Thursday
Room 5
11:40 - 12:40
(UTC+10)
Talk (60 min)
Accidentally Levelling Up Your Career with Personal Projects
Some of the best things we build as programmers never ship to customers - they live in our homes, our budgeting processes, our daily tasks, and our random weekend experiments. From automating lights to building interactive budget trackers, personal dashboards, or tools that simply make life a bit smoother (usually!), these projects quietly become the most powerful way to learn new tech.
In this talk, we'll explore how personal projects act as a low-pressure playground for levelling up - staying current with frameworks, trying new cloud services, strengthening patterns and architecture skills, and building confidence through hands-on experimentation. I'll share real examples from my own projects, from practical automations to things where I dared to think "I wonder if I could build that?", and will talk about some of the exciting platforms and tools that are out there now that make it ridiculously easy to prototype whatever wild idea pops into your head.
Key takeaways of this talk will be inspiration for your next "for fun" build, an understanding of why these projects matter, and a reminder that some of the best learning happens away from your day job.
Bron Thulke
Bron has been developing code since the turn of the century, and loves learning new tech. Her motto is "if you're not learning, you're not moving". Yes she just made that up, she is a programmer not a wordsmith. Bron is the CTO at YouLive to Travel.