NDC Oslo 2021 is over. Amazing three days with significant information overload. First of all, congrats to the organization @NDC_Conferences. Another special edition of NDC. My way to evaluate a conference is by the speakers and topics selection. All my expectations came true. Very often, I was not sure which session to visit, so many hard choices 😊
Due to the Covid measures from the Norwegian government, the participants were grouped into cohorts to visit selected sessions in person on the third day. Nevertheless, it was all very well organized. Kudos to @NDC_Conferences.
This blog post summarizes my impressions from the second and the third day. The first-day impressions you can find here. Let’s start. It seems like security awareness was one of the hidden messages of the conference. Many sessions covered security from various aspects but with the same goal. To make us more aware of the security or even make security our main quality attribute when building our solutions.
I started with the session “Securing your .NET application software supply-chain” from Niels Tanis. I had the opportunity to meet and talk to Niels before and after his session. We managed to exchange some ideas of how security should look today and that it’s our responsibility to write secure code. He elaborated on the application software supply-chain issues in his session and how to prevent them. Very insightful. Talking more about security, in the session “Implement defense-in-depth for your .NET API:s,” interesting practical examples were given on how to implement security in the layers of a particular API. Nowadays, securing only on the surface is not enough; the software developers should think about securing each layer in their architecture. I finished the security section with another insightful session by Dominick Baier about the BFF (backend for frontend) pattern. The ever-changing browser landscape makes security very vulnerable, and the BFF pattern is one solution to avoid browser vulnerabilities.
The non-security sessions that I visited were mostly about new technologies and tools. If used properly and in the right context, all these technologies and tools can make our daily job much easier. From almost all the sessions, I got confirmation that at Nebb, we are on the right path. Most of the new technologies and tools we already use. For instance, recently, we started using K6 for distributed load testing. Our experience is amazing (maybe that should be a separate blog post). We have managed to detect bottlenecks in the architecture from one of our products before even hitting the production environment. Our same experience at Nebb was confirmed in the “Performance testing: from zero to hero with k6 & Azure” session by Jose Luis Latorre Millas.
Additionally, Jose Luis has shared some useful GitHub open repositories to make the load testing easier and more efficient. Going further, Jakob Ehn, in his session, “Developing microservice applications with Dapr,” has proven that Darp is an excellent tool for bootstrapping microservice-based projects. Darp is leveraging the sidecar design pattern. Additionally, the idea of hosting Darp based solutions in Azure Container Apps is soo convenient that one can create a microservice solution in no time. We have already experimented with Dapr at Nebb, so this session was the sign to do the next step.
I finished my NDC Oslo 2021 summary with one great session. Whenever I go to a conference, I look for Chris Klug. He is one of my favorite conference speakers because he performs great on the stage and always shows amazing .NET examples. No mistake this time. Great performance and great examples. I’m looking forward to implementing some of his hints at Nebb. For instance, content negotiation with custom headers, very cool examples with background tasks, and of course extending applications using HostingStartupAttribute and IHostingStartup to achieve super optimal resource delivery. By the way, here is the link with all his great examples.
All in all, NDC Oslo 2021 was a great experience. Very insightful and affirmative. Along with the great sessions, I managed to do some networking which is one of the main benefits of in-person conferences.