NDC London – A Little Review

So, the last developers conference (if you could call it that) I went to was way back in 2001 when we had WAP phones and if you had a Pentium 4 computer you were some super-techno hacker.

Well, time have changed somewhat, we now have smart phones with more memory than we had hard drive space back then and I’m writing this post on a workstation with 8 cores and 32GB RAM (and this isn’t even the cutting edge). Add to that the cloud, driverless cars and social networks with billions of users (for better or worse) and we have come a hell of a long way.

Well, I decided to bite the bullet and shell out for a super early-bird ticket and get myself up to London for a few days to Geek-Out. I had a clear idea in my head about what I wanted to achieve from the three days and planned to not only attend sessions about the new whizzy stuff like Blazor and ASP.NET Core 2.2 but also some of the more mature technologies and concepts – if you read my tweets from the event I think you’ll see that the scope of the tech. I think it was a little light on mobile development but if there were any more sessions covering that I think I would have had a hard time selecting which ones to go to.

Some of the sessions were presented by the likes of Scott Hanselman, Troy Hunt and Jon Skeet through to those I’d never heard of but who presented some engaging (and enlightening content). I don’t regret a single session choice and came out of each of them with something to follow up on.

The exhibitors were varied and interesting with the likes of DevExpress whose tools I’ve used for over a decade (and who know the proper strength for a real coffee) and JetBrains along with OzCode (who proved that debugging does have to suck to the degree that I bought a licence without trying the 30 day trial) and Twillio.

Although the weather wasn’t great and my flight home was nearly cancelled because of snow I enjoyed my three days rubbing shoulders with celebrity and grass root developers alike.

I have to say that almost 20 years between conferences is far too long – especially in this industry and I’ll certainly be considering the next NDC (probably in London – but with Porto and Barcelona events, who knows).

The videos of the sessions are now on YouTube and I will be re-watching a few of these to refresh my memory. I was taking notes but I was also being careful not to get too absorbed in them so that I missed the actual content being delivered!