On this second day of the Warm Crocodile Developer Conference.

First session

I started out by attending Jimmy Bogard‘s talk on continuous delivery. The talk was ok, but in my opinion too much time went by with fiddling with ASP.NET MVC and database scripts and stuff like this.

But this might be also be because much of the stuff that is required to be able to do continous delivery (like e.g. using a build script, having the right tests, automating database migrations, etc.) is stuff that I would never consider NOT doing.

I did however get a tip on how to configure our TeamCity installation by chaining the build configurations to form a pipeline.

Second session

In the second session, I went and saw my homie Jesper Lund Stocholm do a presentation on OData. Jesper is cool in many ways, especially because he’ll say stuff like “I love WS-*” and “I love looking at SOAP messages in Fiddler”, etc.

I’m not sure I’m buying in on the “OData is the future of data on the web”, but I was pleasantly surprised that it was kind of RESTful in that it provides links and stuff between entities. The API is just so ugly though, that I swear I shed a tear of blood while watching Jesper punch in what seemed to be an encrypted LINQ query in the browser query string…

Third session

In the third session, I wanted to see Mark do his top 10 developer mistakes when using SQL Server, but the room was packed! And I simply could not stand the thought of having to sit on a hard floor for one hour straight, so I went down to the lobby and hung out with some of the (geek) rock stars.

Fourth session

After one hour in the lobby, I went and checked out Christian‘s presentation on harmful layers. His message really resonated with me and the problems we’re currently facing at work, and it seemed the service oriented bounded context thing was a recurring theme in several presentations (including my own) at the conference.

Fifth session

After two big ice creams, I went to Ayende’s talk to get an update on the current state of RavenDB. It seems RavenDB is becoming cooler and cooler, and I really like the idea of all the stuff that will become trivial to implement as a developer because the database provides a model that is better suited for what developers do mostly (i.e. want to store objects and query objects in advanced way without compromising on the way the objects are stored).

The room was packed though, so my butt was sore after sitting on the concrete floor for the duration of the talk. Generally, the rooms for the sessions were just a little bit too small.

Sixth session

The sixth and last session was Anders Ljusberg who talked about CQRS and event sourcing, and it was really cool to see a talk about CQRS and event sourcing that had a lot of code in it!

Usually, when people talk about CQRS and event sourcing, it’s done at a slightly higher level where there’s boxes and arrows and databases and stuff like that. But this talk was really concrete and to-the-point, and I really appreciated that.

And then, Anders was the 1000000th presenter to use Twitter Bootstrap in his demos, so I guess it would have been in order to give him some kind of prize.

Conclusion

All in all, the Warm Crocodile Developer Conference has been a really nice experience. It has had a few glitches, no doubt about that, but I think Daniel handled it in a charming fashion – as the time when the arrangers had forgotten to arrange the ice cream for the “double espressos and ice cream” break, so Daniel went into the next door Irma and bought all of their ice cream, which he brought to the hotel in Irma shopping baskets.

There’s been room for a lot of talk between the sessions, and generally the speakers have been engaged and approachable, which has contributed to an awesome atmosphere. And then I had three cool colleagues with me, so it’s been two and a half days of excellent company.

Even though I have been kind of occupied mentally by the fact that I was going to do a presentation, I still managed to catch a few points from attending other presentations during the day.

First session

First, I went and saw Rob Ashton talk about building and testing Javascript applications, which was mostly about Node.js and a bunch of libraries that can be used when you’re doing serious Node development.

It strikes me that project names in the Node world are way cooler than in .NET…. We have NUnit, NBehave, NServiceBus, NWhatever… Node has Mocha, Zombie, Mocha-Cakes, etc.

Also, Rob was delightfully whimsy as he switched between virtual desktops with terminals and Vim at epileptic seisure-inducing speed, so I was definitely entertained, and also enlightened (although I have messed a bit with Node.js already, so I already knew most of the stuff he talked about).

Second session

I decided to stay for Rob’s second talk on game development in HTML5, which was an introduction to three ways of drawing animated graphics with HTML5. Rob gave a great overview over “happy face/sad face” facts about canvas vs. DOM manipulation vs. WebGL, so even though I don’t care about creating games in HTML5, it was nice to learn about how few limits there are in the browser.

Third session

After an elfish amount of vikingish lunch, I went and checked out Mantas Klasavičius who talked about something that he calls metric-driven development. Basically, Mantas talked about how to collect metrics from running applications and use them i various ways, both as a means to know where to improve the application, but also – as I understood it – almost as a gamification thing that inspired development teams to take responsibility and do even better. Even though Mantas is from Lithuania and thus was a little bit challenged language-wise, he succeeded in conveying a bunch of excellent points that I intend to take home and implement right away!

Fourth session

My fourth session was on F# with Tomas Petricek, and I guess it was ok – but at this point, I had to mess a little bit with my slides because I had suddenly realized my last example was too complex to be explained with words alone, so I was trying to follow Tomas at the same time as I was drawing a sequence diagram in my notebook and editing the iPhone photo to make it ready to be included in a slide.

Tomas touched very briefly on some of the cool features of F#, and must admit that I would have loved a full session about programming with actors in F# instead of the TypeProvider thing that Tomas talked about.

Fifth session

…was my own session on Rebus. I think it went fairly well – for once I had had time to actually prepare the talk, so I had my tongue laid out in the right way or something 🙂 at least I didn’t stutter and mumble as much as I usually do when I’m forced to talk in English for an extended amount of time… Here’s the slide deck (PDF): Taking The Hippie Bus To The Enterprise. Sample code is on GitHub: Warm Crocodile Rebus demos.

Sixth session

was on dealing with global performance by Steven Singh, which I attended because Steven had forgotten to bring a computer 🙂 so, being a nice guy and all, I let him use my computer to download his slides and use it during the presentation, even though it meant that I would miss out on Stefan’s ServiceStack all the things!-talk. That was actually too bad, so I must see if can get a chance to pick Stefan’s brain later.

Moreover, I was really tired at this point, and I felt like some FaceTime™ with my two kids at home, so I went out for about 30 minutes during the presentation. I can’t judge whether the presentation was good or bad, but I got the impression that Steven had a hard time keeping the common thread in what he wanted to say. It may be my disability to follow though, so I’m not entirely sure of this.

Conclusion

1st day ended with lunch together with most of the attendees, and I got to talk to Roy Osherove, Jimmy Bogard, and Derick Bailey – three really inspiring people! It seemed that Jimmy and Derick are totally buying in on Udi’s service-oriented-all-the-things way of thinking that permeates all layers of entire stack from database to UI widgets.

Also, Derick had experience with composite UIs with Prism (which is what we’re working with in our big trading application at d60), and obviously also with Marionette which he made as a composite UI framework in Javascript.

All in all it has been a great day! Now i want a shower, and then I want to sleep!

I’m curently sitting at an F# session with Thomas Petricek, and it’s a little bit hard for me to keep my attention at the presentation because my own presentation is on in less than 2 hours.

But I just want to express my very positive impression of the Warm Crocodile Developer Conference! Even though there has been a few glitches around last minute re-arrangements of the conference program, a “viking’ish lunch” in less-than-vikingish amounts, and a conference room with a giant column in the middle of the room, the conference is going greatly so far!

My impression is that people are very positive, and there’s a lot of communication going on in the corners. The arrangers have really succeeded in creating an atmosphere where people seem to want to connect, and that’s a huge win for a conference like this.