My Highlights of NDC Oslo 2025

This year the NDC Oslo conference was a bit earlier than usual and so I went in May to Oslo. That gave me the opportunity to attend the 17th of May parade and experience an overcrowded city centre – quiet a difference to the usual state of the city.

The conference was once more impressive and well organized. It was great to hear that with 2500 attendees this year’s NDC Oslo was back near the record heights.

I started the conference week with a workshop on Designing APIs. While it was good, it did not match the quality of last year's workshop on High Performance .NET Development.

Two important points

From the many great insights we could gain at this conference, I would like to highlight two important points:

1. In her keynote "CTRL+SHIFT+(BUILD) PAUSE", Laila Bougria highlighted that replacing junior developers with AI tools may save costs now but risks the senior developers we need in the future. Without opportunities for juniors to learn, make mistakes, and grow, there will be no new senior developers in the future. Great for those people who already are senior developers, not so great for all those companies who need someone to understand how to build applications in their entirety.
2. Ian Cooper explained in his talk "Responsibility Driven Design Revisited" that each book is a child of its time and has a context. The more widely used a practice was when the book was written, the more likely that practice is assumed albeit not mentioned in the book. What was no problem for the authors and the first readers has left later generations of developers confused by all the holes that the book did not address. The example from the talk is Responsibility Driven Design that would fill most of the holes in the "Domain-Driven Design" book by Eric Evans.

My favourite talks

This year I was lucky and picked so many excellent talks that all filled their time slot to the fullest. The following talks where not only informative but they covered topics in a new and exciting way:

• The fundamental misunderstanding in Team Topologies by Patricia Aas in which we learn about the many problems of the book "Team Topologies". A talk not only for people who like a well-researched rant, but also for those who could be in a company that want to use this book for a reorganisation.
• Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: Finding Your Meme Twin with Embeddings & Vector Databases by Guy Royse delivers the best explanation of embeddings that I saw so far. His application covers all the important parts for an AI solution and stays at an understandable level.
• Design Patterns for Software Diagramming by Jacqui Read offers us a curated list of patterns and anti-patterns to improve our diagrams. If you not only want to draw images but share knowledge, then this talk is for you.
• "Run Query Run" - A Fresh Look at SQL Wait Stats by Pinal Dave explained how important wait statistics are and what can impact performance. While the talk could not offer us the correct answer to solve all our performance-problems, we got a good starting point for our own optimisations.
• The Forgotten AI of Video Games by Layla Porter explains how NPCs in video games get their human-like behaviour. The approaches covered in this talk do not only apply to games but can also improve our AI agents.
• OpenTelemetry in a Brownfield World by Jimmy Bogard explains how we can step by step switch to OpenTelemetry. With Jimmy’s approach we can stop at every step and still profit from this new way of doing things.

Conclusion

NDC Oslo 2025 was over far too quickly. As soon as one gets used to the rhythm it is already over. I hope the recordings of the talks get soon published, then there are a lot of talks I missed because I was attending another presentation.

Update 3. November 2025: add links to the videos