DDD Melbourne 2026

23rd February 2026

David was in Melbourne on the weekend so he could attend the DDD Melbourne 2026 conference. Not only was it good, but he's written up his notes from the sessions he attended too.

On Saturday I attended DDD Melbourne 2026. It was great to be back again in Melbourne and attending a DDD conference (instead of organising one!). I got to catch up with some old friends, meet some people for the first time in person and hear some great talks.

SixPivot supported my travel and attendance, which was really appreciated. I also got to catch up with some of my colleagues, some at the conference and another later on Sunday.

I almost missed the start - turns out the curtains in my hotel room were extra effective at blocking out the light. I’d gone back to sleep a few times, figuring it was still too early and then finally I figured I better check what time it actually was, and it was just after 8am! A mad scramble to get showered and dressed and race out the door. Quickly grabbed breakfast from McDonald’s and then just made it through registration and grabbed a seat for the start. Just as well my hotel was right around the corner from the conference.

The organising team did a fantastic job this year. The food was good and there was plenty of it - I’d learned from last year that there was no need to queue - they wouldn’t run out!

I made handwritten notes for each talk I attended. I’ve transcribed them here as a more legible record. Even I struggle to read my handwriting, so better to attempt that now rather than later! The notes made sense to me at the time, but whether that’s true post event is another question 😃

AI: it’s our responsibility - Sreyna Rath

Sreyna gave the keynote presentation.

• AI is like a villain developer. A “brilliant jerk” - no values or empathy. No awareness of damage.
• Examples
  • Gender bias baked in, racial bias
  • Amazon hiring
  • US Healthcare - used highest cost as proxy for health needs. Black people excluded more often
• AI is a mirror
  • Data reflects us
  • Brilliant jerk culture
  • Scale
• AI family tree
  • Dark side of the Internet
  • Microsoft Tay
  • Character.AI - suicide
• Jaimee - built for women https://jaimee.ai/
• How do we fix that?
• Compassionate design
  • Design for most vulnerable
  • Who is most vulnerable?
  • What’s the worst thing feature?
  • How do we prevent that harm?
  • Ask right questions
• Persona testing
  • Test as different race, gender, age, abilities
  • Different to you!
• AI reviewing AI
  • First AI optimised to be helpful
  • Second AI reviews the first - optimised for safety
  • Eg. Is output sexualised when not requested?
• Your “Jedi” toolkit - what kind of Jedi will you be?
• AI doesn’t have values, it has patterns
• The good news: the villain can be reformed
  • Jerk => Jedi
• “May the framework be with you”

Code is a Conversation: What Are You Really Saying to the Next Developer? - Joel Gallagher

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• Code is read more often than written
• Cognitive load
• eg. contrast “The DaVinci Code” (simple, short sentences) vs “A brief history of time” (did anyone ever finish or understand it)
• Naming, structure, comments, commits
  • Classes and variables = noun
  • Functions = verb + noun
• Watch out for reserved words
• Function size and scope
  • Refactor and extract methods
  • Reduce depth/complexity
• Comments
  • Explain the why, not how
  • Don’t comment out code
• Commits
• Name, scope, flow, consistency
• Tools
  • Consistent standards
  • Enforce standards
• Recommended reading
  • Clean code
  • Pragmatic Programmer (latest edition)
  • Make your code more “DaVinci”

Managing for Failure - Amy Norris

• Failure is good
  • Website hacked
  • Practice recovery
• What does failure mean?
  • “An emotionally upsetting learning experience”
• Why do you want failure?
• Hidden risks of “perfect” teams
  • Slow to learn, or averse
• Feel more comfortable failing. What are you bad at
• Example
  • Rocket game with faulty controller handle
• Rubber ducking
• Dig deep
• How to encourage teams to be more comfortable with failure
  • Share personal failures
  • Fire drills
  • What not to do
    • Punish behaviours you don’t want to see
    • Love your cool
    • Push people too hard
• How to keep your boss happy
  • Less downtime
  • Problems solved faster
  • More cohesive team
• Alternatively - do whatever you want until someone yells at you!
• Low risk
  • Board games (make sure they understand it isn’t a test)
  • Internal projects
• Remember people don’t know how to fail
• Helpful rule:
  • THIRTY (minutes of no progress)
  • FIFTEEN (minutes to do something else)
  • FAIL (get fresh eyes)
• Set failure as the goal. eg. “Get rejected by 10 conferences”
• Over communicate
  • Positive feedback
  • Negative feedback
  • Expectations
  • Changes to plans (including why)
  • Questions
• Overt positivity
  • “Good job me” (without irony)
• Remember you’re a trash can, not a trash can’t

You Aren’t Always Right: Resolving Technical Disagreements The Easy Way - Max Downey Twiss

• Why is it important to resolve them?
• How to we resolve them?
  • Reduce scope of disagreement
  • Compare reasoning
  • Bring in another perspective
  • Change the circumstances
  • Realise you are wrong!
• Techniques
  • PR examples
• How not to resolve

Designed To Fail: Building Resilient Applications - Callum Whyte

• Cloudflare outage
• CrowdStrike
• Microservices or Monolith
• Defining “healthy”
  • 200 OK
  • Requests/second
  • Request performance (better)
• Calling an API
  • Retries
  • Retry + Backoff
  • Circuit breaker
    • Opossum
    • Polly
• Critical path
  • Ecommerce
  • Move to event-driven/fire and forget process
• Queues
• Replicas
  • Healthcheck
  • Not always reliable though
• “Stand-in” platform
  • minimal platform running on failover cloud
• OpenTelemetry
• Chaos monkey/studio
  • Polly - chaos simulator methods

The Billion Dollar Blindspot: What happens when everyone thinks alike - Amanda Pitcher

• Systems thinker vs spacial specialist
• DEIB - Diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging
• Just having policy may not equate to true diversity
• 4 dimensions of diversity
  • demographic (often covered by compliance/policy)
  • cognitive
  • functional
  • behavioural
• Boeing 737 MAX
  • GroupThink
    • Confirmation bias risks
    • Just because everyone agrees doesn’t mean they are correct
  • Diversity sweet spot
• What can we do?
• Build psychological safety deliberately
  • Set the stage
  • Invite participation
  • Respond productively - react constructively
• Practical tools
• Activity to address GroupThink
  • Silent start - 5 mins quiet time to let people capture thoughts
  • Non-confrontational assent - dot voting / secret ballot
  • Separate generation from evaluation
  • Team leader - be a puppet and represent quiet voices
  • Time pressure kills
  • Balance productivity and quality
  • “Yes, and..” instead of “No, but..”

Hey LEGO robot, Grab me a Coke! - Daniel Fang

Daniel was the locknote speaker for the conference. I remember meeting Daniel when he spoke at DDD Brisbane

Lots of agents to make a Lego robot grab and move a can of coke.

That’s a wrap

What a great team! Thanks again Bron and everyone.

Post-DDD

Sunday morning I grabbed some breakfast at a cute little cafe (Segovia) in an alleyway not far from where I’d been staying. Then I walked to the train station to head out to friends’ church in the suburbs. It’s a completely different style of worship to my own church, but that’s half the fun. Went out to lunch with them and it was great catching up.

Thushan very kindly offered to pick me up and drive me to the airport, which also gave us a chance to chat along the way.

Flight was a little delayed leaving, but it was good to get home Sunday evening. What a great weekend!