NDC originally stood for Norwegian Developers Conference, but I don't know if those initials still apply. Although the organizers still host a conference in Oslo, Norway every year, they have expanded to host events across the world.

I attended NDC for the third time this year, but this was my first time speaking at NDC London.

I was happy to see Microsoft sponsoring this event, providing a booth and a place for attendees to ask questions. In addition, about a dozen Microsoft employees delivered presentations at the conference.

I delivered a session on "Effective Data Visualization," a topic I have spoken about numerous times. The audience seemed appreciative, and the feedback was positive.

Sessions

During the three-day conference, I attended multiple sessions and had many conversations in the open areas outside the sessions.

Microsoft Vice President Scott Hanselman delivered an excellent opening keynote titled "AI without the BS, for humans," in which he spoke about the limitations of Artificial Intelligence tools and how we can use AI effectively.

Microsoft Engineer Steve Sanderson gave the Day 3 keynote: "The past, present, and future of AI for application developers" - a technical presentation in which he wrote code on stage to show the power of AI tools.

In between, I attended the following sessions:

"Beyond The Hype: Every Day, Real World Uses for Copilot" by Rob Conery

This presentation was all demos. Rob showed how to add context to your GitHub Copilot prompts by adding files to the Copilot Edit area.

"Consistency and Agreements in Distributed Systems" by Jimmy Bogard

Jimmy walked through the advantages and disadvantages of a few patterns designed to provide transactions to a distributed system that did not natively support transactions.

"20 year old cloud native apps with .NET" by Scott Hanselman

Scott demonstrated updating legacy applications, making them cloud-native.

"Old to Gold: How to Modernize Your Legacy ASP.NET Apps Gradually" by J Tower

Refactoring applications is risky. J showed some techniques to mitigate that risk.

"Practical advice for building glorious monoliths" by Glenn Henriksen

Glenn walked through an enterprise application architecture that provided a good separation of concerns without resorting to splitting every component into a microservice. I enjoyed this even more because Glenn gave me a bar of Norwegian chocolate for asking a good question.

"You Don't Know Git" by Edward Thomson

Edward knows Git inside and out from his time on the GitHub team. He showed many underused but powerful git commands by typing them live.

Conclusion

The sessions I saw were all great, but the real value of this conference was talking with people one-on-one or in small groups. I had many opportunities to do so during the day and at organized mixers in the evening. I learn so much from talking with people who have expertise that I lack. This one meant a bit more because I have attended fewer conferences in the past few years.

This was my first NDC since flying to Oslo almost seven years ago. The organizers did an excellent job of creating a positive experience for the attendees, the sponsors, and the speakers.