FREE upcoming online Sydney Tech Conferences, Meetups & Hackathons You Should Be Attending in 2020

Moscone Center - TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 San Francisco Timelapse (view original embed)

17 March 2020 EDIT: Since COVID-19 hit around the world, a lot of these conferences have shifted their delivery online such as Google's Next conference. Some have cancelled. Best to check on their websites for up to date information. Hopefully 2021 brings back face to face conferences!

Hi there,

Life is more fun with conferences & meetups; somehow everything just seems to click so smoothly at events like these and you end up with a plethora of relatable connections and opportunities at your fingertips. 🎉🗣

I haven't written an article in a few months and I recently ran across an AWS Summit invite email and a few tech meetups in Sydney are starting to spring back to life again after the Christmas / New Years holiday period. I've been to these conferences 2-3 times over the last 3 years and easily over 100s of meetup events in that time and wouldn't recommend them if they weren't good so without further ado.

Sydney doesn't get as many of the big tech conferences as San Francisco or New York (E.g. Google's Cloud Next, I/O, Marketing Live, Facebook F8, Apple's WWDC, TechCrunch's Disrupt), but I'm happy AWS & Google go big on their Cloud ones here. Probably our biggest conferences of the year next to StartCon and Web Directions (paid), TechCrunch did a Battlefield Sydney one here in 2017 but it was more of a one off conference sadly and wasn't as big as their San Francisco or New York ones.

TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 with 7k Attendees

In 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt was focused around health & work productivity tech.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 SF Battlefield #2 - Nutrigene - Blood Mineral Analysis (view original embed)

TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 SF Battlefield #2 - Elevian - Longer Life (view original embed)

Conferences:

AWS Summit Sydney

When? 31 March - 2 April 2020.

What? A huge 3 day conference around AWS Cloud technologies and company success stories.

Who? Anyone Cloud focused either technically or from a business standpoint, from newcomers to advanced users.

Sign-up Link: https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/sydney/

Google Cloud Summit Sydney + Onboard

When: TBA (but usually around Q3 of the year - September, Onboard is a separate newcomers event usually held in Q1 of the year around February - March).

What? A 1 day conference around GCP tech and success stories. Includes lunch, pastries, coffee/tea and even cocktails last year! Yep! Google knows how to party! 🎉 Often there's dance music playing in the background too, a bit different from the AWS Summit.

Google Cloud Summit Sydney 2019 (view original embed)

Google Cloud Summit 2019!

Who? Anyone curious about Google Cloud tech or wanting to dive deeper into their Cloud products. There are Google Cloud Architects on hand to ask advice from too.

Link: TBA (usually selected people are invited by email for both Onboard and Google Cloud Summit, I will update this post when I get that link).

2017 Keynote: https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/summit-sydney-keynote-live

Other Google video links: https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/#upcoming_events

Third party review of the 2019 GCP Summit: https://medium.com/@suwindev19/i-would-like-to-share-my-experience-of-the-google-cloud-summit-sydney-sep-2019-lessons-learned-6b35acc2f12

Google Cloud Summit 2018 at Carriageworks :)

Google Cloud Summit Sydney (view original embed)

Red Hat Forum

A colleague recommended me this one, however I haven't been to it.

When? TBA, could be around November.

What? A free conference dedicated to Linux professionals

Who? Linux System Admins

Link: https://www.redhat.com/en/red-hat-forum-apac-2019

Video:

Highlights Video from Red Hat Forum Sydney 2018 (view original embed)

WordCamp Sydney

When? Usually in Q4 of the year (Nov in 2019), it was hosted in July in 2018.

What? A 2 day conference on a range of topics around WordPress, running and marketing your own websites for Freelancers or small businesses as well as Enterprises using WordPress. In the past there have been talks around cybersecurity, web design (Page Builders), load testing, headless WordPress, SEO, growth marketing and general debates over which plugins to use.

You can catch up on the 2019 and past talks for free here or WordCamp TV.

Who? WordPressers or people thinking about starting a website.

Cost? It's very cheap at around $70 or you can Volunteer to get in for free and includes lunch on both days. (Usually a lot of sandwiches + pastries and coffee/tea).

You can read up on the summary and review here. https://2019.sydney.wordcamp.org/blog/ I really do love the open nature of the hosts around this event. They even published their entire costs for running and revenue of the event as well as freely uploading all talks to YouTube + WordPress TV for later viewing. Not many conferences will do that these days, especially not small/medium community operated ones such as these. I am close with the Organisers as well since they run WordPress Sydney too, so if you need anything, I'm happy to help answer any questions here. They are always looking for Volunteers and talkers as well for their meetup. Contact James Carmondy for more.

2019 Link: https://2019.sydney.wordcamp.org/

2020 will be (once it has launched): https://2020.sydney.wordcamp.org/

Welcome to WordCamp Sydney 2019 (view original embed)

DevFest Sydney

When? Usually in Q4 of the year, Nov in 2019.

What? A 1 day conference focused around Google Dev technologies, such as Flutter/JavaScript, Android Dev and GCP. This one isn't recorded.

Who? Google tech based Developers. It's hosted by the same hosts over at the GDG Sydney meetup.

Cost: It's very cheap at around $16 and includes lunch. (Usually sandwiches + coffee/tea).

Link: https://devfest.org.au/

StartCon

Malcom Turnbull Gave a Speech on Innovation and the NBN in Australia

When? Usually around early December.

What? A 2 day conference around Growth Marketing + Startup success stories, Speakers from Slack, NASA, Google & Atlassian have starred at the conference in the past 3 years.

Who? Anyone interested in startups or online marketing.

Cost: Sometimes can be purchased for $1 Founder tickets or check out the Volunteer or Hackathon tickets. Sometimes free coffee is given out by Twilio or other sponsors.

Link: https://www.startcon.com/

Video of an early Facebook employee who worked on Ads for FB (his company, AdGrok was acquired by Facebook).

Ex-Facebook (AdGrok) Ad lead inventor at StartCon 2017 (view original embed)

Spark Festival

When? Usually around September - October.

What? Many cheap or free startup talk events scattered around Sydney. Scott Farquhar spoke in 2018 here. I was lucky enough to get in for free for this.

Who? Anyone interested in startups or online marketing.

Cost: Ranges per day but each talk shouldn't be more than $25.

Link: https://sparkfestival.co/

Spark Festival - AMA with Scott Farquhar - co-founder of Atlassian (view original embed)

I highly recommend this talk below if you have time, it was really insightful into Atlassian's upbringing.

A fireside chat with Atlassian's Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes (view original embed)

Web Directions Summit (not free, but Volunteers can get in for free if you ask the Organiser).

When? Usually around November

What? A 2 day conference around Product/UX Design, Development & Leadership

Who? Anyone interested in startups, online marketing, UX/Product Design or Enterprise teams.

Cost: It's quite expensive. tickets usually start from $995 and go up to 2k the closer to the date. On rare occasions you may be able to get a Volunteer ticket from the Organisers. I'm not a fan of expensive conferences, I've always managed to grab a Volunteer ticket at the expensive ones, including TechCrunch Disrupt SF, StartCon and Web Directions. When there's a will there's a way.

I found Networking to be a little harder at an event at this, maybe because of the price point, but I still managed to meet people from the ABC and other states here.

Link: https://www.webdirections.org/wds/

Meetups

I generally find meetups much more easier to form closer bonds with people and at a faster pace than at Conferences where people can feel quite distant between the huge talks. Meetups feel a lot warmer and closer with the people around you and generally have more niche topics to hone in on as smaller community groups.

Meetups I try to attend each month:

Marketing & Website Management:

Google Marketing Platform Sydney (I frequent this one).
WordPress Sydney (I frequent this one).
Amazon Selling - Australia
Sydney Shopify Meetup

Startups:

Lean Startup Sydney (I frequent this one).
Sydney Startup Community
Sydney Startup Society (I frequent this one).
Startup Sessions by Startcon (I frequent this one).
Technology Leadership Series by Startcon
Growth Hackers Sydney at Freelancer (I frequent this one).
Startup Grind Sydney (I frequent this one).

Slack's CTO

Slack's CTO, Cal Henderson At Startup Grind

Startup Grind March 2018 (view original embed)

FuckUp Nights Sydney
Fishburners Sydney (I frequent this one nearly every Friday).

Sydney SEO (run by my former boss from an SEO Agency)
Online Marketing Sydney
The Digital Marketing Connection
AdTech MeetUp Sydney
Data & Analytics Wednesday Sydney

Web/App Design

Sydney UX/UI Meetup (I frequent this one)
Sydney Designers (Co-run by an old Designer / Developer friend of mine from UTS)
Sydney Design Thinking Meetup
Design System
Product Hunt

Cloud / DevOps:

GDG Cloud Sydney
DevOps Sydney (I frequent this one, but it usually doesn't have food, just good talks)
Amazon Web Services - Sydney User Group
Sydney Linux User Group
Port80 (was actually my first official meetup back in early 2016!)

Software Development:

Others:

Check my meetup groups for more. I also co-run Sydney 8 Pool if anyone wants to ever let off some steam. :)

Hackathons

Some notable hackathons worth mentioning are:

Startup Weekend Sydney (I went in 2014, although I haven't seen a recent one in a few years)

My team, SoundNinja, ended up winning Startup Weekend 2014 - Although we were the biggest team there. It was a Chrome add-on to create affiliate links to music artists on any page which mentioned their name. I wrote an article on my experience here: https://medium.com/@stefancaliaro/it-was-all-smooth-sailing-until-it-hit-me-day-two-startup-weekend-sydney-2014-3854fd87c17e

GovHack
Facebook Hackathon Sydney (Usually invited by email or Facebook Event, and usually only open to students sadly). The winners end up going onto Facebook's HQ for a regional hackathon tournament with all expenses paid (pretty sure). To get in though you will need to complete an in-depth HackerRank coding test. Here's a Facebook Live video from 4 years ago of this Hackathon: https://www.facebook.com/hackathon/videos/10153443470225988/
NASA Space Apps Sydney Hack 2-4 October 2020.
AWS runs a few hack days around AI and IoT too, I went to AWSshine in 2015 at BlueChilli. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/meet-the-winner-and-finalists-of-the-2019-aws-hack-for-good-competition/

https://aws.amazon.com/events/

If you're a student, look out for your local university or school running hackathons, e.g. At UTS Startups or UNSW's MCIC which have startup programs, workspaces and grants to work on your idea.
Other Hackthons

I highly recommend joining the Hackathons Australia Facebook group, now in its 5th year. https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonsaustralia/

Hackathons Australia's 5th Birthday Party

And

Sydney Startups which has over 25k members (just a warning though, don't overshare or share general startup posts in here, the admins only like content specific to the Sydney Startup scene and disallow self promotion - otherwise you will risk getting banned, if you are banned the group is still publicly accessible via incognito mode or a second account but it just becomes more annoying to access). https://www.facebook.com/groups/sydneystartups/

There is also a Tech Sydney forum but has a hefty fee associated with it, you can search startups for free though and check out Angle.co (Angel List) for local startups hiring nearby.

https://www.techsydney.com.au/

Accelerator programs:

Antler (Now taking applications for their 3rd intake this year in Sydney)
Startmate (Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian is a Board Director)
muru-D (owned by Telstra)
H2 Ventures (FinTech Accelerator)
BlueChilli (In Town Hall)

All in all, I only go to meetups and conferences which aim to offer decent instructional content and valuable networking opportunities. I have once found a job through a meetup and many potential leads or contacts with future jobs.

I often record the talks on my Facebook timeline of Siteroo.

Another place to hang around would be The Startup Hub in Sydney, there are usually Startup career fairs going on there and general startup events from investors or other companies. Also, just saying hi to people you meet around the building can go a long way! You never know who you might meet around the corner. The great thing about cities is they're serendipitous as Scott Farquhar once said in his video above.

I'm always open to chatting, feel free to message me about anything or recommend new events to add to the list.

Thank you for reading and hopefully you can attend some of these great events this year!

Kind Regards,

Stefan Caliaro

Web Engineer & Marketer at Siteroo.design & Greenpeace.org.au

stefs.site