How GovTech is engineering Singapore’s digital future

What do a digital marriage registry service, a job platform, and smart city technologies have in common?

They’re all developed by GovTech, the government agency in charge of driving Singapore’s digital transformation efforts.

Having such a wide repertoire of solutions speaks to the agency’s breadth of knowledge in tech, and every two years, it shares its multifaceted experience with the wider ecosystem through the Stack Developer Conference.

“We build tech for the public good by developing user-friendly digital services for citizens and businesses, while engineering a digital government that makes lives better for Singaporeans,” Chia Hsiao Ming, director of core engineering products at GovTech, says on behalf of the conference’s organizing team.

Chia Hsiao Ming, director of core engineering products at GovTech / Photo credit: GovTech

This year, the event will be held from November 6 to 7 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre. The conference will feature eight keynote speakers – including Gregor Hohpe, Suthen Thomas Paradatheth, Chang Sau Sheong, and Lillian Shieh – eight plenary speakers, and more than 30 short presentations known as lightning talks. The overall theme of the event is “Supercharge Your Digital Engineering Productivity.”

“Given that this is a conference targeting developers, we want to seize the opportunity to help key industry players and the government exchange key knowledge surrounding this topic,” Chia adds.

Growing with the industry

The Stack Developer Conference has evolved significantly since the inaugural edition in 2018, which focused on shifting legacy from on-premise IT systems to cloud-based technologies.

The 2018 event was also where GovTech introduced the Singapore Government Technology Stack, a suite of standardized software platforms – such as continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines and API gateways – designed to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of government apps.

“It was a signal to vendors that the government would be shifting towards cloud technologies, in line with the global tech industry,” says Chia.

Participants at one of the sessions in 2018 / Photo credit: GovTech

As the Singaporean tech landscape matured, the conference focused on the prevailing topic at the time, which is how it landed on this year’s theme.

“The tech industry is increasingly interested in improving developer productivity and the impact that platform engineering has on developer productivity,” Chia explains. “The emergence of new technologies like generative AI in the last couple of years has opened new ways to improve how developers work and do things.”

Beyond that, GovTech has put its money where its mouth is by introducing digital solutions within the event itself. For this year’s edition, Stack attendees will be able to use GovWallet – an app typically for receiving and spending government payouts – to participate in conference activities like redeeming points for rewards and collecting event merchandise.

Over the years, attendee feedback has been a crucial part of improving the Stack Developer Conference as well. According to Chia, attendees of the 2022 conference gave mixed feedback on the venue’s acoustics. Some felt that being able to hear speakers from various stages at the same time added to the atmosphere, while other event-goers faced some difficulty listening to sessions due to sound pollution.

A lightning talk held during the 2022 conference / Photo credit: GovTech

To minimize disruption, the 2024 organizing team streamlined the speaking areas, reducing the zones from four to three. It also tried to schedule talks such that there would only be a maximum of two sessions happening at the same time.

Amid all these changes, however, Chia stresses that GovTech’s core priorities for the conference remain the same.

“It’s a technical conference that only discusses relevant topics for IT professionals, and we don’t intend to include sales or marketing-related content,” the director says.

“Good coffee and food is a must too,” he adds. “We know how much engineers appreciate those.”

The game plan

Going into the finer details of this year’s conference, Chia shares that the event has secured several well-known speakers. The lineup includes Scott Shaw, chief technology officer for APAC at Thoughtworks, who will be exploring the critical connection between platform engineering and developer experience; Evan You, creator of developer tools Vue.js and Vite, who will discuss the different forms of open source and their significance; and Ashley Kramer, chief strategy and marketing officer for GitLab, who will cover how a community-driven company culture can be a catalyst for innovation.

“We curated speakers from a wide range of tech domains so that we can offer discussions and insights that resonate with attendees from various technical backgrounds,” Chia says. In total, the 30+ lightning talks will be spread across seven topics, including cloud technology, data and AI, and digital culture.

Apart from the speakers and talks, the event will consist of four main zones. Each zone will include a Product Showcase element that will allow attendees to view live product demos and interact directly with product teams.

An example of how the product showcase booth could look like / Photo credit: GovTech

These zones are relevant in the wider context, too. Case in point: The “Trust” zone will cover digital trust and cybersecurity, two perennial issues in the modern tech landscape that are poised to become even more of a challenge in the coming years. Just think of how AI is already being used for things like phishing scams, for instance.

There will also be zones such as “Growth,” which will feature software that helps organizations empower their operations, as well as “Community,” which will showcase technologies that benefit local end-users.

The last zone will be directly related to this year’s productivity-focused theme and will feature GovTech products that make software development more efficient, secure, and compliant. For instance, there’s Government on Commercial Cloud, a platform that helps government agencies adopt commercial cloud solutions, such as those provided by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

“These presentations showcase public-private partnerships, something many attendees are interested in, and it helps us achieve our goal of promoting cross-sector collaboration,” Chia says.

A worthy end goal

With all these improvements and content in place, Chia says that GovTech is targeting to hit 1,800 physical attendees for the 2024 conference, with another 1,000 people tuning in online.

Event-goers will mostly consist of tech professionals, tech enthusiasts, and public officers. Chia hopes that these attendees, as well as the conference speakers, can “come away feeling enriched with insights.”

Overall, this should help foster greater learning, networking, and discussions surrounding the latest tech advancements around product development, especially in areas like platform engineering and the use of generative AI.

“We’d really like to kindle an innovative and collaborative spirit to encourage more private and public sector collaboration,” the director says.

GovTech is the lead agency driving Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative and public sector digital transformation. It’s also the organizer of Stack Developer Conference, the largest government-led technology event in the country.

Use the promo code P_TECHINASIA20 to enjoy a 20% discount on in-person ticket prices – register for the conference here

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This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.