Starting a new project from scratch with TypeScript is relatively easy. You can configure things in strict mode and reap the benefits of TS. Migrating a real world application from JavaScript is a little messier.

In this talk i'll walk through the strategies we used at Qwilr to migrate an 8 year old JavaScript/CoffeeScript code base to TypeScript and how you can progressively ratchet up the quality of the type safety in a real world, actively developed, legacy codebase without taking away focus from continued product development.

Michael Timbs

Adopting TypeScript in a (larger) legacy code base

Agile is great, except when it's not. Then it's terrible. And oh boy, have I seen some things... 

In this talk I'll share the best, the worst, and the should-never-have-been parts of agile projects that I've seen over the years. There'll be practical tips for you to take away to start improving your own projects too.

Are we still talking about agile in 2024? Yes, because we have to.

Chris Gilbert

Agile: Use it or lose It. Don't abuse it!

The API-first approach is gaining significant traction as a modern development methodology in today's fast-paced software development landscape. Unlike traditional development models, where APIs are often an afterthought, the API-first approach places APIs at the core of the development process. This ensures that all system components, from front-end interfaces to back-end services, are built with a clear, consistent, well-documented contract.

This session will explore why the API-first approach is increasingly essential in creating scalable, flexible, and maintainable applications. Attendees will learn how adopting an API-first mindset can enhance collaboration across teams, streamline development processes, and improve the overall quality and consistency of software products.

Seminda Rajapaksha

API-First Development: Why It Matters and How to Get Started

This presentation will explore key considerations for boosting developer experience and the use of an Internal Developer Portal. I will cover the essential steps and considerations involved in creating a successful internal developer portal and delve into the key benefits of such a portal and core components.

Key topics include:

Understanding the Value: Exploring the advantages of an internal developer portal, including improved efficiency, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

Core Components: Identifying the essential elements of a developer portal, such as documentation, APIs, code repositories, and metrics.

Design and Implementation: Discussing best practices for designing and implementing an effective developer portal, including user experience, accessibility, and scalability.

Integration with Existing Tools: Exploring how to seamlessly integrate the developer portal with your existing development tools and workflows.

Sam Fernando

Boosting Developer Experience using an Internal Developer Portal

MaxMine has just completed re-building our platform from the ground up using Kubernetes and making heavy use of open-source software. This session will explore how we established a modern architecture for both serving, and heavy data-processing workloads, some of the challenges faced along the way, and of course some of the wins too.

James Schulte

Building a modern data-heavy platform on Kubernetes

In the boundless expanse of software development, deploying new features can often feel like launching a spacecraft into the unknown. Let’s embark on a mission to explore the critical aspects of feature management, because it can be so much more than just toggling features on and off. What if product owners were involved in defining the features in a product? What if developers didn’t need to have the mind of a CTO to develop the product?

Just as astronauts meticulously prepare for a space mission, we delve into the strategies for planning and executing feature rollouts, ensuring that each ‘launch’ is successful and each ‘orbit’ around the product lifecycle is stable and efficient. This talk includes live demos, lots of code, a new way to manage features, quite possibly something catching fire, and definitely llamas

Lars Klint

Houston, We Have a Deployment!

Microservice architectures provide some amazing benefits for scale, fault tolerance, and the ability to build teams quickly if necessary.

However too many teams seem to get caught up in the tech stack, and the results can be disastrous. While diving straight in with the latest hyped tools is fun, it’s easy to forget about design.

This talk will cover some common pitfalls and anti-patterns seen in the real world, as well as how to apply some Domain Driven Design concepts such as Bounded Contexts at an architectural level. 

By modelling your domain better we can solve a host of problems before they happen, and give your next project a much better chance at success.

Damian Maclennan

Human Shaped Microservices - A people centric approach to modelling systems

Debugging modern systems can feel like searching for answers in the dark. Distributed tracing brings clarity by showing how requests flow through complex services. In this talk, we’ll explore distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, comparing the introduction of tracing in two different environments—one using a commercial solution and the other an open-source stack. We’ll dive into the unique challenges and outcomes from each approach, highlighting key takeaways for choosing and implementing distributed tracing tools. This session provides a clear and practical roadmap for anyone looking to improve their system observability.

Matt Magin

Let There Be Light: Two Journeys with Distributed Tracing

You know how sometimes you can stare at a page of code and immediately see that obscure race condition that has hidden itself from all other programmers for years? But then sometimes, you spend 3 hours failing to see a comma in the wrong position even though the compiler has been telling you explicitly what the issue is? This talk is about our cognitive biases and how they impact our programming and debugging and some tips and tricks to avoid them. Join me as we delve into our brains and attempt to see our true selves, face to face, in our code.

Tony Albrecht

Mind Your Code (Human biases in programming)

... and let's pretend you had nothing to do with creating said dumpster fire.

In my talk last year on “Architecting for Longevity,” we explored strategies to help prevent systems from deteriorating into a state of total collapse. This year, we're diving into the reality of what happens when you’re handed a project that’s already a full-blown dumpster fire.

Let me be your guide as we go through the process of navigating and rebuilding legacy systems in crisis. I'll cover practical strategies for restoring feature velocity and regaining stability in a system that has ground to a halt. Discover how to conduct a gradual and controlled demolition of the chaos, ensuring that when rebuilding, mistakes are not merely repeated but learned from.

This talk will provide actionable insights into how to stabilize and incrementally improve a troubled system while avoiding the pitfalls that led to its current state. Join me as we explore how to turn a disaster into an opportunity, and ensure that your next rebuild is both resilient and forward-thinking.

Ryan Craig

So they gave me a dumpster fire of a codebase.... Now what?

Time series data is used everywhere, but we often take our trusty x-axis for granted. Take a journey through time with me, as we delve into how we synchronise time sources to make sure the juicy data we’re looking at represents the right time, in the right order. 

Millie Russell

Syncing clocks without a DeLorean

A lot of people have known for a lot of years that the technical interview process has many, many flaws. From pseudo-code white boarding to writing complex algorithms, to multi-day take home tests, bad practices still abound. Additionally many interviewers suffer from lack of focused training (the belief that once you have 5 years coding experience you are a skilled interviewer), gatekeeping, and the belief that the interviewer should be the interrogator.

This talk will cover some better ways to set up the interview process (and culture) for technical hires. They include:

What should be avoided
How to set up a interview training program
What types and how many interviews should your process contain.
Understanding candidate care and the philosophy that interviewing is a two way street.
How to evaluate your companies interviewers and how you can make them better

Ted Tencza

Technical Interview Processes - Surely We Can Do Better

Over the years, the hype around low/no code solutions has promised a utopia where citizen developers can create applications with little to no programming knowledge. However, as platform engineering continues to gain momentum, this utopian promise will finally face critical scrutiny. 

This talk examines whether the rise of platform engineering will finally temper the much-promised expectations surrounding low/no code platforms, particularly in enterprise environments and early-stage startups.

Platform engineering brings a structured, scalable approach to development, which empowers professional developers with tools and frameworks to streamline workflow and accelerate time to market. In contrast, low/no code solutions offer quick wins and a low barrier to entry that will often fall short in delivering complex, scalable, and secure applications.

We will explore the strengths and weaknesses of both paradigms through real-world examples and trends, examine the current state of low/no code solutions and their limitations and assess whether platform engineering may offer a more sustainable and effective path forward.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of these different approaches, equipped to make informed decisions about technology adoption. Whether you're a CTO, developer, or business leader, this talk will provide valuable insights into the future of application development and the strategic implications for your organisation.

Joshua Boys

The Rise of Platform Engineering: Is the Citizen Developer Utopia Over?

We'll start by exploring the core differences between modern and intelligent applications, focusing on how AI and machine learning can be integrated to enhance functionality, improve user experience, and enable smarter decision-making. You'll see a real-world application demo, showcasing the migration process from start to finish, including the challenges, solutions, and best practices.

Samira Talebi

Omid Karami

Transforming Modern Applications into Intelligent Systems: A Hands-On Migration Journey

Charlii Parker invites you to an exploration of invisible disabilities in the workplace. Committed to ensuring that all voices are heard and valued, Charlii's expertise and empathy shine through as she champions diversity and paves the way for a more inclusive and representative future. Focusing on neurodivergence and other hidden conditions, this presentation offers transformative insights into how we can elevate our practices to create workplaces that truly work for everyone. Through a blend of humour, candid stories, and practical advice, you'll learn how to foster a culture of understanding, implement meaningful accommodations, and champion open communication, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to thrive .

Charlii Parker

Uncovering the Unseen - Making the Workplace Work for Everyone

After the untimely death of Azure Media Services, there was a video engine that needed to be replaced. Rather than just pay for a service to do this (like a sensible person), we decided to build it ourselves. This is a system that needs to accept user-uploaded videos, process them, and make them available for authorised (and only authorised) users to stream. 

It turns out that this is a bit of a process – so let’s talk about it. 

In this talk we will go over how we’ve solved this problem from top to tail. This means talking about (and demoing) video formats, streaming protocols, transcoding engines, media APIs, and browser playback. 


Ryan Rowston

Video streaming is hard, let’s do it anyway

Have you ever started a personal project with a clear idea in mind, only to find the journey itself reinvented your goals, producing something fun and unexpected in the process?

This odyssey began as a small starter codebase project to introduce coding my best friend’s kids (and get them off Fortnite). The rules: No web server, local file paths only; no packages to abstract how things work; Designed, should be general and extensible.

Doh … can’t import, better tackle encapsulation and structure. No store, need that. No observables, build that too. No event management, do that too. No components, need those. Persistence ...

Before I new it, I’m bouncing ideas off the team at work. 

Join me and a colleague as we fast replay this journey together, building a front-end architecture from first principles. 

…And in the process remembering the passion of coding for fun.

Luca Gnezda

Solomon Laing

Webapps without a server, a personal JavaScript odyssey

With the speed that everything is changing, it’s easy to miss new advances or changes in technology, especially if it’s in a language that you don’t use on a daily basis.

So would it shock you to know how many new features have come to CSS in recent years? Now you can style an element based on how big it’s parent is, or based on what child elements you have, or change the page layout depending on if someone’s native language reads left-to-right, right-to-left or top-to-bottom!

Gone are the days we have to say “Sorry, CSS can’t do that” or reach for 52 different libraries to have something according to the design*. So join me as we tour the new world of CSS and play with the shiny new specs.

**Disclaimer: you’ll still need a library to style a select field, sorry. But pretty much everything else is possible now!

Amy Kapernick

What's new with CSS?

Hey Adelaide, Recruiter Girl here. And I have the biggest news ever! After leaving tech recruitment (in a blaze of glory), I'm coming to DDD and I'm ready to spill the tea. 

Spotted at the University of Adelaide: a recruiter who's seen the good, the bad and the ugly of tech recruitment. She's been the one in your LinkedIn inbox, she may have interviewed you and she may have pleaded with you to "take the goddamn offer" when you had multiple on the table. 

There's no doubt that recruiters are a (necessary) evil force in Tech and I'm here to shake things up, spill the tea of how they work, why they do the things they do and open up the debate of whether or not you should actually use a recruiter. 

I've left the recruitment game, so this will be no-holds-barred presentation. 

The tea is piping hot and it's ready to be spilled. 

XOXO Recruiter Girl

Emily Conaghan

XOXO Recruiter Girl

When we design for inclusion, it’s not about compliance, avoiding lawsuits, or expanding market reach—it’s about people. True inclusion starts with the people we meet and the stories we share. 

My journey into digital accessibility has been profoundly shaped by my Dad, who is blind, navigating a world that wasn’t built for him. 

As the designers and builders of an increasingly digital society, it is our responsibility to ensure everyone feels welcome. This talk explores the power of stories and how small, intentional choices can lead to more inclusive experiences—both at work and beyond.

DDD Adelaide 2024 session feedback