Yet another layer of indirection

This year I wanted to experience the full experience of taking part in a workshop.

The choice range was great but…Hands on Ruby on Rails? Great. Explaining concepts to .Net developers? Sweet. From Rob Connery himself? Sold!

Unfortunately I won’t be speaking this year. But I would not miss such a promising conference just because they had enough talent onboard already and decided not to use their secret weapon

Everyone of us dreams with this success stories: self-made, luck-stricken, hard working average Joe –or Jane– that once in a while hits the jackpot of a very successful application that makes him rich overnight (and still doing his –or her– dishes).

My head was still spinning from the party of the day before. Not because of heavy drinking of wild partying (there was none of those) but because the stream of unleashed energy that Rob Ashton is. A quiet beer can turn into a heated discussion decorated with jewels such as “Javascript is the f… second coming of The Messiah”. Heretic, yes… but by Jove was funny!

Still pumped up with the positive energy of the dinner with the rest of speakers the day before I walked the short stretch under the rain to be poetically showered in knowledge of the them of the day: testing.

Let’s start with a declaration of intentions. I will do my best to be less bitchy. And less über-critic. In the past I have already complained about my writings over the conferences I have attended so I will do my best to focus more on the content and less about my biased opinion of the speaker.
And no, it is neither because I fear someone else’s opinion about me being on the spotlight nor because is more difficult to criticize someone when you know him a little bit better. Just so you know.

Just two words: W-OW.

It has been an absolute an utter blast being part of this conference. The experience has been way better than last year’s and I suspect that being at the other side of the stage has had a lot to do with the result.

…which vaguely translated into “I will be speaking at the NDC 2011!”

Wow I cannot possible squeeze more acronyms into a title (God knows I will keep on trying :-p)

Conference is over, plane is waiting (well, not really, it is me who is patiently waiting in the airport writing irrelevant blog posts) and it is time to wrap-up thoughts that I did not know where to place.

Last day of the conference did not start well at all.
I expected to attend a session on Design by Contract (a topic that interests me a lot as I am myself preparing a talk about the subject) but, unfortunately, the speaker was late to the talk. I do not want to take any gratuitous guesses about the reasons for being late. Maybe it was a most legitimate reason (and then the organization should have communicated the audience, which they did not, at least, before the time I left when the session was due), maybe it wasn’t.
Anyway, for me, being late for a session with no warning is a big no-no, so I left the room mildly upset towards…

Not so much sleep, some heavy breakfast and off to the second day of conference.

Yes, here we go again with boring (or not) post about what’s going on in the conferences I attend.
This time is the Norwegian Developers Conference (hence the NDC) that happens to be held in Oslo.

If volcanic ashes permit and since I had some time off in London, I though I could not miss the opportunity to attend some top-quality conference at a very contained price.

This is sort of a rushed post as I am leaving on long vacation for the first time in many years. So you will not hear from me in a month (as it it was the first time and you minded :-p)

Last day of the conference (I still attended the post-conference). My brain was still operative after 3 days of squeezing it, and what a way of pushing it on for another day!!

Sleeping like a baby but still being excited enough to wake up earlier is one of the greatest feelings that I experience in this sort of conferences. That and not having to vacuum-clean the floor for a whole week. Aaah, those little pleasures in live...