DDD Brisbane 2017 is a conference ran by developers for developers and SSW TV was on hand to catch some of the action!

Speaker: Vanessa Love @fly401

Self care is important. Gardening is therapeutic and allows you to grow healthy food or beautiful flowers. As tech folk, getting away from the computer is important, but sometimes gardening is deemed too hard. It takes time during daylight hours which we might not have. You have to weed, think about plants and nutrition, space and most importantly watering. In Queensland this really can be the make or break of your gardening, as the heat in summer and the dryness in winter means you can lose plants and have little success.

Having spent the last 2 years building and maintaining an aquaponics system, Vanessa has first hand experience in a better way. A system that runs on water and fish, and produces amazing crops of vegetables. It uses less space, requires no weeding or soil and uses much less water than conventional gardening. It requires very little maintenance. Nothing is hooked up to a sensor nor run by app. The only containers are recycled and house the fish. This is hands on and screen free gardening. Any comparison to a tech scenario will be from your own interpretation, this is a gardening talk.

About the speakers

About the speakers

Ms Aquaponics

Vanessa is a Support 'Guru' for Octopus Deploy with a past life in development, manual releases and LAMP. Currently running around to different user groups talking about any of her three passions: deployment automation with Octopus, what developers can get out of supporting their products, and gaming as a user experience lesson.

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