the point where Conference Sponsors don’t automatically get presentation slots (which is a rarity in the conference world). They have to propose a session like anybody else, and their proposal gets judged on it’s technical merits, just like everybody else.
As a result, the sessions and speakers have been consistently excellent. I usually have the problem of wanting to attend multiple sessions at the same time, and even when I go to one that seemingly is not related to anything I’m doing, I’ve always come away smarter.
I love this conference so much, this year I bought tickets for a bunch of the Code Partners team to attend. They think it’s a reward, but they’ll come away having learned so much that they can then apply in our customer projects, that it’s frankly a no brainer (plus, I get to hang out at my favourite conference with a bunch of my favourite smart people, so I don’t really see a downside).
If you’re going to be at Yow Sydney this year, please come and say Hi.
