Another year, another incredibly lucky software developer gets to spend a week at the DevWeek conference. For regular readers of the blog (hey mum!) you’ll know I attended last year and you can see my write up of it here.
I look at my own career over the past 12 months and realise just how much DevWeek helped hone and solidify a lot of my thinking – I’ve moved on massively since then and have put a great deal of last years learning into practice within products that I’ve worked on, so definitely was a worthwhile spend (thankfully my employer also thinks so!)
I had to choose my sessions far more carefully this year, it was a downside of returning I feel, but there felt like a lot of repetition on sessions – that said, there was still a great deal of new content (and I enjoyed @JeffRichter’s talk on exceptions so much last year I re-attended this year – sad eh!).
Day 1 Highlights
Ajax and ASP.NET MVC
K. Scott Allen – @OdeToCode
The lightbulb went on at the start of this talk and just didn’t switch off – I’ve not done so much on the Ajax side of MVC, though he made it all incredibly easy, and although I’ve watched the videos he delivered via pluralsight, it was far easier to contextualise and sank in better being in the room (and able to ask those stupid questions!).
He covered the client validation updates in MVC3 (the main reason we switched to MVC3 when it first launched), and covered a great deal around the topic as folks asked questions.
Massive tangibles to take directly onto a project I’m working on and I look forward to getting some of this into code asap.
NoSQL, Is it the future?
Gary Short – @GaryShort
Oh how I wish I went to that day on NoSQL last year in Scotland… Presented brilliantly (as per really, after seeing presentations at DDD this is the usual craic with Gary). He covered the various products available and the general use cases for them, obviously the history to NoSQL, and covered a lot of use cases. I could waffle more but I’d only highlight my ignorance – realistically the cleverness in the talk and the outcome for me was that I have to try this – I have to grab a small project at work that I can pickup in my spare time and experiment with it. I work in an environment where it’s easy to test the limits of our RDBMS solution as we have a massive amount of traffic, especially writes, and I think it’d be worthy of investigation – definitely more on this to follow from me!
Day 2 Highlights
Model Binding in ASP.NET MVC 3
K. Scott Allen – @OdeToCode
I’m going to start to sound like an @OdeToCode fan boy, but his presentation style and knowledge of the topic when asked a question just rocks – one of those people that qualifies in my book as a Dev Rock Star, so him catching up with him at lunch to have a chat through the questions I’d asked during the session was just superb!
There was a great deal of validation (personal, not model) in this session on the ways we’re currently doing model binding, though again, there were significant tangibles around the extensibility in MVC3 that may well make certain aspects of what we do around model binding easier.
Modern Javascript
K. Scott Allen – @OdeToCode
ok, ok, it’s turning into the Scott Allen show… doh! I can only hope the reticence to ask questions during this question meant that others were similarly thinking ‘Oh Christ, I don’t do any of this!’.
I got that functions are heavily important (I sort of got this from consuming jquery, I’d just not written my own in the same vein). Closures are an area I really need to read up on, and in general I just need to work at this one.
For any developer who consumed jquery and just ‘gets things done’, but has never written their own class, implemented their own closure, etc. I’d say do as I plan to do and get to learning – there are so many opportunities that I’ve utterly missed. Exciting times.
Day 3 Highlights
Do’s and Don'ts of ASP.NET MVC
Hadi Hariri – @hhariri
Again, as much a personal validation session, but loads of little tangibles from this one – lots around IDependencyResolver and Nuget that I just need to do – we use Unity in ControllerFactory guise currently so I really need to get this sorted. Nuget I’ve been consistently positively surprised by, There was a lot more in this session and I’ve got a bucket full of notes to work through but a crackign session.
Improving Website Performance and Scaleability While Saving Money
Robert Boedigheimer – @boedie
Possibly the best talk of the week for me – and there wasn't a design pattern, a mention of SOLID, or indeed a unit test in sight. Robert presented a lot of absolutely practical steps that can be taken to improve performance on your website, he highlighted some of the tools he used (and how he uses them), and it was just practical advice after practical advice. There is content from this that absolutely will be going into my every day work from next week onwards, and the team are going to despair as I wave the flag for the tools/concepts I got from this talk.
Closing Thoughts?
Well, the above (as well as just being in a focused environment where I got to talk dev) was superb. I personally think if I can continue to be funded for it I’d return every 2 years rather than annually to give the talks a full chance to rotate, though that’s not a criticism of the hosts or those people who give talks, I’ve seen it on other speaker circuits too (DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper events for example) and it’s one of those ‘either shut up and do a talk Tez or let them get on with it’ – I really have no desire to do so, so will be happy with what I get! Thanks to all of the organisers and speakers, it has absolutely rejuvenated my geek batteries
Onwards and upwards now, fired up geek on board!