Me and a few colleagues attended the AWS 2017 Summit in Sydney earlier this week. It was a pretty cool event – even if a bit packed on the first day.
Not only were there a lot of interesting things to learn, but I also found out about some AWS vendors which could quite potentially be very useful for some of our clients.
All around, really great event. Especially the brownies.
We at 4mation Technologies are a healthy bunch, in fact a large portion of us ride our bikes to work. With that in mind, it was an easy decision to enter ourselves in the Sydney Rides Business Challenge – an event lasting about 4 weeks, designed to get people in the business world riding their bikes to commute to work. We entered as a company of 50-199 staff, and my team within the company also entered as a department of 3-6 people.
As it turned out, we did pretty well! Here are some results that I captured near the very end of the competition;
And I’m very proud to say that our team (within the company) actually came 1st in the department rankings for Sydney. We got to attend the award ceremony at the Hilton with some nice appetizers and alcohol, and the Major gave us these;
All in all, I’m pretty happy with our performance.
Stack Overflow just did their developer survey for the year, and there’s some interesting stuff. There’s also a lot of expected stuff… for example, very relevant to my industry, WordPress remains one of the most dreaded technologies.
Overall, developers are relatively an inexperienced bunch compared to other engineering disciplines (this is however nothing new). Javascript is the most popular technology. Everyone seems to LOVE Swift.
Compensation by Industry is very interesting – I wish they had figures for Australia. I kind of feel as though the US ones are skewed heavily by parts of California like the Bay Area where the cost of living is outrageous (hence the salaries are too). Australia is 4th best compensated, and there is actually little difference between it, US and Russia (amazing right?) according to the big max index of PPP salaries. The best remunerated country according to the same scale happens to be Ukarine. Salary rises with stack overflow rep (bit of self serving commentary, but I guess it’s well placed).
The weightings of different industry sectors in different parts of the world is rather intriguing, I’m guessing the US has a disproportionate amount of tech startups, and of course Asia has a disproortionate amount of traditional software engineering products.
People in Iran, are the most satisfied with their development jobs.
Overall, lots of cool statistics – I recommend you check it now.
Nothing at all surprising. But what the hell is this Nette thing everyone in the Chezh Republic is using??
I’ve just attended the PHP Australia conference on the 12th and 13th of March. This was my first ever actual full blown conference in anything, and I have to say, it was pretty amazing. Apart from the creators of PHP and MySQL (now working on MariaDB of course), there was an awesome list of speakers and lots of great food. This is probably a good time to give Seb kudos for managing to organise such a packed event.
I’ve been compiling notes for work (props to 4mation for paying for my ticket), and so far I have almost 4 pages, which is pretty cool. There are so many takeaways, it seems pointless to even try to get into them, however I will say that talking to Rasmus and Monty was by far the highlight of the two days. Lesser so, it was also interesting to discuss technologies in use with people from all around Australia, what their stack is, and how they go about development.
Just attended Phunconf 5.0 yesterday. It was a great event with lots of very interesting discussions, however probably the most salient point I want to draw attention to is the following image.
To provide some context, at Phunconf events our tradition is to open the floor to the community to suggest topics for circle discussions. This year, all attendees were given two red circles, which they could put on any topic of their choice, in order for everyone to democratically pick the most popular topics which we would then discuss. The outcome was as follows:
The two post-it notes with so many circles on them that you can’t see what’s written there, are of course Angular and Laravel.