NDC 2009 was FREAKING AWESOME

I realize that this is a very strong statement, but this years Norwegian Developer Conference does deserve it in full. Let me just take you through the event as I experienced it as well as what happened before and after it, so you can judge for yourself.

15th of June:

I went to the airport in Bergen to pick-up Jeremy D. Miller as we arranged him to first have a talk at NNUG Bergen. It was great to finally meet this great mind behind StructureMap and StoryTeller. He was talking about “Software Design and Testability” and “StoryTeller” where he eagerly shared his knowledge with our community. There were a lot of confirmations about ideas and practices I have/use, it is always good to hear you are on the right track. StoryTeller sounds very interesting, I will definitely give it a go. After that of-course the mandatory Geek Beer where we exchanged war stories. This is as always the most interesting part of the evening.

16th of June:

Jeremy and I flew to Oslo to be one day early for NDC, at the Park Hotel I met-up with Glenn Block for a good conversation about CAB, Prism and MEF later Scott Bellware joined us as well. That evening I was invited to join a dinner with Glenn Block, Luca Bolognese, Rune Grothaug, Phil Haacked, Scott Hanselman, Asbjørn Mikkelsen, Anders Norås and Peter Provost. A very inspiring group of people to say the least. Scott thought me (after making fun of me) how to pronounce “Jalapeño” and I was able to ask some F# questions to Luca. After dinner there was a good discussion going on with Scott Bellware, Udi Dahan, Torbjørn Marø, Jeremy Miller and Jon Torresdal.

17th of June:

The NDC keynotes by Uncle Bob Martin where as always very inspiring and full of wisdom. After that my day looked like this:
- Michael Feathers with “Seven Blind Alleys in Software Design”.
- Michael Feathers with “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”.
- Michael Feathers with “Functional Thinking for Object-Oriented Designers”.
- Luca Bolognese with “An Introduction to Microsoft F#”.
- Udi Dahan with “Intentions and Interfaces - Making Patterns Complete”.
- Jeremy D. Miller with “Presentation Patterns for Composite Applications”.

18th of June:

My second day at NDC was divided as followed:
- Ian Griffiths with “Parallel FX”.
- Udi Dahan with “Asynchronous Systems Architecture for the Web”.
- Jimmy Nilsson with “Is Domain-Driven Design more than Entities and Repositories?”.
- Ayende Rahien with “Object Relational Mapping + = 2: More than just Data <--> Object”.
- Glenn Block with “Building openly extensible applications with .NET Framework 4.0”.

19th of June:

The third day didn’t have that much variation with respect to speakers, but interesting none the less:
- Kevlin Henney with “The Uncertainty Principle”.
- Kevlin Henney with “Lean Code”.
- Kevlin Henney with “A Decent Proposal”.
- Kevlin Henney with “Slicing Design over Time”.

20th of June:

This was back home in Bergen after NDC, we have been lucky enough that Scott Hanselman wanted to do a presentation for NNUG Bergen. We had a quick lunch before hand where Carl Franklin joined us as well. Carl gave us the best speaker introduction we have ever had at NNUG, the crowed was wild! Scott talked with great enthusiasm about “Deep tour of .Net 4”. I have never heard such a loud applause after a presentation!

Recordings:

I can’t wait until the recording are published so I can see everything I missed and everything I did see. I hope they make the recordings public it would be a shame if this stayed private to attendees, such great knowledge needs to be shared.

Value:

I believe that the greatest value of this conference (and others a like) is the fact that you can ask questions and discuss issues and thoughts with the speakers. Of course the presentations in itself are great, but just the ability to talk to these great minds in our industry. I really want to thank Anders Norås, Rune Grothaug and Kjersti Sandberg for organizing this great event.