I went to the outstanding Developer! Developer! Developer! North conference on the 18th of October, and it was excellent. I left my notepad etc. in my car (and it was such a long walk back!), so I thought I should make a few notes about the sessions I went to, before my brain’s garbage collector reclaims the memory. Thankfully the excellent web app that was provided for feedback was good for taking a few notes.
Session 1:
Write your own compiler in 24 hours - Phillip Trelford
The first session of the day was an interesting take on a simple compiler using F#. It was the only F# based session that made it through the votes, and the subject itself interested me, due to recent experience I’ve had dealing with a poorly designed domain specific language. I won’t pretend to have understood all of the code, although I managed to follow the concepts well enough. All in all, it was a great talk and a good start to the day.
Session 2:
Owin: The great asp.net reboot - Steve Higgs
The second session was one I had high hopes for, and I was not disappointed. OWIN is a very exciting development, bringing us ever closer to the “write once, run anywhere” promised land, for web apps at least. Steve gave a very good run through and the examples provided were very helpful.
Session 3:
Using Xamarin Forms to make a cross platform Agenda App - Richard Garside
Xamarin Forms is something I’ve found to be very exciting but I haven’t yet had the opportunity to use it. The price is big stumbling block for me, but my employers may be taking a look of it in the next year. The session itself was interesting, but slightly limited. The important stuff was covered though, and there is an example app that I’ve not been able to take a look at (yet), due to problems with the Android version.
Session 4:
Keeping it responsive - cross-platform MVVM with ReactiveUI - Sam Hogarth
Another session I was looking forward to; ReactiveUI (and Reactive Extensions itself) is something I’m just starting to use. Sam had a good example app to run through, as well as a brief glimpse at real world examples. Although Sam claimed he’d only been using ReactiveUI for ~6 months, he certainly knew his stuff and fielded all questions admirably.
Session 5:
Lessons learnt scaling a mainstream restful API - David Whitney
An excellent way to finish off a busy day; this session was informative, useful and funny. David shared the genuine lessons he had to figure out the hard way, when he developed the JustGiving rest api.
All in all, it was a fantastic day, and I’m already looking forward to next years event. I didn’t win any prizes (there were only 2 headphone prizes for those who used the app for feedback) plus I didn’t even enter the bigger prize draws!