It’s been a few weeks now, but I am still on a high from YOW! 2025. It was my 12th or 13th as an attendee, but my first as Technical Director and part of the team. I loved every minute of it.
What an amazing event. A fantastic group of speakers, crew, volunteers, and sponsors. And of course an incredible and engaged audience!
The three city roadshow quite the experience, and for somebody who’s always loved being around the conference, hanging out with the speakers and crew was a great time. Outside of the conference days, my life was getting a large group of people out of hotels, on to busses, in to airports, on to more busses, and a fantastic day trip out to Stradbroke Island.
When I got home I was entirely wiped out, I think it took me a week to recover. I did manage to write a few takeaways for LinkedIn, which I’ve reflected on a little more.
1. AI is here to stay.
I was an AI skeptic for quite a while, and I have a whole lot of issues with AI generated art, music, and writing. Despite that, there is an overwhelming adoption as developers are using AI tools in their daily work. The message the development community has overwhelmingly gotten over the last year or so has been “get on board, or get out”, and it’s worked.
What’s obvious is that everybody is still figuring out the best ways to make it work, and how to balance speed with maintainability, safety, and quality.
Companies are coming to terms with what it all means going forward and looking to create rollout strategies of tooling, but also how to implement AI into their own products.
The danger here is safety and security. We need to be mindful of implementing the correct guardrails, test our models and implementations, and make sure that security has a front row seat in our rollouts.
2. The fundamentals haven’t changed
Developer skills have MORE value, not less, in an AI world. We can’t trust the AI “Genie”, so we must guide it away from doing the wrong thing.
Our core competencies of design, testing, security, accessibility, and privacy, remain as critical as ever, if not more. AI tools can speed us up, but it’s up to us to make sure we’re not accellerating into danger.
The role of junior devs is still relevant, but we can educate and train faster now. Not hiring junior devs is just bad business. We also can focus now on the higher order skills. Conceptualisation and systems thinking are more important than ever.
And most importantly, writing code can be done just for fun and creative expression. It’s far too easy to forget that.
3. The human element of conferences is incredibly powerful
A conference is not just about listening to people speak, it’s the hallway conversations, the exchange of ideas, and the connections we make when we gather together.
This is the real value of a conference, and this year was amazing.
For me, I can’t wait for the next one. We’ve already started planning the program and speakers for 2026 and we have some great ideas.
