This year’s NDC Oslo was once more a remarkable conference. Great speakers doing 9 parallel tracks for 3 days crated an enormous amount of content. So far I can give you an overview on the sessions I attended. It will take me some time to catch up on all the other sessions I want to watch. Those sessions will be part of another post in a few weeks.
The videos of the NDC can be found on Vimeo. I can highly recommend the presentations I mention in this post. With many more to watch I’m happy for any recommendations.
Can or Should?
Hadi Hariri showed in his talk “Developing in a Decade” how quickly the technology around us changes. Last week you could be happily writing code in Objective-C, today Swift is the new shiny language for iOS. What should we do prepare us for the future? Hadi has a simple answer: Adapt quickly. If we can learn fast we can postpone to pick a possible winner until we need another language to solve our tasks. We don’t have to guess the future and can use the saved time to solve real problems.
What are those problems? We may only think about the technology we use, but there is more. Today IT kills more jobs than it creates. This is a problem we will have to fix – even if we belief it has nothing to do with us. And we have to start thinking about the side effects of our work. We often ask “How can we build XYZ?” but we nearly ever ask “Should we build XYZ?”. Not everything that can be done should be done.
How bad the current situation is showed Aral Balkan in “Free is a Lie“. A whole industry exist to spy on the people. All they need is a “free” product. This is not limited to software. Using a mobile phone to create a 3D model of a room sounds like science fiction – or a Bond movie. But this is exactly what Project Tango is all about. Where do you take your mobile phone with? What would happen if all those places get scanned?
The price of free is our privacy. Currently we can’t do much as user of those services. Certainly we can switch from Google to Microsoft or to Yahoo. But all those companies have the same business model. All we can change is the logo on the spyware. It’s time to support projects like Indie Phone. As Aral pointed out: We not only need feature parity, but also an equal if not better user experience. Without that we can create as much alternatives we want – none of them will be used.
Improving and Sharing
Did you ever attend a talk where you heard exactly what you feel or experience but could not put in words by yourself? I encountered this in the talk “Banish Your Inner Critic” by Denise Jacobs. The Perfectionism–Procrastination Infinite Loop is a too familiar place for me. You want something to be really good and postpone it until later when you know more and can make it better. Unfortunately this keeps on and on and after weeks or months you still haven’t started. Now I have some new ideas on how to end that loop. I keep you posted on how those techniques work for me.
Another great talk on improving is “Build an extraordinary career by sharing your knowledge” from Johannes Brodwall. He shows how you can structure a talk with a simple 3×3 formula and by answering the questions “What? Why? How?”. Software developers may find the triple of nightmare, dream and how to get there a simpler approach.
ASP.Net vNext or Nancy?
Scott Hanselman showed in “The Future of ASP.NET Part I” how fundamentally ASP.Net with vNext will change. Two separate Frameworks (one for the desktop and one for the cloud/server) will bring new challenges in deployment. For the additional cost we will finally be able to guarantee that all the versions of all the assemblies our software needs are correct. This will be possible with the self-containing folders that have all we need to run a web application inside. The CTP version of vNext is not yet stable enough for reproducible outcomes. But it’s only a question of time till we can run our ASP.Net applications with Mono on a Mac.
If you don’t want to wait you should try Nancy. Mathew McLoughlin explains in “An Introduction to Nancy” how simple a web application could be. Nancy works already, can be used with your current application and may be a good extension when you just need a little service.
Conclusion
For me the NDC was a great experience where I could learn a lot. It will take some time to process all those inputs and putting them to work. I’m looking forward to the NDC Oslo in 2015. And for all who can’t wait there is again the NDC London (1-5 December 2014) with an open call for paper.