NDC London 2014

Last week ExCel London was hosting NDC London 2014, a conference for programmers, software architects, PMs and IT executives. Hundreds of developers came along from all over Europe to see fantastic speakers and to mingle and share ideas with fellow developers. We headed East as well.

The variety of themes and subjects discussed was pretty impressive. With so many talks to choose from it is fair to say NDC London brought some food for though to every mind.

One of the talks that stood out was Tomas Jansson‘s talk titled “Polyglot heaven – how to build a async, reactive application in 2014”. Tomas went through a variety of points such as CQRS, event sourcing, Event Store, Neo4j (graph database), Elastichsearch (search database). In addition he also did programming in both, F# and C#!

A very different talk was delivered by Dan North. Dan talked about his extensive experience of being in the industry for 20 years and various interactions that shaped his career. He shared different stories, including those about him killing the production database, trying and not being able to quit, not agreeing with his boss an being a boss you shouldn’t agree with. This was the first ever talk by Dan I saw and he certainly lived up to his reputation.

Going back to the variety of talks – there were a few entries on the design side of things too. Lauren went to see a talk on style guides and here’s what she has to say: “We attended the Shay Howe talk, “Modern Style Guides for a Better Tomorrow”. Shay currently works as Director of Product at Belly. The talk gave us a good insight into the best practice for creating a company style guide and how this should be a collaboration across disciplines. This was particularly relevant to us given that we’re currently working on a new Pusher style guide. It’s always great to see how different companies tackle common problems.”

And here’s a word from Jamie: “I attended the talk by Cristiano Betta on ‘Hacking Through Time And Space’. It was a fascinating account of his experience with hackathons and the dos and do-nots of attending or hosting one. It was very useful for me as, having only been coding for a few months, I gained a lot of interesting insight into the tech world.”

Perhaps, what really made this event fun were interesting conversations we had with the .net folk. We don’t do many .net events at Pusher, so ideas and problems we chatted about were very much new to us. I guess it’s always good to shake things up a bit.

And last but not least – we almost got filmed by the Mission Impossible 5 crew, right next to Tom Cruise. No joke.