Mon - Fri, Jan 16 - 20, 2017
NDC London
London, England
Conference Site
Topics:
o Get Func-y: Delegates in .NET
o Focus on the User: Making the World a Better Place
I feel very fortunate to be going back to NDC London (and it's only 2 weeks away!). Last year, NDC London was my first international speaking engagement. It was a great experience, and I met a lot of great people, including Anthony Chu (@nthonyChu) from Vancouver, Canada who I got to see again in November at the Microsoft MVP Summit, and also Scott Nimrod (@Bizmonger) from Miami, FL who I got to spend some time talking with in November.
In addition, I got to spend time with some of my speaker friends, and I also had the chance to meet Mark Seemann (@ploeh) whose Dependency Injection book was very influential for my development, and it helped give me the tools I needed to help lots of other folks. I'm looking forward to seeing him again this year.
I'm looking forward to my talks. I've been talking about delegates for quite a while. They've been very useful in my career. And as I've gotten into functional programming, I understand how they are a bit of a gateway to that world in C#.
In addition, I get to talk about making the world a better place. As a developer, that's my goal. Sometimes it's a simple as making one person's job easier to do. And even though that seems small, it does change the world for the better. In this talk, I tell a lot of stories from my career and show that I've been most successful when I've really understood my user. On further reflection, I see that this actually started before I was a professional developer, and it's been extremely useful in my career.
A Look Back
In December, I spoke at Visual Studio Live!, part of the Live! 360 conference in Orlando, FL. I had a really good time and got a really amazing response. I was scheduled to give 3 talks, and I was a bit concerned when I saw the room that they put me in:
 |
| Yikes! That's a big room |
It turned out I didn't need to be concerned. I had over 200 people show up for my first talk. And attendance for the others was good as well.
What really amazed me was the response. Usually when I do a talk, I get a few mentions in Twitter. But when I came out of one of my talks, I had 54 notifications!
This was a combination of tweets, likes, and retweets. Here are a few that I picked out. The most complimentary came from Londovir (Link to @Londovir's tweet). (Sorry Londo, I don't have your real name):
From Casey Vlastuin (direct link):
It's always interesting to see what people pick up on. From Derek Jacobs (direct link):
I met Aaron Van Wieren at Live! 360 last year, and I got to spend a bit of time with him this year as well. (If you want to be impressed with endurance, he regularly runs 50 mile races.) He's a great guy to hang out with (direct link):
And from Carla Lewis (direct link):
And finally, it looks like I made Jose Cunha into a believer in unit testing. I'm really happy to see this since it's the goal of that talk (direct link):
Lots of other folks were nice enough to Tweet about my presentations as well. Unfortunately, I can't include all of them here. A big thank you for all the folks who came to my talks. And I'm really glad that so many people were able to leave with useful information.
At the airport on my way home, I got a bit of conflicting information regarding how long Orlando has been around:
Anyone know which one it is?
Share Your Development Experience
One of the reasons that I speak is that it allows me to multiply my impact. If I write an application for 10 people, I can have a positive effect on those 10 people. But if I can influence 10 developers, and they each have a positive effect on 10 people, I've multiplied my influence.
So whether you're speaking, blogging, podcasting, streaming, answering questions on StackOverflow, or simply talking with the other developers on your team, make sure you share your experiences. We all learn from each other, and we can multiply our impact to make the world a better place.
Happy Coding!
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