Canterbury Tech Summit 2024

A huge turn out for the 2024 Canterbury Tech summit hosted at the stunning conference center Te Pae in central Christchurch. With many great speakers, amazing food and of course meeting old friends and new. Major themes were AI, Security, Data, digital transformation and software product design & development.

Gotta love Christchurch a bike ride through Hagley Park on a crisp, sunny day to an awesome conference - what way to start the day! Thanks to my amazing wife for taking the kids to school and going to their final assembly of the term ;-)

A great intro by Louisa Taylor, organiser extraordinaire and ex rocker (who knew she played in a rock band in Japan), she gave some good news about the Canterbury region which is weathering the economic storm seeing positive growth and hiring.

Business confidence is up and Christchurch companies are hiring!

The key note speaker futurist and always hilarious Melissa Clark-Reynolds-Clark as usual pushing into the uncomfortable truths - covered what and where ‘copyright’ and ‘personhood’ will lie with AI using people images & audio. She cited a recent Anthony Bourdain docu (a famous chef who has passed away) in which AI was used to create voice overs - so where does the copyright sit? Who gets sued if it all goes wrong? Surely it’s the person creating the ‘prompts’ !?!? So a new area of legal accountability is upon us.

IT security guru Dmitry Souleliac did a really insightful talk and some good solid reminders on how to keep Kiwi businesses safe.

Most companies still approach security with a high concern, low priority attitude which was a great line and often seen in the IT industry - a lot of talk and little action until something happens and it’s too late.

For small companies in NZ approach they should their security by focusing on three things:

1) Train

2) Back-up

3) Plan?

I managed to ask a question through the conference app (and get an answer) Are you seeing AI increase the amount of attacks globally?? No increase it seems, much the same although everyone knows systems experience hundred and thousands of attacks daily. I also recently asked this same questions to one of our cloud architect contractors who specialises in AWS (Including security) and got the same answer which is interesting to hear.

One of the salient points Dmitry made was when we have hacks or breaches we lose trust in the digital services of a company. He gave an example of his mum thinking her bank account had been compromised and thus she would have to go into the branch. This loss of trust and confidence is going to cause customers to turn up at an office and then the bank, organisation or company will have to deal with this.

Another question asked what was the most common security attack on NZ companies? The answer is still the good old phishing attack by email. Stay safe out their New Zealand

An amazing turn out - great feels :-)

There were also some great interactive sessions in the aftternoon ‘What is behind great software and App design? An interactive session using the concept of Balance to deliver successful App development’ by the legendary Reuben Bijl, Managing Director of Smudge.

Followed by the awesome Tas Gould (GSD Alliance) & Matt Duffy, Head of Product (Caterpillar Trimble Control Technologies) talking on ‘Product in Motion: What does good look like?’ Who took us through an interactive assessment and mapping exercise they used for their own business & teams.

Lastly I joined a really insightful session - AI for Developers Masterclass: from RAGS to riches with Eduard Liebenberger (CTO at Streamliners) & Grant Patterson, Principal Solutions Architect at search company Elastic (as in Elastic search) what a privilege. We learnt about RAGS - retrieval augmented generation. This is a technique that’s helping AI systems in very simple terms stop hallucinating or giving incorrect answers.

It was a very insightful talk and a huge confidence boost for the crowd with key messaging to give it a go and get your AI modes in production but also to ‘cover your butts’ and consider the risks.

What an amazing day of learning, laughs and connection. I want to thank everyone involved especially the Canterbury Tech committee for organising, the amazing speakers, conference staff, sponsors and everyone who was involved in making this annual event such a special one for the tech community in Christchurch & people who came from across NZ & overseas.

I’m Paul, lover of coffee, animals, biking, surfing & skiing. Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within software, web, mobile, AI, blockchain, data, cloud infrastructure, security & networks in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.?