I was lucky enough to make my first trans-Tasman journey to Auckland last week to attend the 2015 ANZTB Conference. The conference was enjoyable and there were some memorable talks I really enjoyed (I personally like single-stream events). Here’s some favorites:
Secure by Design – Laura Bell – slides
I loved the essence of this talk which was basically (in my own words) ‘take security testing off the pedestal’. Laura shared five simple tools and techniques to make security more accessible for developers and testers alike. One key takeaway for me was to focus on getting the language right: ‘security vulnerabilities hide behind acronyms, jargon and assumptions‘. For example, most people understand the different between authentication (providing identity) and authorization (access rights), but both these terms are commonly shortened to ‘auth’ which most people use interchangeably (and confusingly). A great talk.
Innovation through Collaboration – Wil McLellan
This was probably my favorite talk of the day, as it was a well told story about building a collaborative co-working space called ‘EPIC’ for IT start-ups in Christchurch following the 2011 earth quake. The theme was how collaboration encourages innovation, and even companies in competition benefit through collaboration. My key takeaway was how designing a space you can encourage collaboration, for example, in EPIC there’s only a single kitchen for the whole building, and each tenancy doesn’t has it’s own water. So, if someone wants a drink or something to eat they need to visit a communal area. Doing this enough times means you start interacting with others in the building you wouldn’t normally do so in your day to day work.
Through a different lens – Sarah Pulis – slides
Sarah is the Head of Accessibility Services at PwC in Sydney and she shared some good background information about why accessibility is important and some of the key resources to analyse/evaluate and improve accessibility of systems. Whilst I knew most of the resources she mentioned, I thought here talk was very well put together.
Well done to the team that organized the conference.
Auckland was a beautiful city BTW, here’s a couple of pics I took:
