Erwin van der Koogh and I ventured over to the west coast to speak at YOW! West last week. YOW! West is an extension of Australia’s leading developer conference YOW! to offer the Western Australian IT community with a great conference.
This year, the conference was keynoted by the likes of Michael Feathers, Paul Rayner, Edward Kmett, and fellow Melbournite (and one of our clients), Simon Raik-Allen (CTO of MYOB).
Keynote – Paul Rayner
Of particular interest to myself was Paul Rayner’s keynote. Paul highlighted that one of the greatest challenges in our current complex world is trying to learn our domains and industries quickly. He posed the following question:
How do we learn together, fast?
His answer… to walk us through a Domain Driven Development (DDD) workshop exercise called, Example Mapping. In short it looks to map out the collective group’s understanding about a series of events, highlighting what may trigger something to happen either by a human or system.
It aims to draw out where we have limited understanding about a current process and should spend time afterwards researching and potentially improving. It’s a technique that I am hoping to try out with one of my teams in the near future as it sounds extremely useful. If you’re interested, you can refer to the following references:
Ryan McKergow
Don’t be a zombie reading your stories – Learn the exciting parts of analysisI had the opportunity to speak on Tuesday sharing my thoughts on how everyone can do analysis, not just Business Analysts. I introduced a number of exciting techniques for people to try out, which included: Story Kickoffs, Customer Journey Maps, and Design Studio workshops. You can find more information on how you can try out one of these techniques via my slides: Look Ma! No servers!
Erwin van der Koogh
Erwin was also flying the flag for Elabor8 on Wednesday by presenting a much more technical talk. His talk was on how to create an entire system with no physical servers and utilise a number of services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to achieve this. It was half demo / half presentation.
In true Erwin fashion, his talk had plenty of cultural references and laughs:It was an enjoyable couple of days over in Perth, and definitely some good takeaways from the conference. You’re guaranteed to see Erwin there next year as he hasn’t missed one YOW! West since its inception.
Bring diverse opinions and insights to your agenda. Organise a speaking engagement with thought leaders Ryan and Erwin.