Driving back from Craigieburn in the weekend, Castle Hill Peak, Canterbury

What a fabulous event at the new Te Pae convention center in Christchurch drawing 800 people from the tech community to gather, learn and connect with new & old friends.

The event kicked off with product guru from Silicon Valley Rich Mironov who had some valuable lessons on product development and he couldn’t stress enough how important it was to work directly with customers to understand their needs. He also made the point that due to not doing this you tend to have to ‘throw out’ half of the engineering time which is ‘product waste’.

And what is the most scarce resource? Developer engineer time & attention are the most scarce resource in the world.

Tiffany Bloomquist from AWS did a great talk on Leveraging tech to thrive in the current environment. Hear innovative customer stories and tips for how local businesses and employees can grow, scale, innovate, and thrive in today’s current economic environment. This was great to see some data on cloud adoption in NZ and hear how NZ businesses were benefiting from being able to scale and she highlighted some of these Kiwi businesses using AWS to do so.

Brendan Muscamp from Loom did a fantastic presentation Migrating 2 million customers without breaking it - a walk through of Loom's chosen strategy for migrating their Chrome extension to a new recording technology.

He talked us through some hard problems re-writing their core recording engine that the product is based on and explaining some complexities & hot tips like ‘feature flags’ in a simple, interesting way to a packed crowd of devs.

Paul, Louie, product guru Gary Jensen (Phocus ex Telogis / Verizon) & George

One of the great things about the tech summit is it is for everyone to learn & connect - from students onwards…

I was priviledged to introduce a couple of students from the UC school of Entrepreneurship / Entre who are studying marketing and have founded a company Snippet, which they’re building a Mobile App MVP which is like Tinder for student jobs. They aim to solve the billion dollar problem of student debt by helping connect student workers on demand to do micro jobs (2-3 hours etc) from pouring pints, to designing logos, digging holes, cutting hair to just about anything. It was lovely to introduce these guys to the tech community and I was thrilled to see some of my industry contacts spend some time with them discussing their ideas and offering valuable advice.

Futurist Ben Reid did a great talk on Fast Forward Aotearoa: How emerging technology is defining the future of New Zealand... and what we can do about it.

Have you heard of Google Deep Mind’s new AI AlphaFold that can predict 3D models of protein structures and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology? Imagine being able to understand diseases more quickly and develop drugs to fight them quicker? Or develop enzymes to break down plastics quicker? Or remove carbon from the atmosphere?

So many awesome speakers(I couldn't seem them all but they're covered here in the tech summit program), a fabulous day of and connecting with like minded people.

What a great day of awesome speakers and connecting with like minded people.

A huge thanks to the Canterbury Tech committee, team, helpers, sponsors, speakers & participants for putting on another memorable, well run event that the tech community can be proud of! The next one is Friday 27th September 2024 put it in your diary and see you there :-):-):-)

An inspirational talk by Vaughan Fergusson, founder of Vend to finish the day

I’m Paul, lover of coffee, dogs, biking, surfing & skiing. Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within software, web, mobile, blockchain, data, cloud infrastructure, security & networks in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.

Canterbury Tech Summit at Te Pae Christchurch 2023