GDG Cloud Sydney is back for a meetup this August! Join us for an evening of interesting technical talks.

Come Hire!

The meetup allocates 10 minutes to people seeking technical jobs or with open roles at their company.

This meetup is in the in-person format; there are no plans to stream the event.

Partners

This meetup is organised in partnership with Mantel Group. They harness technologies that transform business operations in the real world. With capabilities spanning Cloud, Data, Digital and Security, they merge emerging technologies with innovative design and industry expertise to enhance your business. With deep technical specialisation and as leading Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud partners, the depth and breadth our solutions offer is unparalleled. Mantel Group is your partner for end-to-end digital transformation.

Ranked in Australia's top 10 Best Workplaces by Great Place To Work Australia for four years in a row, we are people-focused and uphold strong values. Our culture champions trust, empowerment, and diversity with a lean structure emphasizing collaboration, direct communication, and equity.

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"Dented Code teaches coding skills that you need to become a full stack developer and help you advance your career, pursue your dream job, or enjoy the freedom of life as a freelancer." - Learn more on their website.

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We will also give out two 1-year subscriptions from JetBrains  to any of JetBrains' IDEs in a raffle. You can use the 100% discount code on CLion, DataGrip, DataSpell, GoLand, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PhpStorm, PyCharm, ReSharper, ReSharper C++, Rider, RubyMine, WebStorm, or dotUltimate.

Talks

Talk 1: Why Go? From the lens of a polyglot developer

As a developer who has worked across multiple languages and ecosystems, I’ve seen the strengths and quirks of many tools firsthand. This talk dives into Go not from documentation or hype, but from the practical lens of a polyglot developer who has used it in real-world projects. We'll explore what makes Go compelling—its concurrency model, simplicity, and deployment story—as well as where it might fall short compared to other languages.

We'll take a practical look at why Go was chosen for cloud services, internal tools, and distributed systems. You'll hear honest insights on where Go shines, where it doesn't, and how it fits into a modern polyglot tech stack.

About the speaker - Nanik Tolaram

Nanik is a prolific coder and active open-source contributor with expertise across a broad range of languages, including C, C++, Java, Go, and Python. He is a recognised authority in Android customisation for niche and vertical markets, having presented at the Sydney Android User Group and contributed as an Android Platform Technical Writer for ODROID Magazine. With a strong background in the finance and investment sectors, Nanik has co-authored "Becoming a Full Stack Go Developer". He is also the author of "Software Development with Go: Cloud-Native Programming using Golang with Linux and Docker"

Talk 2: From managing projects to engineering data: my tech experience as a woman

In this talk, I will share my personal experience of transitioning from a project manager in IBM China to a hands-on data engineer in Australia.

After relocating to Sydney and taking a multiple-year break to look after my family, I faced challenges of reentering the workforce in a rapidly evovling tech landscape. Rather than returning to management roles, I chose to embrace a new direction, a direction I always want to try. I went back to university to pursue a Master degree in Digital Health and Data Science. After graduation starting fresh in a data consulting firm, I immersed myself in data engineering, analytics and machine learning projects with hands on experience in modern cloud platform like GCP.

I hope to offer insights and encouragement for anyone, especially girls, navigating a non-linear career path with persistence and lifelong learning.

About the speaker - Christine Zhang

Christine is a highly skilled data engineer and analytics consultant with expertise in SQL and Python for data extraction, transformation and advanced analytics. She has built scalable ETL pipelines using Python to process complex data and load into data warehouses of AWS Redshift and BigQuery. Christine is proficient in developing data models that support robust reporting and insights generation, with hands-on experience using DBT, Airflow, Tableau. She has achieved multiple certifications, including DBT Certified Developer, AWS Data Engineer, GCP Machine Learning Professional, and Databricks Data Engineering and Machine Learning Professional.

Event Schedule

5:30pm - Event doors open

5:45pm - Introduction and hiring connect for those hiring/wanting to be hired (5 mins for each group, and every individual gets 1 min max)

6:00pm -  Why Go? From the lens of a polyglot developer - Nanik Tolaram

6:45pm - From managing projects to engineering data: my tech experience as a woman - Christine Zhang

7:30pm - Raffle for the 2 JetBrains IDE licenses

8:00pm - Event end