Day 1:
The day couldnt have started off better. Beautiful weather, and the registration queue at the venue was really fast.
People waiting outside of the venue before the doors opened on the first day.
Beautiful weather outside of Oslo spektrum on the first day of NDC 2012
The venue was split up into ten different areas. One main area with lot’s of stands from different companys promoting themselves and their products. Eights separete areas presentations / session + one area for workshops.
Venue during registration hours on the first day of NDC 2012
Venue during lunch hours
After moving inside and checking out the venue for awhile, i grabbed a seat fairly close to the main stage. Aral Balkan came on stage at 09.00, and basically went straight into a musical performance on stage.
Vimeo link to Aral Balkans – A Happy Grain of Sand keynote
Aral goes on to talk about how we as developers should create emotional connections with our users (His song example), and design experiences that make our users happy.
During his presentation he used everyday examples filled with humor, such as design of toilets, ticket machines, train doors and elevators to make his points.
He talked about “the superman effect”. How we can make our users feel like superman, when we make the technology behind the experience invisible.
Lot’s of great quotes came out of the keynote, such as:
“Your app should not look like your database just threw up”
All of these things, together with Aral’s enthusiasm and obviouse passion for his work made this one of the best presentations i’ve seen, regardless of topic. And it really set the tone for the rest of the conference.
From here on out it was one hour presentations scheduled all day, only interrupted by 20 minute breaks inbetween sessions and a one hour lunch break.
I attended several sessions about different aspects of Windows 8. Some fairly technical, with lots of good code examples. Like Gill Cleerens talk on WinRT in Windows 8. I also went to listen to Laurent Bugnion talk about the Metro Design Principles that Microsoft are so focused on in all of their products now days (Windows 8, Windows Phone, XBOX and Zune).
Overall it was a lot of different sessions, that complemented each other pretty well. Im especially looking forward to having some more time studying several of Gill Clereens examples once he releases them on his blogg!
Gill Cleerens blogg – Snowball.be
Day 2:
The second day didnt start out quite as dramatic as the opening keynote, but it had some very interesting sessions lined up for us.
The first session i attended was called Clean Architecture, and it was held by Robert C Martin, aka Uncle Bob. Martin is a well known author and speaker in the field of software design and development. He has published several books, and is also the owner of the cleancoders educational video series.
Uncle Bob – Clean Code Video Series
In the presentation Martin talked about how we can make better choices for our architecture, by defering technical deccisions for as long as possible. This way we have more information available, once we make our decisions.
He also mentioned some really good points about how we as developers often “enslave” ourselves to the tools we use. We integrated them all the way into the core of our systems, making it an almost impossible task to change or remove them in the future.
The presentation was really good, and i think alot of people recognized themselves and / or their companys practice in what Martin was talking about.
The next presentation came from Dan North, and it was about embracing uncertainty. Dan talks about how we are so desperatly uncomfortable with uncertainty. So much so that we will replace it with anything, even things we know don’t work.
The rest of the day for me was spent in various sessions about user experience and design. Several of them from a great speaker named Billy Hollis, who is an american consultant in software development and a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional).
He held some great presentations that i think hit straight home for most of the developers in the audience. They all focused on what some people call the transition from The Age of Features, to The Age of Experiences.
For many years now it has been good enough to just make things possible. But now days success also depends on making things easy!
I don’t think i attended a single technical presentation on day 2, but it was by far the best day of the conference. So many good sessions that are applicable for all programming languages and software products that we as developers will create in the future.
Day 3:
The third and last day was the most technical day for me. Looking back i should probably have switched out some of the technical sessions, for some more well rounded presentations. This was partly because of my lack of technical experties in some of these areas, but also because a few of the presentations were not really all that good.
Lack of preperation, and also general lack of focus in the presentations made them hard to follow, and fairly uninteresting. But these things are hard to predict, and the theme of the session was interesting. So it was worth a shot.
Hightlights for the day was probably Billy Hollis again, talking about the concept of storyboarding your user experience, and Laurent Bugnion talking about applying the MVVM pattern on several different platforms.
Both presenteres are really good, and their content was also top notch. Billy Hollis pours out his experiences once again, complete with lots of good examples and tips for the audience to follow.
I also ended up winning a book, and a voucher for either a free training course at ProgramUtvikling or a ticket to next years NDC.
My choice when it came to picking out a free book from winning on ProgramUtviklings magical spinning wheel.
My golden voucher for a free training course or a ticket to next years NDC!
So overall it turned out to be a pretty good day, and a really good conference!
Hopefully i’ll be able to attend again next year 🙂
Funtastic Software 