Serverless Days ANZ 2023 Recap

When a tech community comes together, great things happen and Serverless Days ANZ 2023 was no exception. As soon as you checked-in, you could feel the community spirit, buzz and excitement that comes with an event like this. 

It’s been four years since the last Serverless Days ANZ was able to run IRL (In real life), and the local serverless community had been eagerly waiting for its return. The Edge at Federation Square provided the perfect venue for the event, with its open and airy design lending itself well to the collaborative atmosphere of the conference.

An opening keynote to awaken even the most epic of cold starts

“When all you have is a hammer…”

AWS Serverless hero, and Serverless Chats host, Jeremy Daly shared experiences and tales that spoke of the importance of a robust and evolving developer experience. He shared his own experiences and tales to highlight the challenges that developers face when building serverless applications and the critical role that a well-designed developer experience can play in overcoming these challenges.

“Stages or Environments, Experiment’s galore”

Susan Brander was the next speaker up, talking about how serverless can help go from idea to product with faster iterations and idea testing. With a strong focus particularly on a startups journey, the examples and experience could easily be applied to organizations of all sizes. 

“Idempotency by any other name would smell so sweet”

Eric Johnson (aka edjgeek), one of the Principal Developer Advocates at AWS, talked about maintaining idempotency in distributed serverless applications. One thing I loved the most from Eric’s talk was around the importance of not tripping over your own naming conventions. This is something I think every developer experiences at some point in their developer origin story, and usually the result of long hours and not allowing enough time to review and refine before meeting that pressing deadline.

“One of the panel discussions at SLSDaysANZ”

We had a host of other great speakers throughout the course of the day covering a variety of serverless topics, from Security, AI, accessibility to name but a few. There were also a number of panel discussions which provided an opportunity for attendees to engage in lively conversations about some of the most pressing issues in serverless computing.

That moment where you hope that every nuance of the demo and presentation goes well

I was grateful to have been selected as a speaker at Serverless Days ANZ, where I spoke about building an IOT trace wire game that Lumigo used in our booth for re:Invent last year. Players navigate the wire maze as quickly as possible; times are recorded and sent via wifi to a Lambda and stored in DynamoDB. All of which was traced using Lumigo. 

“Schema for the buzzwire game”

It was a cautionary tale, fraught with looming logistical deadlines, many work pivots, lots of IOT hardware tinkering combined with 3d printing; and of course Serverless. Lots of geeky fun was had by all, and especially me. You can read more on my IOT adventures see this blog post on Observing IOT and Lambda. 

“The appropriate level of (design-time) coupling depends on the level of control you have over the endpoints”

The final speaker of the day was Kris Howard, head of developer relations for APJ. Kris spoke about thinking in integration patterns, with a variety of learnings and takeaways from a wealth of experience working closely with developers and communities. 

Something that really resonated with me the most, coming from a developer background, was a quote Jeremy Daly said “As developers we need to do developer things with as little fuss and mess as possible”, This is something that at lumigo we live and breath every day and is ingrained in everything we do. 

Get involved and help bring community together 

“Organisers from Serverless Days ANZ 2023”

Serverless Days ANZ event would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the serverless community, who came together to share their knowledge, insights, and experiences with one another. From the organizers and speakers to the attendees and volunteers, everyone played a vital role in making the event a success.

A big thank you to the dedicated Serverless Days ANZ team for organizing an exceptional event. Bringing together a community of like-minded individuals requires meticulous planning and a committed team of organizers who can seamlessly bring all the intricate details together.