I try to attend a developers conference once a year and this year I attended NDC London 2018.  I was surprised that only two developers out of the many I had asked  before going knew of the NDC brand of conferences.  I discovered NDC thanks to Carl and Richard of .NET Rocks! Thanks gents, I owe you.

Just in cases you are not aware of what NDC is, here is a brief description courtesy of the NDC London site.

About NDC

Since its start-up in Oslo 2008, the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) quickly became one of Europe`s largest conferences for .NET & Agile development. Today NDC Conferences are 5-day events with 2 days of pre-conference workshops and 3 days of conference sessions.

NDC London

In December 2013 NDC did the first NDC London conference. The conference was a huge success and we are happy to announce that the 5th NDC London is set to happen the week of 15-19 January 2018.

I didn’t attend the pre-conference workshops so my NDC adventure started on Wednesday. First impressions of the conference and its venue, The Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Westminster were superb; upon arriving there were no queues to register another plus was that the cloak room was free which although a small touch was one I really appreciated.

Throughout the conference continuous high quality hot drinks and food was served. Starting with cakes and pastries and moving on to a variety of hot food.  I wouldn’t normally mention food at a conference but it was of a standard that I had not encountered at other conferences that I had to write a few lines about it.

My reason for attending was to hear a number of people whose podcasts I listen to, books & blogs I have read or have helped me by providing answers on Stack Overflow speak. As a newbie to this conference I did not know what to expect from the talks but I was not disappointed and for me the conference experience went into the stratosphere from here on in.

The talks are scheduled to last one hour and as you will see from the agenda they are on a wide variety of subjects. The presenters did not disappoint. There was no death by PowerPoint, no about me slides, no err/errms or the dreaded “like”.  The presenters were passionate about their topics and were clearly enjoyed themselves engaging with their audiences. Some had a slight more conversational style whilst others used self deprecation and one in particular used the medium of song (thank you Jon Skeet that was unforgettable). One of the common traits that I noticed is that many of the presenters are building and experimenting with “stuff” all the time.

As is the norm after a talk\session the audience are invited to give feedback and NDC has probably the best I have so far encountered.  As you leave the room after a talk just throw a colour in the box. Brilliant.

Here are the sessions I attended:

Wednesday

Keynote: What is programming anyway?
Felienne

Sondheim Seurat and Software: finding art in code
Jon Skeet

You build it, you run it (why developers should also be on call)
Chris O’Dell

I’m Pwned. You’re Pwned. We’re All Pwned.
Troy Hunt

Refactoring to Immutability
Kevlin Henney

Adventures in teaching the web
Jasmine Greenaway

C# 7.1, and 7.2: The releases you didn’t know you had
Bill Wagner

Thursday

Building a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster and running .NET Core
Alex Ellis & Scott Hanselman

An Opinionated Approach to ASP.NET Core
Scott Allen

Who Needs Dashboards?
Jessica White

Hack Your Career
Troy Hunt

HTTP: History & Performance
Ana Balica

Going Solo: A Blueprint for Working for Yourself
Rob Conery

NET Rocks Live with Jon Skeet and Bill Wagner – Two Nice C# People

Friday

The Modern Cloud
Scott Guthrie

Web Apps can’t really do *that*, can they?
Steve Sanderson

The Hello World Show Live with Scott Hanselman, Troy Hunt, Felienne, and Jon Skeet

Tips & Tricks with Azure
Scott Guthrie

Solving Diabetes with an Open Source Artificial Pancreas
Scott Hanselman

Why I’m Not Leaving .NET
Mark Rendle

Summary

NDC London 2018 was the best conference I have ever attended. I have returned from it motivated to do more; to experiment and try stuff that I hadn’t even thought about.

There were so many highlights for me but having my photo taken with Carl and Richard was the best. Seriously guys you rock!