I attended the NDC Oslo developer conference this year, and had an absolutely amazing time. Here’s my brief, bullet-pointed review, along with some of my favorite talks.
The good
- Extremely well organized — had an overflow room where you could switch between talks if you weren’t sure which to attend
- Included a good number of soft-skill presentations; provided a nice variety
- Good speakers — a good mix of “celebs” like Troy Hunt, Jon Skeet, but also other great, lesser-known ones
- Good food! Great coffee! (they had booths with pour over and pretty good espresso)
- Easy to get to — arriving from the airport to the city is a breeze
- I left the conference feeling refreshed and motivated to do cool things — more than any other event I’d attended.
The bad
- Norway can be a bit pricey, depending on where you’re coming from, especially when you consider the taxes
- On that note — the final cost of the ticket surprised me a bit, because of the 25% of VAT. The cost for the 3-day conference pass was published at 12,900 NOK (about $1508 USD), but the final ticket cost was $1,948.60 USD
- However, with food and other goodies, I thought it was pretty good value overall
- It wasn’t hard to find good hotels for $100 – $150 a night.
All the videos are now available on YouTube
Some of my favorite talks:
Microservices and Rules Engines – a blast from the past by Udi Dahan
Udi describes times when encapsulation breakdown in a micro-service oriented architecture — and how rules engine can be a nice solution to them.
State of .NET Performance – Adam Sitnick
ValueTuple; Span (working with unmanaged memory); ValueTask. Pretty good stuff.
C# 7 – Jon Skeet
A nice refresher on all the latest lang features. He ran a bit out of time, unfortunately.
Beyond step-by step debugging in Visual Studio – Tess Fernandez
Tess describes using procdump to debug your applications; DebugDiag to diagnose, as well as WinDBg to analyze.
Using C#’s Type System Effectively – Benjamin Hodgson
Benjamin’s talk about expressing ideas (in particular, an abstract expression tree) using C#’s type system. Really good!
Banish Your Inner Critic – Denise Jacobs
A really inspiring talk to help us unleash our creative side and help us build stuff without so much self-criticism. She’s an amazing speaker.
Emerging Web Security Standards – Scott Helme
Talks about Same-site cookies, certificate transparency
Hack Your Career – Troy Hunt
Troy takes you through the story of his recent career, and some of the steps and tricks he used to become happier and more successful.
Norway was also very pretty 🙂 I recommend the Norway In a Nutshell Tour, if you have an extra day or two.