David Gardiner - Adelaide

DDD Adelaide 2025

2025-11-23T18:00:00.000+10:30

Yesterday we ran DDD Adelaide 2025 - a community-driven conference for everyone involved in software development and related activities in Adelaide.

With an ever so slightly bigger attendance than last year, our venue again was the University of Adelaide. The delicious catering was provided by Cargo Catering and warm refreshments by B3 Coffee - both who have been with us since 2019.

I think we're starting to find our stride with organising the event. Setup on Saturday morning went smoothly and no major dramas to worry about was good. The only thing beyond our control was the weather. It rained most of the day but at least the 3 lecture theatres and the atrium (where sponsors and food and drinks were located) were all relatively close together, so it didn't put a damper on things 😃

One new thing this year that we're trialling is recording some of the presentations. We've partnered with TxRx Technologies on this and hope to be able to publish some of the sessions in the coming weeks.

Geoffrey Huntley was our keynote speaker. I particularly liked the fact that he came dressed exactly how he appeared in his promo image that we'd used before the conference.

Being one of the organisers, you don't always get a chance to sit in all the sessions, but with this year running smoothly I was able to relax a bit and enjoy some really interesting presentations.

Geoffrey Huntley's keynote

Morning tea and lots of discussions happening

I was then acting as room host for a couple of sessions, including James Bannan with a really interesting talk about the history of Steganography

And Ashley Mannix on Industrial strength testing for complex software

Then lunch! I'm not a vegetarian, but I picked that option as there were some spare ones, and it was really nice.

A few more sessions after lunch and then it was time for afternoon tea, and wow that was so yummy.

Last session I was back room hosting, and caught Samira talking about the challenges of introducing event-driven architecture.

The day finished with Andrew Best and myself hosting the closing prize draws and thank-yous. Another change we introduced this year was that to be eligible for the prizes you had to have submitted some feedback. Turns out that's a great incentive for people to give feedback!

Two bonus highlights for me for the day that I wanted to mention:

Catching up with Nigel Spencer who I worked with way back in 2010 and who is now based in the USA. He timed a trip back to Adelaide to visit family perfectly - or was it a visit to DDD Adelaide and a bit of family catch up on the side? 😃 Random fact: Nigel was a speaker at one of the original CodeCampSA events many years ago that were the predecessor of what is now 'DDD Adelaide'.
Meeting Melissa Houghton in person for the first time. I've known Melissa for a few years but this is the first time we've been in the same place at the same time. She's been involved with organising DDD Melbourne and now DDD Perth, so it was a lovely surprise to discover she'd 'popped' over from Perth to checkout the Adelaide event.

In the next few weeks the organising team will first (and most importantly!) catch our breath, then catch up to review all the feedback that has been submitted and do our final debrief. And then in the new year we'll start planning towards DDD Adelaide 2026!

Thanks to the awesome organising team Andrew, Claire, Harnoor, Isaac, Ryan and Will. What a great team to serve with planning and putting this event on together.

Extra special thanks to my family for stepping up to volunteer on the day. It's a very early start and a long day but they were wonderful.

Welcome to 2020

2020-01-09T20:00:00.000+10:30

Christmas has come and gone, and now it's 2020. If there's one thing that's been a constant over this Summer period, it's that it feels like we're under seige from bushfires.

Here's a view not that far from where I live. That's a smoke haze (not really thick, but noticeable ), from fires on Kangaroo Island around 200km south. There's been other fires around South Australia in the Adelaide Hills and over on York Peninsula. And then interstate there's fires all over the place - basically all around Australia. A good drop of rain would not go astray.

I've been enjoying some time off - catching up with family, the odd bike ride or two, a few jobs around the house and just trying to switch off for a bit.

More to come...

A simple 'Up Next' Dashboard using PowerShell

2019-11-28T07:00:00.000+10:30

Last Saturday, we ran DDD Adelaide 2019. When we were setting up the venue on Friday afternoon, I realised that there was a huge flat-screen TV in the open area (behind where the registration/info desk would be located) and we hadn't made any plans to use it.

We could just pop a copy of the DDD logo on a USB stick and probably the TV could just show that in 'slide-show' mode. But then I thought maybe we could go one better. Wouldn't it be nice if you could display a simple 'What's on now, and what's coming up next' dashboard?

Ok, it's Friday night, and I really should have been heading to bed, but I'd been inspired - now to find something that would fit the bill. A quick search of GitHub didn't reveal anything obvious, so can I write a simple application myself to do the job?

First question - WPF, WinForms? HTML+JavaScript? They'd all do the job, but I wanted something simple that I could get done quickly! I decided I'd give PowerShell a go - and I kind of liked the idea of making it "old-school" ASCII text too.

I copied over the conference agenda data and decided on simple ordered dictionary would suffice for the data structure, using the time as the key. Then just two queries - one to find the entry who's time is now, and the second to find the entry for what's coming up next.

To help with development, I added a -test mode, that sped up time and made the clock run from 7am. Later on Saturday I realised I had an 'off by one' bug in the query logic - the test mode was useful to validate the fix.

One extra touch - I added a 'current time' and used [Console]::SetCursorPosition() to locate that in the bottom right-hand corner. While I was at it, just to be fancy, I added some colour to the 'DDD' bit in the title.

To run the dashboard, I used Windows Terminal. That allowed me to run full screen and choose a nice font size.

The dashboard worked well and I heard a few compliments that people liked it. Not bad for something whipped up in an hour!

If I revisit the script in the future, I might see if I can incorporate a simple Tweet wall - either on the right-hand side, or maybe alternating every 30 seconds. There was a lot of Twitter traffic on the day and it would have been nice to showcase that.

The source is all on GitHub. Pull requests welcome!

DDD Adelaide 2019 Summary

2019-11-24T22:00:00.000+10:30

Phew! DDD Adelaide 2019 is done. Yesterday we had 150 people come along to UniSA's MOD building in the city and see 16 speakers present some awesome topics on software development.

The feedback on the day was overwhelmingly positive. I'll be catching up with co-organiser Andrew soon to debrief and also review the comments received from attendees.

Special thanks to the gold sponsors:

Telstra Purple,
AWS,
Comunet,
The University of South Australia and in particular The School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, who went out of their way to provide a beautiful venue.

Here's a few of my highlights of the day:

Some kind people brought one or two donuts to share!

Lars Klint was our keynote speaker, kicking off the day.

A fantastic range of speakers, including Ming Johanson

and Liam McLennan (who incidentally was actually a speaker around 10 years ago at the last DDD Adelaide)

Really yummy catering provided by Food Lore...

... and Coffee Cart provided by B3 Coffee and sponsored by Encode Talent

It was great to see so many software developers gathered together in Adelaide.

Andrew drawing the prize winners (prizes sponsored by Octopus Deploy) and closing out the day.

Finally, special thanks to my wife and two eldest kids who also gave up their Saturday to help out as volunteers for the day. I really appreciate their support.

DDD Adelaide 2019 is coming!

2019-09-01T22:00:00.000+09:30

It was first announced a few weeks ago, but it deserves a mention here too - DDD Adelaide 2019 is happening on Saturday 23rd November!

Andrew Best (Principal Consultant at Readify) has taken the organisational initiative and I'm excited to be working with him to bring a day-long conference for all software developers to Adelaide.

Long-time readers may remember we have actually had some events in Adelaide before. Indeed I blogged about the last DDD way back in 2011. In the intervening time, DDDs have been happening all around Australia. Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth are all now running annual DDD conferences. They've grown to become significant events (many selling out within hours of tickets being made available!), and some now regularly have 700-800 attendees (big enough that they have to book a proper convention centre for their venue).

So the DDD we're putting on this year is going to be a little different to anything that has ever happened in Adelaide before. It's going to be bigger and better (with two tracks), and is open to any and all software developers (plus related fields) and any programming language, technology, ecosystem, cloud, little and big-endian!

While we're not aiming to be quite as large as our interstate cousins, I think if this year's event is well supported by the local developer community, then the only way is up for the future.

DDD is run as a non-profit event. So while we are charge for registration, this covers the cost of providing catering for the day. There's other costs with running DDD, so it's great to have some big-name sponsors also supporting us. In fact there's still room for more sponsors to get on board.

So what happens between now and November 23rd?

Registrations are open now. Sign up to attend now!

The Call for Presentations closes at the end of Wednesday September 4th. If you've got something you'd be prepared to present to a group of interested people, submit it now!

The following week (12th September to be precise), the full list of proposed sessions will be published for registered attendees to vote on. Yes, the people who are going to attend get to vote on which sessions they want to see. Yet another incentive to register.

After voting closes (27th September) and we've confirmed presenter availability then the final agenda will be published (3rd October).

So sign up and I'll see you on the 23rd. It's going to be awesome!

Comparison of public weather forecasts for Adelaide

2011-02-02T08:58:00.001+10:30

If I want what I consider the most accurate forecast for Adelaide, I'm going to refer to the Bureau of Meteorology forecast. There are a number of other weather sites on the Internet, so let's see how close their forecasts are to what I'll call the "official" one.

Note, temperature is measured in Celsius in Australia, so those are the units I'm displaying. Out of interest, 42°C is equivalent to 107.6°F which is equivalent to hot!

BoM Forecast

PRECIS FORECAST FOR ADELAIDE Issued at 5:00 am on Monday, 31 January 2011

Monday Max 42 Dry. Sunny.

Tuesday Min 24 Max 33 Fine. Mostly sunny. Wednesday Min 20 Max 34 Fine. Mostly sunny. Thursday Min 22 Max 34 Fine. Mostly sunny.

wunderground.com

http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/94672.html

Predicting 37°C

weather.com

http://uk.weather.com/weather/today-Adelaide-ASXX0001?fromSearch=true

I went to the UK version of weather.com as that seemed to be the easiest way to get the temperatures in Celsius.

Forecast: 40°C

accuweather.com

http://www.accuweather.com/en-us/au/south-australia/adelaide/quick-look.aspx

Forecast: 42°C

theweathernetwork.com

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/ausa0001

Forecast: 32°C

weatherbug.com

http://weather.weatherbug.com/Australia/Adelaide-weather.html?zcode=z6286&lang_id=en-au

Forecast: 33°C

Looking at the screengrab, I can see why they're called weatherbug.

So as you can see, most of these have absolutely no idea.. I can only presume they are throwing darts at a dart board with the numbers they come up with. Accuweather seemed to be the closest to the Bureau's figures.

And as it turned out, Monday did get to 42°C, so the BoM was on the money.

ClustrMaps - Hit counter map shows locations of all visitors to my blog

2006-07-21T15:33:00.000+09:30

I've added a link to ClustrMaps on my blog, to see if there really are any people who read my blog!

I heard about this from Rob Caron, and the fact that there are no dots on Adelaide makes me wonder a) am I the only one in Adelaide reading his blog or b) have they got Adelaide somewhere in the middle of Australia!

"Hey, that's me!"

2006-04-14T20:24:00.000+09:30

I just noticed there's a link to my blog on the Australian SQL Server User Group home page - I'm not sure how long it's been there, but then I don't always look up in the top-right corner :-)

Which reminds me, when I have some spare time I need to see if I can fix the layout problem with their Forums area in Firefox. I also put my hand up to add some RSS feeds to the site which I haven't done anything about yet.

Returning to a positive note however, I'm pleased to see that the Adelaide SQL group is doing really well at the moment. Maybe it's our jet-setting leader, or the great speakers, but we are getting regular crowds of 30+ and I'm always learning something new each time I go.

Threat Analysis & Modeling v2.0

2006-03-10T16:07:00.000+10:30

As seen at the recent Adelaide Security seminar, here is the latest threat modelling tool from Microsoft.

Microsoft Security Interchange notes

2006-02-28T11:37:00.000+10:30

Last night Gary, Chris and I attended the Adelaide edition of the Microsoft Security Interchange evenings that they are running around the country.

It was a relaxed evening, but there were some good speakers. Most interesting and entertaining would have to be Steve Riley. I've heard Steve and Jesper talk at TechEd previously, and he is a very compelling presenter. I wish some of the ISTS guys had been there to hear him talk about how "account lockout" is just a great way to mount DoS attacks on user accounts. It's also worth repeating the security tradeoff triangle diagram:

Rocky Heckmen also did an interesting presentation where he showed a new tool that will be released soon from Microsoft that helps with Threat modeling.

Dave Glover finished up with some demos of techniques to help improve code security. Sadly, encrypting web.config didn't work for him on the night, but he did also mention the Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library that I blogged about last week. Turns out this includes security-conscious versions of the Server.HTMLEncode and Server.UrlEncode functions