A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to be able to attend NDC London, and be part of the crew.

Below is a brief commentary on some of the talks I attended. The NDC crew are uploading videos all the time, I’ll try and update this page with links to the videos when they become available. You can watch the videos here

Scott Hanselman delivered a typically polished and amusing keynote, the gist being that we’re finally starting to deliver web applications instead of delivering applications inside web pages. Scott’s keynote can be found here.

“…none of us can ever have a title higher than web developer”

Good point, if Tim’s just a web developer, are you really a senior web developer? More to come from Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft.

The theme of delivering content, without fighting the Web carried on.

Dylan Beattie built on this, with his, the rest of REST talk. Take away for me was, you should be using Hypertext in your RESTful APIs. Dylan introduced us to Hypertext Application Language (HAL).

Interestingly, Ali Kheyrollahi, in his talk 5 Anti-Patterns in designing APIs, also touched on Hypertext; His solution was a little different, preferring to use HATEOAS.

David Neal presented a lovely introduction to Node.js. Certainly presented a case that you can build really good apps with this. Cited nice example of how the new Visual Studio Code editor is built on top of Github’s Electron, which is, you guessed it, based on Node.js.

Peter Meyers delivered a great talk, building a demo from scratch, showcasing how you can use Azure’s Machine Learning, to use a basic neural network to predict data. A very hands on demo, a lot of complex content covered and explained beautifully. Brought back happy memories of my student days studying AI.

My favourite talk, was delivered by Kevlin Henney, SOLID deconstruction. A measured and thoughtful look at the SOLID principles, where they come from and what they really mean. I liked it, as it encouraged you to think. Enough that I already have a couple of blog posts in mind on the back of it.

Doc Norton gave a good talk too, the building blocks of knowledge culture. To me it seemed like a look into the future of how great (software) companies will be. Takeaway for me was, the idea of having fluid teams, let people choose the team they want to work in. It works.

Dan North also gave a thought provoking talk, with a new take on how to structure your agile department. Not sure it’s what he wanted the audience to take away but he talked about what an hypothesis is (a falsifiable statement, he concisely stated). It’s also something to be built upon, as you learn more. Agile methods should and need to be improved all the time, his talk introduced us to some new ideas that worked for him when it comes to scaling agile (you can’t scale agile!).

I saw that Hanselman fellow again on Friday, tooting the wonders of Azure.

Microsoft wants your for loops.

He happily chimed. On a personal note it also wants you to set the service level for your app services incorrectly too, in it’s ever confusing portal (cost me over £50 for that mistake). He is a very accomplished speaker too, pleasure to be entertained by him.

Talking of entertainers, king for me was Troy Hunt. So entertaining! Nice guy too, as his crew, I had a nice chat and handshake before the show, Making Hacking Child’s Play. Best bit – the HarlemShake, works on far too many sites and it’s soooo fun!

And finally I saw John Skeet, live, 3 times. No words can convey how deep and impressive his C# and OO knowledge is.