Norwegian Developer Conference – Day 1

I’m attending the NDC 2010 and wow… The fatigue is settling by now after a nice dinner at a pizza-shop. I dare you: Have either of you ever paid 180 Norwegian Kroner ~ 28 US Dollars for a pizza without beverages? I knew that Norway was bloody expensive but I honestly didn’t see that one coming.

I attended seven sessions today Wednesday including the keynote kicking off the conference. I think I gave three or four green cards and two yellows… No red cards yet.   Sadly the two F# sessions this morning were cancelled so I watched Kevlin Henney at first talking about architecture and then Steve Strong walking us through the new features in .NET 4 System.Treading namespace. Quite interesting – I have a feeling that the usage of System.Threading is limited considering the day-to-day problems we face back at work but it’s good to know about the new stuff Microsoft has made available to us.

After that it was time for probably the best session for me today which was Scott Allen doing a talk about Modern Javascript. I know so little about the strengths and possibilities in Javascript so it was packed with information about features and core concepts that I had no clue existed. As a C# programmer hearing things like “functions as constructors” and “replacing the ‘this’ keyword with another object" rocked the boat quite a bit… I have decided to get to know Javascript better because my ignorance towards dynamic languages comes part from ignorance and part from the fear of the unknown, I guess. The only lasting solution to that problem is to take a deep dive into it and I was impressed even though I have to spend some time getting familiar with the concepts.

The session by Jon Skeet about Noda was interesting. I don’t think I share his passion for dates and times and I’ll probably sleep like a baby tonight despite that… I for one don’t really get a kick out  of a bug found in the New Zealand way of handling timezone restrictions but he managed to convince me that programming dates and times into an application is just as complicated as anything else which is the feeling I’ve had earlier. Earlier I almost felt a bit ashamed to not be able to figure out “simple” things with dates and times but the thing is: Dates and times in software development is hard, period. Jon says so, I’ve felt it on my own body – talk to the hand!

Until tomorrow…