We all wanted to be in Norway for NDC Oslo 2020, but Covid-19 made that impossible. As with most other conferences in 2020, there was no way to make this an in-person event. The NDC crew and Dylan Beattie did their best to create the typical NDC feeling at an online-only conference. I was surprised how well it worked and how few problems occurred for an event with around 1000 attendees.
Front End Web Fundamentals workshop
I attended the workshop about front-end web development to get a refresher on HTML and CSS. I learned many new things and wrote about them here, here, here and here. I was surprised how well Cisco Webex worked, then Amy Kapernick did the workshop from Perth in Australia and Australia is not know for fast and reliable Internet connections.
The conference
The conference started on Wednesday with the keynote from Dylan Beattie. It was live streamed on YouTube and offered many ideas worth thinking about. As a novelty, you could watch room 1 on YouTube for free throughout the conference (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). Unfortunately, the first session from room 1 had no sound on YouTube. This was one session I noticed with severe technical problems; another one was the great talk “Infrastructure as Software” by Paul Stark where the audio got lost twice.
Big technical problems like this where in the minority. But even small things can have a big impact on the experience. On Wednesday I could not see the names of the other attendees in Webex. That made the experience rather anonymous and boring, much as you would watch any other YouTube video. On Thursday that problem was fixed, and it got more of a conference feeling. On Friday more and more attendees turned their camera on, what made it a much more connecting experience. Especially if you could see people you know from previous years and were able to chat with them.
The attempt to replace the hallway track with Slack did not really work. While Slack was a good help in the workshop to share code and links, it got cluttered in no time with all the participants at the conference. A simple way to find attendees and start video calls was the thing I missed the most. I believe the value of a conference comes to a big part from all the small encounters with other attendees. So far, I have not seen any online tool that can support that.
The quality of the talks did not fully reach the level I am used to expect from other NDC conferences. Do not get me wrong, the talks were not bad. Not at all. I saw far less bad talks this year than last year and the time keeping was a lot better. Yet the talks lacked that wow-effect, that spark of creativity that lets you solve one of your technical problems by seeing the solution someone else came up for another problem. I think this is due the lack of a live audience and the missing shrimp cruse.
My top 3 talks
From the talks I have seen so far, I can highly recommend these three:
- Domain-Driven Refactoring by Jimmy Bogard – a great demo on how you can use refactoring to improve your code and how you can leverage ReSharper to do the work. I saw how much simpler I could refactor my code if I would know more about ReSharper.
- Does Your Codebase Spark Joy? by Jenna Pederson – applying the ideas of Marie Kondo to your code will allow important improvements for you and your team. Stop cleaning up areas of your code and fix a small set of problems throughout your application.
- Analyzing source code using Roslyn by Erik Schierboom – see how Exercism.io uses Roslyn to analyse code to get faster feedback for the participants in the coding challenges. This talk shows exactly what I imagined how Roslyn could help you to improve your code.
The recording of all three talks should be soon on YouTube. Unfortunately, this year it takes a long time to publish them and there is still a backlog from NDC Porto.
Conclusion
The online-only NDC Oslo was something new. It was a nice experience, yet not fully comparable with the “real” thing in Oslo. The hallway track, the sitting together with developers from all over the world and the endless supply of food was dearly missed. Nevertheless, it was a lot better than nothing and the NDC crew did a great job. I will attend the online edition of NCS Oslo 2021 should it still not be possible to have an in-person event in Oslo.
Update 14. September 2020: add links to the videos
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