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.