Most of what we build outlives the team that built it. Priya looks at a decade of incident reviews, migrations and rewrites at a large hosting provider and pulls out the habits that made old systems pleasant to change and the shortcuts that made them painful. Expect concrete practices rather than predictions.
You will be able to
Recognise the early signs that a codebase is becoming hard to change
Apply three lightweight habits that keep systems maintainable
Make the case for maintenance work in planning conversations
A fast closing session drawn from member submissions: a council booking system, an open-source date picker, a migration off a legacy CMS, a public transport accessibility audit and an internal tool that saved a support team a day a week. Each speaker covers what they built, what broke and what they learned.
You will be able to
See how peers scoped and delivered real projects
Collect practical lessons from five different contexts
When a client rebranded mid-project, Paperbark Studio found its tokens were named after colours rather than purposes. Mei Lin walks through the three-tier token structure they moved to, the tooling that keeps design files and code in sync, and the naming arguments worth having early.
You will be able to
Structure tokens in primitive, semantic and component tiers
Name tokens by purpose so themes can change safely
Set up a review step that keeps design and code aligned
Tom explains how a payments platform moved tenant checks out of hundreds of query sites and into row-level security policies. He covers policy design, testing policies like any other code, indexing for policy predicates and the connection-pooling details that catch teams out.
You will be able to
Design row-level security policies for tenant isolation
Test policies automatically in CI
Avoid the common performance problems with policy predicates
Grace has coached a dozen new tech leads at a civic technology agency. She shares the 90-day plan they now use: what to learn in the first fortnight, which meetings to keep, how to delegate work you could do faster yourself, and how to tell whether it is going well.
Hands-on: auditing a checkout flow against WCAG 2.2
When
Day 1, Thu 19 Aug · AEST
Where
River Room
Level
Intermediate
CPD
2 points
Limited to 30 seats, first come, first served on the day. Starring this session does not hold a seat.
Working in pairs, you will audit a deliberately flawed checkout flow, log findings against WCAG 2.2 success criteria and prioritise fixes. Hannah and Sione cover the criteria added in 2.2, including focus appearance, target size and accessible authentication, and how to write findings developers act on.
You will be able to
Run a keyboard and screen-reader pass on a real flow
Event-driven without the drama: queues, retries and idempotency
When
Day 1, Thu 19 Aug · AEST
Where
Bridge Room · also streamed online
Level
Intermediate
CPD
1 point
Ravi tells the story of a notification system that duplicated, dropped and reordered messages, and the fixes that settled it: idempotency keys, outbox tables, sensible retry policies and dead-letter queues somebody actually reads. The examples use plain Postgres and a managed queue.
You will be able to
Make message handlers idempotent
Use the outbox pattern to publish events reliably
Choose retry and dead-letter policies deliberately
Panel: Hiring juniors when the entry-level work is automated
When
Day 1, Thu 19 Aug · AEST
Where
Lantern Room
Level
All levels
CPD
1 point
Tasks that once taught juniors the job are increasingly handled by tools. Callum Fraser asks a panel of hiring managers how they now assess juniors, what a first year looks like, and what the industry risks if it stops training new people. Questions from the floor are welcome.
You will be able to
Understand how junior hiring practices are shifting
Compare approaches to onboarding and training juniors
Server components in production: what we would do again
When
Day 1, Thu 19 Aug · AEST
Where
River Room · also streamed online
Level
Intermediate
CPD
1 point
Luca's team moved a retail storefront to server components last year. He shares the measured changes in bundle size and time to interactive, the caching bugs that reached production, and the boundaries between server and client code they would draw differently next time.
You will be able to
Weigh the trade-offs of server components with real data
Workshop: a zero-downtime deploy pipeline in an hour
When
Day 1, Thu 19 Aug · AEST
Where
Bridge Room
Level
Intermediate
CPD
2 points
Limited to 24 seats, first come, first served on the day. Starring this session does not hold a seat.
Using containers and a small sample app, you will build a pipeline that deploys a new version alongside the old one, checks its health and switches traffic only when it is ready. Elena then breaks it on purpose so you can see the rollback work. Laptops with Docker installed are required.
You will be able to
Set up a blue-green deployment with health checks
Configure automatic rollback on failure
Explain the database migration rules that keep deploys safe
Zoe has run an independent web practice for eight years. She compares day rates, fixed-price quotes and retainers using her own anonymised numbers, explains how she scopes work to protect her margins, and shares the contract clauses that saved her the most trouble.
Motion with purpose: animation that respects reduced-motion users
When
Day 1, Thu 19 Aug · AEST
Where
River Room · also streamed online
Level
Intermediate
CPD
1 point
Yuki shows before-and-after examples from a media publisher's apps where motion clarified state changes, and others where it caused discomfort. The talk covers the prefers-reduced-motion media query, view transitions and a simple review checklist for motion in design critiques.
Ben runs engineering at a twelve-person company. He describes the small observability stack that caught their last three outages early: structured logs, a handful of service-level indicators, sampled tracing and alerts tied to customer impact rather than CPU graphs.
Nadia reviews dozens of technical proposals a quarter at an insurance group. She shares the one-page structure her teams adopted, the questions that should be answered before any diagram is drawn, and how to run a review meeting that ends with a decision.
Assistants in the editor: keeping judgement in the loop
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
Wharf Hall · all streams · also streamed online
Level
All levels
CPD
1 point
Daniel shares the numbers his team collected after rolling out AI coding assistants: review times, defect rates, onboarding speed and where developers stopped trusting the tools. He argues that the teams getting value are the ones that invested in review culture and tests first.
You will be able to
Weigh the measured benefits and costs of coding assistants
Identify review and testing practices that make assistants safer
Panel: The next five years of web work in Australia
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
Wharf Hall · all streams · also streamed online
Level
All levels
CPD
1 point
To close the conference, Amara Eze puts the questions members sent in during both days to a panel spanning platform engineering, product leadership, freelancing and performance. Topics include accessibility regulation, the changing junior role and which skills are worth investing in now.
You will be able to
Hear contrasting views on where the industry is heading
Identify skills worth developing over the next few years
The performance budget your marketing team will sign
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
River Room · also streamed online
Level
Intermediate
CPD
1 point
Jess explains how her team linked page speed to enquiry rates and used it to agree a performance budget with marketing. She covers measuring field data, budgeting third-party scripts and the automated checks that stop the budget quietly eroding release by release.
Arjun shows how his team made a single schema the source of truth for request validation, OpenAPI documentation and generated client types. He covers versioning, the tests that catch drift between code and docs, and the cultural shift needed to keep the schema first.
You will be able to
Use one schema for validation, docs and client types
Detect drift between implementation and documentation
Marcus leads delivery at a digital agency where client priorities shift often. He shares the weekly update format, the trade-off conversation and the simple priority log that helped his teams push back constructively and stopped work being thrown away.
Workshop: an accessible design-system component from scratch
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
River Room
Level
Intermediate
CPD
2 points
Limited to 30 seats, first come, first served on the day. Starring this session does not hold a seat.
In this hands-on session you will build a tabs component with the correct roles, keyboard behaviour and focus handling, style it with design tokens, and test it with a screen reader. Mei Lin and Hannah bring the design and accessibility perspectives together. Laptops required.
Caching at the edge without serving the wrong user's data
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
Bridge Room · also streamed online
Level
Advanced
CPD
1 point
Tom returns with the post-incident review of a caching bug that briefly served personalised pages to the wrong users. He explains how cache keys and vary headers really behave at the edge, how to split public and private content, and the tests that now guard against a repeat.
From developer to engineering manager: an honest account
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
Lantern Room
Level
Introductory
CPD
1 point
Callum describes his move from senior developer to managing a team of nine: the loss of flow, the first difficult performance conversation, learning to measure his week differently, and why he nearly went back. He ends with questions to ask yourself before making the move.
You will be able to
Understand the realities of a first management role
Sione redesigned a health provider's online intake form after watching patients struggle with it. He covers question order, error messages that help, autocomplete attributes, saving progress and the usability testing method that found the biggest problems in a single afternoon.
Elena Petrova moderates a candid discussion with engineers who have shipped AI features in logistics, analytics and education. They compare how they evaluate output quality, control costs, handle outages from model providers and decide when a feature should not use a model at all.
Limited to 20 seats, first come, first served on the day. Starring this session does not hold a seat.
Kirsten introduces a short structure for mentoring conversations and then runs three rounds of practice in groups of three, rotating mentor, mentee and observer. You leave with feedback on your own approach and a one-page guide for setting up mentoring in your team or through the WDAA mentoring programme.
You will be able to
Use a simple structure for mentoring conversations
CSS in 2027: container queries, cascade layers and :has() in real projects
When
Day 2, Fri 20 Aug · AEST
Where
River Room · also streamed online
Level
Intermediate
CPD
1 point
Oliver audited a large product's stylesheets after two years of adopting modern CSS. He shows where container queries replaced fragile breakpoint logic, how cascade layers ended specificity battles with third-party styles, and the :has() selectors that turned out to be performance problems.
Sam led a three-year migration using the strangler-fig pattern: a routing layer in front of the old system, new routes released one at a time and data synchronised in both directions until each part could be switched off. He shares the timeline, the setbacks and the metrics that kept the business on side.
You will be able to
Plan an incremental migration with a routing layer
Keep data consistent between old and new systems
Report migration progress to non-technical stakeholders
Leilani runs a speaker mentoring scheme for a developer community. She covers choosing a topic you know well enough, structuring a fifteen-minute talk, rehearsing without a script and managing nerves, then invites a few volunteers to try a sixty-second pitch for their own talk.