Playing the fool at Developer Day

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I did my session at DDD first thing this morning. It was fun. Not sure how many turned up online, but there were enough to make some nice comments at the end. The session was recorded. I’ll post here when it is ready to view.

Then it was time to prepare for my production duties. To do this I had to do some authentication stuff which turned out to be really fiddly. And I made a complete idiot of myself in an hilarious way. I was in a Teams call with Rik who was patiently walking me through the process of connecting to Teams using the right identity.

Rik: “The first step is to log out of your current user ID…”
Rob presses the logout button. Call instantly drops. I could hear the sound of Rik’s face palm all the way from Leeds…. Oh well. I think (hope) he actually found the whole thing rather amusing.

Anyhoo, after a bit more faffing around I was connected and able to produce a session, which was great fun. The whole day was great. It’s a shame that we couldn’t meet up in person, but for this event the organisers set up Discord channels for all the sessions and this worked a treat. It is going to be interesting to see how they can integrate these kinds of things into an in-person conference so that people from all around the world (and we did have quite a few) can take part as they do now with the online versions.

Thanks very much to the organisers for setting up such a great event.

DDD North was awesome

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The DDD event today was wonderful. So good that I forgot to take pictures. The only pictures that I did take were of links to more interesting content. The picture above is from a session by Pete Gallagher about .NET Core 3 on Raspberry Pi.

…and this is from the session that followed, all about Blazor (which looks wonderful).

Then I went to sessions about VR, C# for the lazy and Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi. I don’t have pictures for them because I rather stupidly sat too far back…..

Everyone that went (and the place was packed) had a great time. Thanks to all the organisers, a perfect day. There’s another DDD event later this year in Nottingham, you can find out more here.

Much Travelled Dev Day

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If you've ever wondered if it is possible to travel to from Hull to Mons in Belgium, do a session at Dev Day 15 and then fly back on the same day I'm able to tell you that it can be done. Even if the day starts with a 90 minute delay before you take off and you arrive too late to make your ongoing rail connection.

Fortunately, because the people at Thalys are completely awesome, this was simply a matter of rebooking on a later train (at no extra cost) and then heading off. I got to the venue around 20 minutes before my session. You can't beat just in time delivery. I did my session, and then headed straight back for my train home, getting back just in time for bed.

Talk about a full day....

Thanks to Christophe for the picture. 

Thanks to Christophe for the picture. 

Anyhoo, the session was great. The audience was lovely, if a little bemused at the start, when I started handing out small cheese and big cheese prizes. But they soon got into the swing of things and much fun was had. Apparently it was captured on video, which will be interesting.....

Thanks to Olivier and the crew for organising the whole thing. It's actually a rather inspiring story. A bunch of developers wanted a conference in their part of the world and they just built one. They've got lots of delegates, sponsorship, a great venue in a cinema multiplex and splendid Microsofties like Andy Wigley coming along to give them sessions on the latest tech. Great stuff. A pleasure to be involved with. I'll be there next year if you want me. 

Although I might travel down the night before.....