GDG Cloud Sydney is back for a meetup this April! 

Join us for an evening of exciting technical talks, community connections, and knowledge sharing.

Come Hire!

The meetup allocates 10 minutes to people seeking technical jobs or with open roles at their company. If you’re hiring or job hunting, this is your chance to connect with the community.

👉 This meetup is in-person only. 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 a leading Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud partner, the depth and breadth their 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, Mantel Group is people-focused and upholds strong values. Their culture champions trust, empowerment, and diversity with a lean structure emphasizing collaboration, direct communication, and equity.

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.

We will also give out two 1-year subscriptions from JetBrains to any of JetBrains' IDEs in a raffle. Winners can choose from tools like IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, and more.

Talks

Talk: How engineers (technologists) should adapt to the changing AI landscape

As AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, the real value of a developer is changing. It’s no longer just about typing lines of code; it’s about building software that actually solves problems and stays reliable. To stay ahead, engineers need to shift their focus from just "how" to build things to "why" they are building them.

This talk explores how to adapt to this new reality. We’ll discuss why your foundational skills and personal judgment are more important than ever, even when using AI tools. We will also look at why the most successful engineers are those who understand the business side of their work—becoming "product-aware" to ensure their technical efforts create real-world value.

Key Takeaways:

• Use AI Wisely: How to use Gen AI to speed up your work while staying accountable for the results.

• Prioritize Design: Why understanding the "big picture" of a system is your best career move.

• Change Your Mindset: Shifting from a "coder" to a "problem solver" who focuses on business goals.

About the speaker — Geshan Manandhar
Geshan is a seasoned software engineer with over 17 years of software engineering experience. Currently, he serves as a Technical Lead at Safewill in Sydney, Australia. He is a language-agnostic software engineer who believes the value provided to the business is more important than the choice of language or framework. With a keen interest in REST architecture, microservices, agile software engineering, and serverless, he has spoken at tech conferences in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Australia. He is actively involved with the developer community and is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as a Docker Captain. Blogging since 2007, he maintains a well-known tech blog where he shares his insights and ideas.

Event Schedule

• 5:30pm - Event doors open

• 5:45pm - Introduction and hiring connect (5 mins for each group, every participant gets up to 1 min)

• 6:00pm - Talk 1:How engineers (technologists) should adapt to the changing AI landscape — Geshan Manandhar

• 7:00pm - Raffle for 2 JetBrains IDE licenses and 2 programmable tickets

• 7:30pm - Event end