The 10th edition of the NDC (Norwegian Developers Conference) in Oslo was the best I ever attended. Kjersti and her team made everyone welcome and created a friendly and familiarly atmosphere. This is no easy task, especially not with 2000 attendees. But even at this size you always felt a personal touch and if you needed something, you would always find one of the organizers.
Between the talks you had enough time to meet with old friends and make new ones. Talking in person to people you know from Twitter is a great way to connect on a different level. And let’s not forget the food. The NDC has plenty and if you don’t like a dish, you have other offerings that should meet your taste.
Pre-Conference Workshop
This year I attended the “Hack Yourself First” workshop by Troy Hunt. In two days Troy showed us how simple mistakes can compromise a system and what we can do to protect us from such attacks. His demo web site http://hackyourselffirst.troyhunt.com had everything from logs on the web server to SQL Injection vulnerabilities.
As soon as you find a place for a SQL Injection, you can use tools to completely extract all the databases your web application can connect to. But there are other dangers: session hijacking is even simpler when your auth cookie is written in the ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) log. And with your session your attacker can do all the things you can do.
I was astonished how robust those tools are made. Switching networks or restarts of the service in Azure didn’t affect them. They continued with their work as soon as the connection could be re-established. I wish many apps on my phone would handle network errors so gracefully.
Great Talks
The keynote by Dylan Beattie (“Are There Any Questions?“) asked questions where some of the answers force you to think about how you approach programming. Be that forms with validations that can’t be used outside our cultural circles or more philosophical ones. If you weren’t enthusiastic about the conference before, then this keynote definitely changed that.
Troy Hunt explained in “Hack Your Career“ how he creates that much output. It’s not by multitasking like a monkey, but by creating multiple outputs out of one input. If you learn something new for your company (1 input), then these could be your outputs:
- You can do your work (better)
- Write a blog post as documentation for you to remember what are the points to look out for
- Collect links that are helpful and share them with your colleagues (on Twitter, your blog, etc)
Done that with all the things you do for work and you can create a lot of content for various receivers – you just need to remember not to post code you aren’t allowed to.
Kylie Hunt explained in “Crappy to Happy“ how we could improve our workplace. Getting to know the expectations of your superiors and align them with your needs could save you a lot of frustration. And don’t work till you die, as Kylie showed in one of the examples. It’s simply not worth it to ruin your health to hit an arbitrary deadline no one cares about.
Denise Jacobs had completely overhauled her “Banish Your Inner Critic v2.0“ talk and offered many simple but powerful little tricks to outsmart your inner critic. The gesture of deleting email can also be used to get rid of negative thoughts. Simply swipe left and start to think about something new. If this doesn’t work, add “but then I did X” where X can stand for any of the positive outcomes. This constant carving of a good thing that came out of a negative one let you remember the positive one as well. If you want to have a more in-depth explanation, then you should buy her book Banish Your Inner Critic.
Tess Ferrandez explained in “Beyond step-by step debugging in Visual Studio“ what you can do when something goes wrong with your application. There are so many tools inside Visual Studio who can help you to analyse crash dumps to understand where the problem was. The best part of those tools is that you don’t need to have a Visual Studio running at the time of the crash. It can even be on a different machine or when your computer starts up. If you have a strange situation with one of your applications, then you should watch this talk.
Nicholas Blumhardt made in “Serilog: Instrumentation that Works for You“ a great introduction into the semantic logger I use at work. With more than 200 people contributing code to the various parts of Serilog I have no doubt that this Logger is here to stay. The possibility not only to enrich but also to remove certain attributes in a log message is something I have to try out.
Joe Stead showed in “.NET Blub: Frameworks beyond Microsoft“ how many alternatives exist beyond the frameworks from Microsoft. If there aren’t any silver bullets, then why do we pretend that every problem can be solved with the few frameworks Microsoft offers? I completely agree with his point and hope more people would look beyond Microsoft to find solutions to their problems. Those frameworks exist and aren’t riskier than those from Microsoft.
Jessica Kerr explained in “Develop Your Development Automation“ how her team works with Slack and Atomist to automate their development work. I especially liked the idea of creating work items right out of the discussion. If you and your team chat about a certain topic, then this is the place to create an item in the bug tracker. The bot offers a small form where the necessary information can be entered. The ticket is created and the link to that item is posted back to the conversation. Everyone interested in this conversation will be able to see which ticket was created and can directly open it.
Joakim Lindh talked in “The state of IoT in 2017 and how Norwegian Technology make IoT Easy“ about a sensor made by Disruptive Technologies that can send 100 measurements per day. That isn’t so spectacular, but the tiny sensor has enough power to do that for 15 years! However, security in IoT is a rather disappointing topic. The fitting joke was “The S in IoT stands for security”…
Todd Gardner explained in “The Developer’s Guide to Promoting Their Work“ a few points I never thought of about creating your own brand (like: What are you against?). As a side note he showed how you can use Twitter Ads to target a specific audience, which I found very interesting and helped me to close some gaps in my understanding.
The NDC Oslofjord Cruise had again great luck with the weather. There isn’t much more fun than to cruse the fjord while eating shrimps on a sunny and warm evening.
Except one thing was even funnier: PubConf. 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide and the most hilarious talks that you can imagine created endless laughs.
What to Improve
Besides all those highlights, there were some points that should be improved:
- One talk I attended was over after just 20 minutes (in a 60-minute slot). Time management is hard, but being 2/3 short is just terrible.
- The NDC Community Tuesday couldn’t keep up with the great sessions of the last years. The DDD track was an example on how not to do a presentation, but showed nearly perfectly why so many people fail with DDD: they ignore the domain part completely.
- The conference app lacks important features, like selecting the favourite sessions and bundle them to a personalised agenda. Without that the app is rather useless, especially if you can’t see the name of the speaker on the overview page.
Nevertheless, those points only had a minor impact on my experience and I’m sure the feedback of the attendees will be used to make the next NDC even better.
What’s Next?
The videos of the talks should be published in the next weeks. When this is done I will add links to the videos.
Conclusion
The 10th edition of NDC Oslo was a great experience and I can’t wait to be back in Oslo for the next NDC (11.-15. June 2018).
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