How we match millions of saved searches against a continuous stream of new real estate listings
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Every day, realestate.com.au handles millions of searches. But we also need to do the opposite: match new real estate listings against millions of existing saved searches. This enables us to notify our users whenever a newly created listing matches their saved search, and thus help them find their dream home faster and easier.  

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Demystifying the pain of working with legacy, and strategies to make it easier
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We've all seen, heard and read about the multitude of approaches and patterns on how to reduce your legacy footprint. As we've all experience, these are long term propositions, and with no quick fix there is a need to have a strategy for caretaking your legacy system to avoid having a system that will end up holding you hostage.

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Unlocking Simplicity: How Temporal Transformed Cash App's Code Complexity
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We have an easily explainable use case - Buy and Sell bitcoin from Liquidity providers by interacting with their APIs. But in order to achieve this we have a wide variety of kafka consumers, SQS job queues, DB updates and internal services to call. The code to make all of this work is spread all across one repo and it was getting impossible to fit in a team's head.

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Weathering the storm, how to navigate failure in the cloud

Cloud computing has been a game-changer for businesses striving to enhance digital experiences. However, managing services at scale with modern cloud tech isn't always a cakewalk. Failure is inevitable and the way we prepare, react and learn from it will define the success or failure of our journey.

Observability for Developers
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Observability ( o11y )  is a practice that helps provide better insights into application behaviour,  to enable the earlier identification and rectification of application defects.  Most developers come across o11y  when assigned a bug report from IT OPS with a log file attached, this log file usually contains any information that has been pumped to stdout() !!  .... usually not that helpful.  

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Riding the Streams: Powering Stream Processing at Cash App with FLINK

Over the last 5 years, Cash App migrated from a monolith to a service oriented architecture. At present we have hundreds of services communicating via event streams. These services provide solutions across multiple areas like ML, financial reporting, data warehouse ingestion and materialised views.

Hydrosight - Secure Cloud-Native IoT solution
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Hydrosight Soil Monitor - a small battery powered device, which measures soil moisture, salinity and temperature, utilises NB-IoT networking and communicates with API straight from the underground.

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Engineering Platforms Evolved

Multiple forces have converged recently to put internal technical platforms in the spotlight for digital businesses. This talk encapsulates key insights drawn from various teams who have delivered engineering platforms in diverse organisations and industries around the world.

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Who tests their cloud code anyway?

If you are a developer, you know as well as me that testing your code is optional. And when we suddenly involve cloud computing, there are even more excuses not to test your applications and infrastructure.

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Weathering the storm, how to navigate failure in the cloud

Cloud computing has been a game-changer for businesses striving to enhance digital experiences. However, managing services at scale with modern cloud tech isn't always a cakewalk. Failure is inevitable and the way we prepare, react and learn from it will define the success or failure of our journey.

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OAuth Oops!

OAuth, OpenID and JWTs are complex standards and protocols and often poorly understood by development teams which can result in some seriously flawed implementations!

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Hey ChatGPT, can you keep a secret? Encrypting PII in RAG Chatbots
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of data, which they learn from and can answer questions about. However pre-trained LLMs are not able to provide answers to data outside their training set. RAG is a technique that augments the user’s query with additional relevant contextual data.

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Guarding the Guardian: Fortifying AI LLMs against Malevolent Utilization on AWS
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Dive deep into a landmark case study that details the creation and implementation of an advanced security framework designed to protect GPT-4, one of the most powerful AI LLMs, from being leveraged for malicious endeavours, all grounded within the AWS infrastructure.

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One password to rule them all (for a few minutes)
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Find out how One-Time-Passwords (OTPs) can be a game-changer for your user accounts. With recent data breaches making news in Australia, it's more crucial than ever to think beyond traditional passwords which could leave you vulnerable to data leaks.

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Turning 'wat' into 'why'
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Programming languages are repeatedly touted to have strange edge cases. Bugbears. Footguns. Wats. The canonical 'wat' talk shows some of these for Ruby and JavaScript, but doesn’t go into any detail into the ‘why’

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Hooked on Hooks in React
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If you're using React, there's a good chance you've been writing functional components with hooks for a while now. And I think most of us would agree that hooks make our components cleaner and more elegant. But hooks have a dark side too - they can be confusing and make code more difficult to reason about.

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Conquering complexity: refactoring JavaScript projects

One of the most common issues in JavaScript code bases is that our code is too complex. As projects and their requirements evolve, complexity creeps in. Excess complexity slows progress, frustrating us as we try to keep large chunks of a program in our heads just to understand what is happening.

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Craft events mindfully - navigating the event driven journey with caution (EDA)
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There has been a shift towards event driven systems since REST and micro-services. Like any other architecture, embarking on an event driven journey, requires plenty of decisions and trade-offs to be made. Prematurely building for the future can lead to under utilisation and over-engineering, while focusing solely on the present may result in accruing technical debt and increased costs.

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Streamlit in Snowflake, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly!
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Features, benefits and potential "gotchas" that your organisation should consider before fully adopting Streamlit in Snowflake. There'll be a live demo as well to spice things up!

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Engineering Platforms Evolved

Multiple forces have converged recently to put internal technical platforms in the spotlight for digital businesses. This talk encapsulates key insights drawn from various teams who have delivered engineering platforms in diverse organisations and industries around the world.