Post DDD Scotland

Another conference down and this time I was lucky to a speaker at this one. The event was Developer Days Scotland a locally organized event with local community speakers for the local community. As you can guess its about being local! Its a great event showcasing the best of the the UK talent with the odd foreign guest thrown into the mix (like myself). It was superbly organized by Colin Angus Makay, Andy Gibson, Craig Murphy and supported on the website by Phil Winstanley.

The idea behind DDD is that the sessions are submitted by the speakers and the community chooses them in the form of a vote. That way the community decides what it wants to see rather than the organisers so it remains a more democratic system. Also for the speakers it means that someone thought enough of your talk to vote for it so they might actually show up!

I presented the Defensive Programming 101 session to a fairly packed room who thankfully had great stories to share and gave me some new insights into the topic. The slide deck for this presentation is available here and the code demos are here.

I managed to poke my head in at a few sessions and caught Martin Hinshelwood’s session on Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010 which was very informative and also gave me a load of information on how to upgrade our TFS 2005 server to 2010. 

In the speakers lounge, at times I was the only non MVP in the room, for which I got some friendly abuse and the jibes of “Sorry are you under NDA??”. It was great to be able to talk with some extremely knowledgeable people and get some extremely helpful advice on different topics that I had been looking at. Chatting to Liam Westley and I managed to get some great information on accessories for my HP laptop.

On the Friday night before the event, there was a speaker and organiser dinner where we witness to a flammability test on hair products ably demonstrated by Phil and Seb Lambla. As a public service announcement, certain hair products are highly flammable and should be kept well away from naked flames.

The post event dinner was excellent and we were treated to a very tasty Italian meal where due to some clever spotting by Phil and Liam some of us managed to order steaks much to the chagrin of the other people at our table.

Overall it was an excellent event, well run and organised and that showed in the final result. Enthusiastic speakers whose talks where chosen by the people who go to them. I think it gave me ideas and that we should run something similar in Norway. I suppose that is how it all starts really!

Photos from the event can be seen here

Defensive programing 101

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