ndc london 2017

Last three days of NDC London presented a constant paradox of choice, since every hour 7-8 speakers would have parallel sessions in different rooms. How the hell am I supposed to pick only one, if all of them are great? How on earth can you choose between Jon Skeet and Mark Seeman? My way of solving this problem was to spend an hour every evening going through the list of the next day’s speakers and googling their talks from the past. Sometimes this helped me to pick a brilliant talk from someone I had not known yet, sometimes this meant I would go to the Bill Wagner’s talk and… well, more on that later.

Being an old-school geek, I still prefer to make notes on paper, so I have pretty good coverage of what I learned during these talks. Hopefully all the recorded sessions will be available on the web soon (that’s the part I really like about NDC), but before this happens, here’s a list of my observations and learnings from the talks I personally attended.

Apparently last year I was a good boy, because Santa has already made several of my dreams come true in 2017. This week I am visiting London and attending NDC London, one of the greatest and most inspiring conferences I am aware of. Until now I only knew it by watching numerous recorded talks from the past and listetning to these top notch developers on .NET Rocks. Well, this morning I was in an elevator with Scott Allen, whose courses on PluralSight were the major part of my learning materials on ASP.NET some years ago. And when I stepped out of this elevator, first thing I heard was “Hi, I’m Richard Campbell” (that’s exactly 50% of .NET Rocks I just met). I know, it sounds silly, but I actually feel like a little boy meeting his all time football idol or somebody like that.