Overview

NDC London 2019 managed the impossible by being even better than last year.

How is that possible? Everything just seemed more ++. The facilities, the choice of food, snacks and beverages, the swag socks.
Sure sometimes the lines for food were long during the traditional lunch hours and the halls were very busy but you could always find a place to talk or pull out your laptop.

Talks

I attended 21 talks during the three days and I took away at least one thing from each one that is going to make me a better developer.

This year there were many talks that were focused on the life of the developer and the nonsense that he or she finds themselves in. From the shocking state state of agile, to dealing with incompetent managers and finding themselves thrust into leadership roles

The slides used during talks are worth mentioning. One of the things speakers at NDC don’t do is to use them as a crutch or read from them. They are used sparingly and only then to add something to the talk. They are usually innovative in their design or enjoyable to look at. Fortunately both bullet points and Death By PowerPoint presentations are not on the agenda.

My Top four

My favourite talks this year were

1. Friday’s key note – Scott Hanselman
2. Everything is Cyber-broken – Scott Helme & Troy Hunt
3. Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader – David Neal
4. Insecure Transit – Sam Newman

It is worth keeping an eye on the NDC site so when the videos of the presentations appear I recommend watching these. Scott and Troys talk was not recorded because it was part of the after show party.

My Conference Agenda

Wednesday

Keynote: Welcome to the Machine – Hadi Hariri

Reading Other peoples Code – Patricia Aas

Teaching New Tricks – How to enhance the skills of experienced developers – Clare Sudbery

Insecure Transit – Microsoft Security – Sam Newman

Why Your ASP.NET Core application won’t scale – Damian Edwards, David Fowler

Avoiding the Agile Alignment Trap – Mike Long

Hack To The Future – Troy Hunt

Thursday

ComSci and My Day Job – Rob Conery

Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader – David Neal.

Beyond Developer – Dan North

Think like a Trainer: Improving Your Communication Skills – Olivia Liddell

ML.NET for Developers without any AI experience – Lee Mallon

A Practical Guide to Deep Learning – Tess Ferrandez-Norlander

Dot Net Rocks Live with Christine Yen

Everything is Cyber-broken – Scott Helme & Troy Hunt

Friday

Keynote: The Microsoft Open Source Cinematic Universe Phase 2 – Scott Hanselman

Ctrl-Alt-Del: Learning to Love Legacy Code – Dylan Beattie

Versioning 1.0.1 – Jon Skeet

Solving Diabetes with an Open Source Artificial Pancreas – Scott Hanselman

Crash, Burn, Report – Scott Helme

Deep Learning in the world of little ponies – Galiya Warrier

Photos

The perfect end to a perfect conference

I got to meet two of my programming heroes…