Yes, it’s conference time. After two years of online meetings, workshops, brainstorming & roadmap sessions, endless webinars, now it’s time for an in-person conference. Next week I’m visiting NDC Oslo 2021, one of the best conferences in Europe. NDC is famous for its wide but refined selection of speakers and topics that is attractive even for the pickiest developers. Based on the conference agenda and the speaker selection, I can detect certain trends next year. Here are my favorites.
The list starts with the keynote session: “Unicorn Hunting” by Mikko Hypponen. Mikko is a worldwide industry expert in cyber security and a serial conference speaker. He is famous for the Hyppönen Law about IoT security. The Hyppönen Law states that whenever an appliance is described as being “smart,” it is vulnerable. Nebb offers various IoT solutions, and IoT security is our focus. Therefore, If you can judge a conference by its keynote session, this will be great.
Photo Credit: NDC Oslo
The next topic that is in my focus is microservices. NDC Oslo traditionally covers microservices as one of the most popular architectural styles. I plan to follow the following sessions: “Choreography vs. Orchestration in serverless microservices” by Mete Atamel and Guillaume Laforge, “Developing microservice applications with Dapr” by Jakob Ehn, “Managing Event-Driven Architectures” by Ian Cooper, and “Implement defense in depth for your .NET API:s” by Tobias Ahnoff and Martin Altenstedt.
Another topic that triggers my attention is open telemetry, so I plan to follow “Distributed Tracing in dotnet core using OpenTelemetry” by Martin Thwaites and “OpenTelemetry will save your day (and night)” by Alexey Zimarev.
The drive to explore various technologies brings me to “Drinking a river of IoT data with Akka.NET” by Hannes Lowette, “What’s new in C#? Exciting new features in C# 8.0 and 9.0” by Filip Ekberg, and “Building Cloud-Native .NET Applications with Project Tye” by Jon Galloway.
As a technical manager at Nebb, I equally work with people and technology. Keeping my technical and soft skills sharp is equally important. That’s why I end my list with “The Leaders Leap - When your work becomes about people” by Martin Mazur and “Stop punching yourself in the face!” by Hannes Lowette.
With such a selection, I cannot say that my list is finite. Each time I go through the agenda, I have new favorites. I plan an après-conference post to summarize my impressions. You may be wondering why I’m so excited about an in-person conference. Well, the answer is simple. After two years of webinars, I realized that nothing beats the chit-chat between sessions and during coffee breaks and informally discussing ideas and solutions with people from the same industry.
