YOW! 2025

Source: Dev.to

My YOW! Experience

I’ve been following the YOW! conferences for over a decade. They take place in three Australian cities—Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney—and feature top industry experts. I was thrilled when I was invited to speak on the YOW! tour earlier this year.

Talk: WebAssembly on Kubernetes

I presented a brand‑new talk on WebAssembly on Kubernetes in each city. The content builds on an earlier article that I reworked and updated. YOW! will release the video soon.

Talk outline (spoiler):

1. Understanding WebAssembly
2. WebAssembly in its own words
3. Different actors of the WebAssembly‑Cloud ecosystem
4. The demo – the GitHub repo is available (the README is mostly for me)
5. The good, the bad, and the ugly
6. Conclusion

OpenTelemetry Masterclass

In Melbourne I led a one‑day masterclass on OpenTelemetry. The session alternated between theory and four hands‑on labs, covering:

• Generating metrics, logs, and traces across the JVM, Python, and Node.js
• Storing data in the LGTM stack

Attendees left with a solid grasp of how to observe their systems and gain continuous insight.

Other Talks I Attended

Below is a non‑exhaustive list of talks I saw, along with brief summaries.

Java Container Mastery: Optimizing Images Across Build Tools – Matthias Haeussler

Matthias discussed various ways to create a JVM application in Docker:

• Adding a JAR to a base JRE
• Using a multi‑stage build
• Leveraging Cloud‑Native Buildpacks
• Compiling to native with GraalVM

The talk provides a good overview of each option and their trade‑offs. Watch it on the YOW! YouTube channel when it becomes available.

Pushing Java to the Limits: Processing a Billion Rows in Under 2 Seconds – Roy van Rijn

Roy described a challenge (originating from Gunnar Morling) to ingest a file with one billion rows as fast as possible. He explained his strategy, performance results, and linked to a GitHub repo for the full description and participation details.

Fun fact: Thomas Würthinger (GraalVM) placed second; the winner hired the developer who beat him. My former boss and friend, Jaromir Hamala, finished third.

The Past, Present and Future of Programming Languages – Kevlin Henney

Henney presented data on “popular” languages from several reports and analyzed why they occupy their current positions. He noted a strong correlation between a language’s age and its ranking, suggesting an inertia effect in the ecosystem.

Conceptualisation – Michael Feathers

Feathers introduced a Payment class that conflates payment and tax responsibilities. He explored whether the issue lies in naming rather than design, prompting a discussion on semantics, naming challenges, and the limits of language expressiveness. The talk concluded with brief remarks on LLMs.

The C4 Model – Beyond The Basics – Simon Brown

Simon explained the C4 model, an architectural diagramming approach he invented. While I usually rely on UML, the C4 model offers a different perspective that many find useful. Simon is preparing a book with O’Reilly (details forthcoming).

Note: I attended additional talks, but jet lag limited my ability to retain details.

Thanks

A huge thank‑you to the YOW! organizers—Sabine Wolf, Damian Maclennan, Tracy Chen—and all track hosts and volunteers. It was an amazing experience!