.NET Developer Days 2016 - Grand finale

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The time has come to summary .NET Developer Days 2016. I think that each conference can be judged based on 3 main factors: organisation, presentations, networking so I'll write a few words about each of these topics.


Organisation

In short the organisation was ok. However, as always there were some positives and some negatives. Let's start with the positives. Warsaw Expo Center seems to be a good placed for conferences. There is a plenty of place there, conferences rooms are big etc.

Another important thing are food and drinks. I think that the food was good, especially the lunch on the second day. It's worth saying that hot/cold drinks and beverages were available all the time. What's more I appreciate the selection of beers during the conference party. I found there one of my favourites i.e. Jankes beer from Lwówek Brevery!

Several Xbox consoles available for everyone were another good idea. Unfortunately, for majority of the time there were occupied by FIFA players and I couldn't play Gears of Wars as much as I want ;) Other good concept were the big seat cushions/pillows.

As to negatives. Although as I said Warsaw Expo Center is ok personally I'd prefer a location directly near the subway. I didn't have any problems with the registration but next to me I saw very long queues. I also have to complain about such an important thing like coffee machines. There were many of them but it happened that all of them didn't work at the same time! Finally, one mundane affair/issue - there could be more toilettes.

Presentations

Here I'm a little bit disappointed. Maybe because I'm becoming older and bored but majority of presentations were average, not bad, not good simply average.

• Jon Skeet – C#: Open, Evolving, Everywhere The beginning of the presentation was too long and too wordy. I think that the history of C# is not the best choice for the keynote. The latter part was more technical and better. Jon told that dotnet core is now available in Google Cloud and showed some C# 7 features.
• Valdis Iljuconoks - Tackling Complexities and Mediating Hexagonal Challenges Honestly speaking now I cannot recall anything special about this presentation.
• Tomasz Kopacz - Deep dive into Service Fabric after 2 years As far as I remember presentations given by Tomek were always very technical and very advanced. And this one was the same. For me it was even too technical and too advanced and at some point I was simply lost. Anyway Tomek showed a lot of commitment, energy and it was obvious that he loves what he does.
• Piotr Spikowski, Marcin Nowak - Deadly Sins of .NET Developers Piotr and Marcin were talking mostly about basics but I refreshed myself a few things.
• Adam Granicz - Functional, reactive web abstractions for .NET It was mostly WebSharper advertisement. It seems to be a great tool but I expected something else. Now I think that I was too novice in F# for this presentation and because of that it was boring for me.
• Maciej Aniserowicz - CQRS for… everyone! Maciek gave a good presentation but being familiar with his posts I expected something more energetic, exciting... Besides I think that this presentation should have level 200 rather than 300.
• Jon Skeet - Abusing C# This presentation given by Jon was much, much more technical than the keynote presentation and also much much more better. Jon actually showed what not to do in C# and proved me that I still don't know many things about C# and .NET framework.
• Tomas Herceg - Entity Framework Core This presentation was a good introduction to a new Entity Framework Core. I haven't used it yet, I only read about it so it was a good choice.
• Michał Dudak - How To .NET All The Things This one was about very important thing which however is not very popular and easy to talk about - .NET Standard. Despite this difficulties Michał gave a very good and at the same time interesting presentation. For me the number 1.
• Raimondas Tijūnaitis - Complexity game – from big balls of mud to shiny bullets Another presentation that I can't write anything special about.

On the second day I could not attend the last 2 presentations so it's everything when it comes to this topic.

Networking/people

The conference and especially the conference party was a great occasion to meet new people. I decided that I'll try to talk with someone completely unknown and thanks to that I learn many interesting things about payment terminals, security of payments... in other words about things I'm not expert in. It's also worth highlighting that the party was not used by the organizers as the occasion for advertisement or promotion. It was simply a time for participants. A very big plus!

By the way, I noticed that another good occasion to meet someone new was Xbox area. Even if you are shy, is there a better opportunity to talk down someone than playing together at the console?

Summary

The summary will be short. Despite some disadvantages, advantages outweigh so this wasn't my last .NET Developer Days.