StripeCon APAC started with a bang

The first ever StripeCon Asia-Pacific (Sydney - 9 November) was a great success, with over 80 attendees from the wider open source community, as well as developers and digital leaders in the public sector and commercial enterprises. The conference was a joint effort between SilverStripe Ltd and Web Directions.

Themed as ‘the future of Digital Transformation’, StripeCon APAC was packed with talks on successful Digital Transformation projects and open source innovations. SilverStripe CEO and Co-founder, Sam Minnée, started the first talk with his view on what Digital Transformation meant for you and your organisation — both now and in the next year 5 years.  Sam emphasized that having Agile mindsets was the key to successful digital transformation. The new dad compared Agile to gripe water.

One of the key messages from Sam’s talk was that the future of Digital Transformation was about trust, especially in the banking and financial sector. ‘Trust is an asset’ and ‘you cannot automate trust’.

The morning continued with a presentation from representatives of NZ Department of Internal Affairs, Bene Anderson and Paul Murray. They showed some challenges that the NZ government faced in the digital projects and how the Common Web Platform and open source helped them tackle these challenges. Challenges ranged from having everyone agree on the terms such as ‘being Agile’, to choosing what software to adopt and trying to avoid complications in building new technologies. It was awesome to hear that NZ government was becoming more and more ‘open source’, with a new SilverStripe theme being funded by the government and open sourced in the future.

More technical talks were delivered later in the morning. Stevie Mayhew of Little Giant looked at how different user experience had become in the digital and physical world. For example, when people had food now, it wouldn't be a simple ‘dig in and enjoy the food’ – it might be ‘rearrange the food to the right position and angle, take a perfect photo and upload it to Instagram’. Understanding better your user experience would help you develop better applications. This motto helped Little Giant run a very successful Junk Free June campaign. Paul Kotz and Wing Ho from Canlab also presented their case study on building better prototypes with SilverStripe CMS and ‘would only use something else (other CMSs) under threat of violence’.

The conference was resumed in the afternoon with SilverStripe Solution Architect, Ingo Schommer, giving you the ins and outs of SilverStripe 4. Ingo even gave you a taste of ‘what’s beyond SilverStripe 4’: content blocks, personalisation and A/B testing. He also had a little chat with us on the break.

There were also a couple of fascinating case studies on using SilverStripe CMS from SilverStripe Australian partners. Guy Watson and Michael Caruana from Internetrix had us at awe of how they overcame the ‘Great Firewall of China’ to successfully build a multi-region synchronised SilverStripe deployment in China. Stuart Gonsai of Wolf Interactive got us all excited about what SilverStripe CMS could do with his enthusiasm on the product and how it helped his company build multiple sites for the Ian Potter project. Shifting to SilverStripe was the best decision ever’, Stuart said. ‘Using SilverStripe, we can do anything’.

Later in the afternoon, SilverStripe developer, Simon Erkelens, gave his perspective on Digital Transformation and how it had affected us all, especially when it came to security issues. Simon challenged attendees to find his middle name via the Internet in exchange for some sweet swag but no one seemed to succeed (not even till today). Colin Westacott from Ephox delivered the last talk on the new TinyMCE and Ephox Cognitive that improved content authors’ experience in editing a CMS.

StripeCon APAC was finished with some live-streamed lightning talks from Christchurch City Council, Stead Lane, Wolf Interactive and Canlab.

Special thanks to our sponsors who have made this event possible: Internetrix, Haylix, TinyMCE (Ephox), Solutions Outsourced, Stead Lane, Sanicki Lawyers, Canlab and Wolf Interactive.

Coming soon!

We will be releasing talk videos from StripeCon APAC soon. If you want to be the first to know, please sign up to our blog!