Last week, I was in beautiful Oslo in Norway most of the week for NDC 2014. It was a great conference and I’d like to point out a few highlights.

For the first time, I was a speaker at a major conference. I’ve done quite a few internal talks before and a few externals too, but never at such a high profile event as NDC. Looking at the speaker list I’m really honoured to have been part of it. I think it was challenging and fun – but I also found myself much more nervous than I had anticipated.

Highlights

There were so many great people at the conference (both speakers and participants), but there are some that I think stand out with exceptionally good talks.

1. Troy Hunt’s How I hacked my way to Norway. Troy is entertaining and educating on the same time. A talk that is both fun to listen to and that actually gives some concrete advice on how to (not) do security. I’m a bit disappointed though that he never used the IKEA allen key when hacking sites ;-).
2. Uncle Bob Martin’s Advanced TDD: The Transformation Priority Premise. I’m a huge fan of TDD, but Uncle Bob brings it to another level, talking about 10 second oscillations between writing test and production code. Despite the title, I think it’s worth listening too even if you have limited previous experience on TDD.
3. Luke Wroblewski’s It’s a Write/Read (Mobile) Web. The keynote, which was an eye opener to me that mobile and touch devices are not only for passive consumption of material. I especially liked the count of the number of clicks required to book a hotel on the major sites (well over 100) compared to FOUR on the best one.
4. Scott Meyer’s Effective Modern C++. An introduction to some of the “new” features of C++11. The talk makes sense to a C# developer too – C++ developers are often far ahead of us in being aware of the details of how the language works and what the pitfalls are. Although there are more pitfalls in C++, a lot of the things Scott talked about applies to C# as well.

My talks are available as videos as well.

Strangling the Legacy out of an Application

A ten year old system with a basic architecture from a distant past (.NET 1.0? VB6?). New functionality built throughout the years with the then state of the art technology. On top of that some cosmetics to make the web interface look modern, but in reality the application is rotten on the inside and about to fall apart any day. That’s a common work environment for many developers.
But there is a way to get out of it without funding for a complete rewrite. Anders shares his experiences on strangling, a method where a new architecture is built in and around the existing code based, gradually replacing the old rotten code with a shiny new architecture.

Using the Scrum Rules Against your Boss

Managers think that Scrum was invented to make developers work harder. That’s a lie. Scrum was invented by developers to keep managers away so that developers get time to do actual work.
Learn how the Scrum rules can be used against your boss to get a realistic workload and more coding time without interruptions.