August meetup

GGD is still meeting at 341 George St this evening! You will need to enter via the George St entrance as the normal entrance is closed. We'll do our best to help everyone find the place. Please comment on this event if you need help getting in.

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Join us for our August event! We have three excellent speakers lined up this month :)

We'll have someone in the lobby to let you up starting around 5:45. The doors close at 6:25 and the elevators need a key - please be on time! We'll have pizza, chats, and mingling before the talks start at 6:30.

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Why Having A Plan Might Be A Bad Plan by Freya Berkhout

Abstract: Walking in the modern world can often feel like treading a well-worn, mapped out path. After years of serial planning, I realised that doing away with the concept of a plan — be it for career, life, or otherwise — might be the key to finding and exploring wilder, more exciting opportunities. This talk is about my wiggly, winding journey to technology, and how being open-minded and curious might change your life.

Bio: Freya Berkhout is a multi-award winning composer and creative technologist. She began her career in an experimental pop band and eventually found herself in the film and tech industries. Her recent projects include Creatable, an education programme kicked off by FINCH for school-age girls to dive into creative tech, as well as innovation campaigns for clients like MARS, VW and Data61 with FINCH’s tech arm Nakatomi. She is currently working on interactive projects involving computer vision, graphics, music, machine learning, 3D printing and all sorts of sensors. An activist at heart, she is inspired by cultural exchange, food politics, the human voice and the natural world.

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Asynchronous Javascript by Pavithra Kodmad

Abstract: Javascript is a programming language that is notoriously known for its operation in a single thread. But still it’s widely used to perform on one of the most dynamic platforms known to humans, the internet. The biggest strength of Javascript that keeps it relevant is Asynchronous behaviour. In this talk, I will explain briefly this concept and describe how it works in practice. Basically, I’ll show you how awesome Javascript is!

Bio: I'm Pavithra, you can call me PK. I work at Atlassian as a front end developer. I come with a deep passion for frontend technologies. I'm mostly into Javascript and trying to learn CSS and SVG :)

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Multi-tenant architecture in 20 minutes by Carmel Hinks

Abstract: We have recently completed the largest infrastructure project in Atlassian's history, moving from a compute- node-per-customer model to a multi-tenant solution hosted by AWS. We explain some of the interesting problems that we solved, from enabling one compute node to serve any request from any customer, to building an ultra-low-latency service that can handle over 15,000 requests per second.

Bio: Carmel Hinks is a Sydney-based software engineer who joined Atlassian in 2015. She received her B.Sc degree in software engineering from Curtin University (Perth, Australia), where she also spent several years teaching students about application and database design. Since realising her passion for systems architecture, Carmel has specialised in the development and maintenance of highly critical platform services.