This weekend saw the return of DDD to Bristol after a break of a year, with a new location and changed team behind the organisation.
As per previous years the weather on the day was absolutely fantastic with blue skies and sunshine as far as the eye could see.
The venue
This year instead of being held at UWE the Redcliffe Sixth Form Centre which is closer to the centre of Bristol making it easier to access via Train but a little more difficult by car, but with plenty of car parks nearby I don’t think it was a big problem.
On entering the venue you proceeded upstairs into a large “common room” area which is where the attendees would be between sessions. One advantage this had over the previous venue was that the area was large enough for the sponsors to be in as well as attendees being able to get coffee/food and socialising.
My Day
On arriving at the conference I found coffee & Danishes waiting for attendees, which was much appreciated, and whilst waiting for the welcome I took the opportunity to catch up with people I knew some of which I hadn’t see since the last DDD I attended.
Welcome session
Ross Scott gave the welcome telling everyone about the day, house keeping information, etc. One change for this year was that there would be no evaluation forms instead all feedback would be recorded by Pocket DDD and each session you entered feedback for would count as a single entry into the prize draw at the end of the day.
Session 1
I didn’t actually attend any of these sessions, none of them had piqued my interest (although having listened to people who did attend I think I may have missed an opportunity to see Steve Sandersons talk) instead taking this time to catch up with some people I specifically wanted to talk to.
Session 2 – Redis Cluster
Marc Gravell started off by explaining what Redis is, how you can install it, basics of Redis, etc.
He then showed us how simple it was to use Redis using the Stack Exchange Redis client and also touched on how to monitor Redis using the Stack Exchange OpServer which he uses daily - both of which are available for free.
Marc then covered various replication configurations for Redis with master-slave relationships before moving onto Redis Cluster.
Redis cluster is currently unavailable on windows (MS Open Tech that are porting Redis are slightly behind) Marc then explained why you’d want a cluster rather than using a master-slave configuration with a demo of how to set up a cluster which currently needs Ruby to achieve.
Session 3 – Supercharge you JavaScript Development
Chris Canal’s session was packed, people were obviously interested in the subject.
Chris had chosen to video all of the “live coding” to ensure no issues with the internet and for the most part it worked really well with Chris being able to add additional commentary on what was happening whilst the video was running.
Chris covered using npm, grunt, bower and yeomon to get a project started quickly and then covered using the lodash library in your code.
Lunch
Lunch was held in the common room area and the team had laid on pasties for the attendees which were very nice.
There were a few groks and a 20-20 presentation by Phil Winstanley, although with the common room although more people could watch it the noise from people talking and not watching did make it more difficult to hear the speaker.
By this time the heat in the presentation rooms had increased and a lot of attendees were commenting on it.
Session 4 – Hadoop and Big Data
Gary Shorts’ session was packed, again a good indicator that people wanted to know more about this subject.
Gary took us through how hadoop works and then showed us how we could use .Net to work with it using the obligatory word count demos.
Once he had explained how we could use it he managed to squeeze in a real world example, including some visualization, around trying to predict the results of horse races.
Session 5 – 10 things I learnt about web application security
James Crowley started his talk explaining he wasn’t a security expert but was passing on his experience from working on a product that had had professional penetration testers trying to break into it.
He went on to show us just how easy it was to break into a site using fiddler before moving on to more sophisticated tools such as BeEF.
James showed just how easily your site could be compromised and more than one person I talked to said they were more than a little concerned about their sites after seeing this session.
Closing Session
Ross Scott presided over the closing session, thanking the speakers and everybody for coming, and then handling the swag giveaway.
And with that it was over.
Summary
The new team put on a really good day, pasties and cream teas adding to the west country flavour of the day. I thought the new venue worked out well, especially the common room area, the only downside seemed to be the session rooms were so hot by the end of the day but it does seems this happens at every DDD SW.
I think the team can be rightly proud of what they achieved and I look forward to seeing what happens next year.
