Meet a Speaker Rob Crowley
Not long now until DDD Sydney 2018 and in the lead up we wanted to make sure you get to know our speakers. Today we wanted to introduce you to Rob Crowley, who’s one of the DDD Perth organisers and is making the trek over.
DDD: What excites you most about being a speaker at DDD Sydney?
Rob: First off, I’m really excited to be speaking at my first DDD Sydney. Last year, I made it to the DDD conferences in Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane but missed out on Sydney. Glad I’m able to address that glaring oversight this year! One of my favourite things about attending conferences is meeting other attendees. I’m a firm believer that everyone you meet has something valuable to teach you. You just need to be curious, ask genuine questions and listen. So, if you see there come over and say hi!
DDD: How did you get into speaking?
Rob: In 2014 I had the opportunity to attend Velocity Conference in California. It was an inspiring experience which had a profound effect on how I thought about building and releasing software systems. When I arrived back in Perth I was wanted to share all the things that I had learned, so in a wave of adrenaline fuelled enthusiasm I signed up for a talk at the DevOps Perth meetup. What quickly followed was my already deep seeded technical lead imposter syndrome being compounded by a new but equally crippling fear of being exposed as a public speaker imposter. As is often the case, anticipation is worse than reality. The talk went really well and I was hooked.
DDD: What should people expect in your talk?
Rob: A love story involving two services trying to make it work in a distributed systems world. Against this backdrop, we’ll explore techniques we have adopted to make inter-service communication safe and reliable. We’ll also look at how Cloud Native, specifically the advent of micro-services and containers, demands a new approach.
DDD: What talks, other than your own, are you looking forward to seeing?
Rob: The sign of a great conference agenda is that there should always be a tough choice for attendees to make in each time slot. This is certainly the case at DDD Sydney.
- Michael John Pena has a session on Blockchain and its uses beyond crypto currencies. I’m looking forward to learning more about the potential use cases.
- There’s a lot of great looking sessions in the Junior Dev track and I applaud DDD Sydney for including it. I’m looking forward to seeing Fiona McCawley’s introductory session on Elixir. It’s a language that I’ve been meaning to learn more about for some time so great to see it on the agenda.
- I’ve heard amazingly good feedback from Daisy Smith’s session at Levels Conference so massively looking forward to learning more about creative coding.
- Amanda Dean is a fantastic speaker who has a wealth of knowledge to share about testing and leadership. Unfortunately, we’re speaking at the same time. Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against anyone who chooses her talk over mine. She is amazing.
DDD: Anything else you want to say to people thinking of coming to DDD Sydney?
Rob: DDD Sydney is a conference for the local software community by the local software community. DDD offer a low-cost day with a democratically chosen agenda so they’re likely to be something for everyone. If you haven’t bought a ticket yet then do it today and I look forward to seeing you there!
Catch Rob’s talk, Service Meshes - Powering the next wave of microservice architectures, at DDD Sydney 2018.