DDD9!

Last Saturday I not only got to attend DDD9 I was lucky enough to have a session selected so I was speaking as well.

Pre-Conference Dinner

The night before the conference there was a bit of a get together and a chance to chat with other people who were going to attend the conference the next day and it was great to catch up with people over a few drinks and food.

DDD

.Net Collections Deep Dive – Gary Short

Gary’s talks are always great and so I was really looking forward to this one.

From this session I learnt a lot about the different types of collections and Gary’s insights about their foibles was invaluable and will help me in future when I’m deciding what collection to use rather than just plumping for a List<T>.

Monads! What are they and why should I care? - Mike Hadlow

As I wanted to ensure my presentation was ready I missed the beginning of Mike’s presentation and joined it about half way through.

Mikes session was one where I really needed to have been in since the beginning, it was an excellent presentation and very technical but coming in half way through I had trouble keeping up (my fault not Mike’s) .

As I tweeted on the day monads look really interesting but I’m not sure where I’d use them in C#.  As I said in my post about the year ahead I hope to look at F# and can see that monads may be very handy.

Writing Maintainable Tests for Selenium - David Burns

I was looking forward to David’s session as I have been using Selenium for a while and wanted to see if I could improve my tests.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have been following best practice without even knowing it.  I think that David’s talk ended a little earlier than he anticipated but the questions and discussion that filled the rest of the session were good.

Is your code S.O.L.I.D ? - Nathan Gloyn

Yes this was my session!  I had a good time presenting it and from the feedback it seems to have gone down well, I’m going to be presenting it again at some user groups in the near future and I’m hoping it will be selected for DDD Scotland.

Mobile Panel - From iPhone to HTML 5 to Windows Phone 7 to Android - Chris Hardy

The final session I attended of the day was a panel that took questions from the audience on various topics relating to mobile technologies.

The questions included security in relation to mobile devices, tablet PC’s, HTML 5, best platform to develop on, etc

The panel answered all the questions and even posed some to the audience to try and find out the feeling in the room about where mobile technologies were going and what platform’s people intended to develop for.

Geek Dinner

So after the conference finished was the geek dinner which kicked off as per usual in Revolutions bar for pre-dinner drinks and then moved onto Pizza Express.

It was great to be able to talk to other speakers and attendees to gauge how the day had gone and the feeling was that this was the best DDD so far, a good mix of introductory, deep dive and technical sessions.

Summing up

From the pre-conference dinner through DDD to the geek dinner this was a great DDD. I really enjoyed meeting friends old and new and the discussions that we had.

The DDD team did a fantastic job of organising the whole day and I’m sure that everybody who attended would agree that the actual day and the dinners, before and after, were a great success.  Well done chaps!

So what’s next? Hopefully DDD Scotland and after that DDD Southwest 3, see you there!