Thanks to the generosity of my fantastic employer, Connect Develop, I was fortunate to be able to attend NDC Oslo this year. It was a massive conference with 1900 delegates, 9 tracks of talks over 3 days, much larger than any other I’ve been to.
There was a good balance of .net, non-.net, functional, microservices, REST, agile, peopleware & other topics. The conference was very well run. I initially had some concerns that it was held in a stadium, but they made use of the space well. The stadium floor was used as the general exhibition area, keynote stage & dining area. The stadium seating around the main floor was divided up into rooms with black curtains, which worked remarkably well with almost no noise leakage into other talks (except for maybe the laughter from some of Troy Hunt’s sessions). To cater to full rooms, an overflow area was provided which displayed the presentations from all the running tracks. You could choose which session to listen to with a supplied headset.
Keynote: Bruce Schneier from NDC Conferences on Vimeo.
Breakfast, lunch & dinner was provided at various sponsor food stands, catering to a wide variety of dietary needs. A number of sponsors were also providing drinks stands, one even offering fruit smoothies. Of course, plenty of coffee was on offer as well.
Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security - James Mickens from NDC Conferences on Vimeo.
The vast majority of talks I attended were of a very high quality, being able to take away much from each talk. Out of all of the talks I attended I was only disappointed with two. One of which was the security panel, hosted by the .net rocks podcast. While having excellent panellists, it was let down by the .net rocks guys not being ready to start at the allocated time. They spent about 10 minutes setting up their own gear during the session, rather than being ready to go. I may be nitpicking, but it started the session off on the wrong note.
Anyway, it was a fantastic well-organised conference, with high quality speakers, so check out the videos.
Also good to see so many Aussie speakers at the conference taking home some pretty good ratings too. It was also announced that NDC will be in Australia in 2016. No extra information was provided.
