A couple of weeks back I got the opportunity to attend NDC London organised by the team between the Norwegian Developers Conference. They’ve branded this event to “new DevelopersConference() London” as Norwegian Developers Conference obviously limits their reach a little bit (to steal a joke from @markrendle’s stand-up) . I went out to NDC Oslo last year to attend their dedicated security track and was really impressed by the quality of the event and the speakers they lined up so once the registration opened for their London event this year I knew I wanted to attend as much as I could.

Like any conference there are the fantastic talks and the ones where you wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong room. Probably my favourite talk from this years event was Coding Culture by Sven Peters, talking about what makes great engineering team and how to inject enthusiasm and passion into development. His slides and a recording of this talk are here, if you can only watch one this is it.

A few of the other highlights for me were:

  • Jon Skeet demonstrating the scary amount he knows about the Hebrew calendar and confirming date and time is still a pain in the neck. link
  • “Code is like humour, if you have to explain it it’s bad”. A crowd driven refactoring session with Cory House. link
  • “SAML is the Windows XP of online identity”. Dominick Baier talking about OpenID Connect. link
  • Reviewing a year of security howlers and CSI Cyber with Niall Merrigan. link
  • Learning how to count potatoes with drones and how machine learning can optimize farming with Gary Short. link
  • If you are doing exactly what your IDE tells you which of you is writing the code? Along with other pause for thought moments with Kevlin Henney. link
  • “Does your home audio set-up really need an external IP address? Who is adjusting their speakers on the bus?” Looking at the “Fragile Internet of Things” with Erlend Oftedal and Einar Otto Stangvik. link

Videos of all the talks are already available to attendees here and will apparently be made public some time early in the new year.