David Gardiner - Food

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.

Christmas 2020

2020-12-26T14:00:00.000+10:30

Christmas this year started technically at 12.01am. I was rostered on to be 'Vision Mixer' for the streaming videos of my church's Christmas eve services - 7.30pm and 11pm. The latter finishing just after midnight.

I've been volunteering to be a camera operator and vision mixer since church started live streaming a few months ago. It's a bit of a dream come true as being a TV camera person was the second job I wanted to be when I grew up (this is before I discovered computers!). Mixing is a challenging job, and I have greater respect for those who do this as their paid job. It's one of those things when done right, you don't even think about it. The Christmas Eve services should be uploaded to the Seeds Uniting YouTube channel soon if you're interested.

I love Christmas. It was always an exciting time when I was a little kid, and I still enjoy it now that I'm well and truly all grown up. It is special as a time to remember the birth of Jesus, and a season of catching up with family and remembering old traditions (or possibly making some new ones).

COVID has obviously had a massive impact on many. Fortunately here in Adelaide and South Australia things are currently in a good state, so any remaining restrictions didn't impact us personally. I'm all too aware that there are many who are doing it much tougher, or who are missing loved ones that couldn't be with them due to travel restrictions, or tragically through sickness or death.

Narelle loves a brunch (and she's not alone there!), so she organised to have her parents and my aunty over for Christmas morning.

For lunch, we headed over to my sister's place. Food continued to be a highlight of the day. My sister, her husband and their very cute dog did a great job of lunch.

Yum! Oh and it turns out the Christmas crackers had balloons in that you could make balloon animals with. That was a great laugh.

Then just when I didn't think I could fit another thing in, Mum brought out the Christmas slices for afternoon tea!

Wow. We got to bring some leftovers home (plus my mother in-law's home-made fudge). Not sure how long they'll last. I'll have to try and keep up the physical activity to counteract all the good eating.

I'm on annual leave for the next 3 weeks. Will be great to have a break, recharge, catch up with friends and family a bit more, and staying cool over summer.

Oh, and what was hiding behind that scary wrapping paper (see first picture)? That was my son showing his creative flare to wrap a bucket of Cadbury's Favourites chocolates. Still deciding if I'm going to share them🙂

An Iced Vo Vo surprise

2019-06-14T09:00:00.001+09:30

Those who know me really well know that one of my favourite biscuits is Arnott's Iced Vo Vos.

By Bilby - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

I'm not sure why - I just really enjoy the combination of the sweet biscuit base with pink icing, coconut and jam. A winning combination.

Recently Arnott's have been looking to diversify their product range and I saw with interest that they now have Iced Vo Vo flavoured milk and Iced Vo Vo flavoured chocolate!

Imagine my surprise when I got home from work this week to discover a block of the latter waiting for me on my bed (together with a clever Origami bow).

My youngest daughter was hanging around and asked me to guess who got it for me..

My wife? No

My sister? No

My friend Andrew? No

I was stumped.

It was later that night that my wife tipped me off that actually it had been my daughter all along who'd bought for me with her own money! What a beautiful (and yummy) gift!

Adelaide CodeRetreat

2016-10-23T09:54:00.001+10:30

Earlier this year I’d been contacted by Rachelle (Community Manager at Reinteractive) asking if I could promote a CodeRetreat Event that she was organising in Adelaide to ADNUG members. Not only was I was more than happy to do this, but I decided to go along myself and find out what it was all about.

The day-long event was held in the _southstart (formerly Majoran) office space in Grenfell St. 20 had registered, but somewhat disappointingly only 6 of us showed up (I say “somewhat” as in some ways having a smaller group actually worked better, and not just because there was more food to go around!)

The day was also facilitated by Adam Davies (who also helps run the Adelaide Ruby Meetup group). The structure of the day was based on the one from Coderetreat.org. After a welcome and introduction, we paired off with another attendee, worked on implementing Conway’s Game Of Life for around 40 minutes, then all came back together as a group for a ‘retrospective’ review and discussion of how we felt that session went. This was then repeated for most of the day, with a few challenges thrown in just to make it interesting, like “only commit code to version control when all tests pass, and use a 4 minute timer that you revert all uncommitted code when the timer expires” (that one was stressful!), “ping pong” (one person writes the test, and the other has to implement the code for the test) or “avoid using a mouse”.

Most of these sessions operated in pairs and promoted using test-driven development (writing the test first, confirm that the test fails, now write the smallest amount of code to make the test pass). I really do like the practises of pair programming and TDD, and it reminded me that it would be good to use these more in everyday work.

One rule of the day was “delete all your code at the end of each session”. It was curious how ‘wrong’ that felt. You are so used to saving and keeping stuff. It was probably a bit liberating too – after all while the code had gone, the experience and learning from the pairing session had not.

Even in such a small group there was a good mix of programming languages – Ruby, Java, JavaScript, C# (obviously) and even Elm. Sitting down with a fellow developer and working in an unfamiliar language was also both a challenge and a highlight.

Lunch was provided, and was a step up from the usual pizza fare. Very nice!

The most awesome lunch courtesy of Red Star Catering. #coderetreat #southstart pic.twitter.com/I4NMOb2BYL

— reinteractive (@reinteractive) October 22, 2016

After lunch we did more of a ‘mob programming’ style session lead by another attendee Richie. Still using the Game of Life problem, it was a great illustration of how important communication skills are, as we worked through coming to consensus on not only how we could approach the problem, but what were good names for things and what did those names actually mean (not surprising, considering naming is one of the two hard things in computer science).

Following that we did one more pairing session. This time each pair got to choose from a list of limitations. My partner had commented when we sat down together how much he appreciated his mouse and that was probably what prompted me to suggest we try the “only use your keyboard” challenge. We used Java in Eclipse and apart from an annoying splash screen that we had to resort to the mouse to make go away, we managed the rest of the session to stick to just typing. Not easy though.

The day ended with a final group review. I really enjoyed the day, appreciated learning some new skills and practising some old ones, and getting to know a great bunch of people.

Christmas baking

2011-12-17T17:26:00.001+10:30

Christmas has always been one of my favourite times of the year. Probably because growing up, Mum would always be making yummy things to enjoy before, during and after Christmas day.

I wouldn't put myself in the same class as Mum, but I do like doing a bit of cooking too – particularly the sweeter recipes. 😀

Here's some shortbread and mince pies that I made today. I think I should have cut the pastry for the pies smaller as it expanded a bit when it was cooked. Still tastes nice though.

Cooking on Saturday

2011-11-06T11:51:00.001+10:30

Yesterday I made some cupcakes. We'll enjoy eating these in lunches this week !😀

The trick is after you make them to immediately put them in the freezer (otherwise there probably wouldn't be any left!)