much chin stroking at ddd north

It seems like only yesterday that I was sharing stories and having drinks in the bar at Sunderland AFC after the original DDDNorth but somehow 12 months has passed and all of a sudden its DDD time again. This time the organisers moved the venue to Bradford in attempt to make the event closer to my house. So thanks for that.

The venue was the Bradford University's beautiful School of Management situated just outside the city centre. Registration was a little chaotic but after a quick reorganisation everyone was in and ready.

Stunning Venue.

The venue hosted 4 separate rooms for talks. Unfortunately I've not worked out how to fork myself so I'll take you though the ones I attended.

DDDNorth devs watching a session.

10 practices that made me the developer I am today - Gary Shutler

Before we ask the obvious question of do we want to be the developer Gary is today, it's worth pointing out Gary had aimed this session at developers new to the industry. What followed was a walk through of tips of how to really go from Joe average to a great developer. Most of the advice was sound (especially be diverse, and be responsible for your own training) but there was some controversy when Gary rated code reviews but didn't rate pairing. (note: very simplified interpretation). Gary's beard was immaculately groomed.

Gary gave some great advice.

Async C# 5.0 - Patterns for Real world user - Liam Westley

Technically my favourite session. Liam took us through the Task Asynchronous Pattern white paper.  Async is Microsoft's latest attempt to make doing more than one thing at once easy. What Liam does really well is slip from slides to code whilst maintaining an interesting patter. His test application was a simple mp3 organiser & player which give some great audio cues as to when things were done. This was definitely a session that I came out of eager to try new things. 

Liam's was a fascinating session.

Look Ma! No Frameworks - Gemma Cameron

Gemma's BDD message was that you don't need any stinking framework to do BDD. Forget about the tools and just have the conversations. She showed by the help of the audience how you could write meaningful test code with out having to be constrained by a frame works language. We had a live kata and some interesting discussion with good points raised by the grizzly looking Ian Cooper.

Gemma's interactive session was thought provoking

Websockets and SignalR - Chris Alcock

I've seen this talk before and somehow managed to be in here again. What I love about Chris is that he manages to pack in a tremendous amount of information in to an hour. SignalR and websockets on the front of it are powerful tools.

Another great buzz in the foyer. Not too unlike the sound of a Braun series 3.

Using nuget for fun and profit - Joel Hammond-Turner

Joel has found the solution to code reuse and its been right under our noses. It's NuGet! In this session Joel showed us how to set up our own NuGet server and his PublishNPackage tooling. He's used this effectively to reorganise big code dumps of shared code and is now an integral part of his build process. We got a quick insight how this will be used with CI build too.

I just wanted to thank the organisers for today. It was amazing.