NDC conference London 2017

19 Feb 2017

In January I visited NDC London along with a colleague from Betsson and I must say that it is one of the better conferences I have visited. The conference was situated in the London ExCEl which is a great venue although a bit off the beaten path.

The conference had 166 talks over 3 days in 7 to 8 concurrent sessions, picking talks proved to be a challenge.

It was one of the more social conferences I have been to. It was easy to bump into people during lunch and breaks and you would often get the chance to have interesting discussions with the speakers during those times.

Wednesday

Making your way to the venue was easy if you stayed at the recommended hotel, it took less than a minute door to door. You didn’t even need to put your coat on.

Ian Cooper’s talk Twelve factor apps in .NET about the 12-factor methodology was a great talk. Dan North’s talk Ops and operability made me think about changing a lot of the ways we work today and Itamar Syn-Hershko’s talk Elasticsearch - Do’s, Don’ts and Pro-Tips taught me some good lessons about Elasticsearch that will be immediately helpful at work.

Thursday

War stories, learning from the experiences of others, is very useful. Jimmy Bogard’s talk Avoiding microservice megadisasters contained a lot of good learnings. I didn’t know analyzing data could be so much fun until I watched Evelina Gabasova’s Exploring Stack Overflow data. I got to watch a live recording of a podcast for the first time, .NET Rocks Live! about machine learning was really interesting. Machine Learning is something I really need to look into.

Friday

Analyzing performance issues is not easy, Tess Ferrandes’ talk Deep .NET debugging with WinDBG gave you a lot of great tips about how to do that. Containers are cool, but how do you monitor them? Philip Krenn’s talk Monitor your containers showed you how to do that with Elasticsearch and Kibana. Troy Hunt is always amusing, his talk Something something cyber was interesting and funny and also the last talk I watched before having to head off to the airport.

Conclusion

This conference had a lot of great sessions. What I liked the most was that many of the talks were on an intermediate or advanced level and did not only cateer to beginners. The easy going social atmosphere was also great. The venue also had the most comfortable chairs of any conference I have ever visited.

I will definitely try to go to another NDC conference.