By pcurd
The latest event in the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper family, DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 8 happened at the Thames Valley Park Microsoft site on Saturday 30th of January and I was amongst the 340 or so lucky ticket holders.
This year one of my friends, Rob Ashton (@RobAshton) was speaking along with some old favourites including Simon Sabin (@Simon_Sabin), Richard Hopton (@RichardHopton), Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) and Barry Dorrans (@blowdart). I was also pleased to see Jon Skeet (@jonskeet) presenting as I had never before had a chance to see him live.
The turnout seems impressive which is to be expected considering the length of the waiting list – over 200 people within 15 minutes of the event “selling out”. At lunch, as always, seating was at a premium and even the grok talks, organised by Zi Makki (@ZiMakki), were full.
As DDD8 was the last community event Barry Dorrans was likely to present at for a while (due to his recent appointment to Microsoft), I think it is only fitting how popular the event has been. Even Barry’s book (Beginning ASP.NET Security) sold out. I was fortunate to get a signed copy which I will be sure to keep in my collection.
Jon Skeet was also kind enough to sign a copy of his latest book (C# in Depth) which I impulsed purchased.
The sessions I attended were:
Test Driven Development to save time, money and your sanity by Richard Hopton
Richard has a clear and simple approach to explaining TDD and although most of the content wasn’t new to me, his techniques and clarifications certainly made my own approaches seem more sensible. His session showed an introduction to the whys and hows of TDD and his code demo was efficient and explanatory, showing TDD and writing tests in an understandable way.
Multi-Tenant ASP.NET MVC Projects by Rob Ashton
Rob did an excellent job handling the room and although a lot of his content could be considered seriously technical, he explained it with ease and clarity. His to the point code demos conveyed the subject matter and complimented his slides and explanations exceptionally. His dry sense of humour came through and the controversial topic met with many questions that he handled with grace and technical accuracy.
C# 4 by Jon Skeet
I had been told that Jon was an excellent speaker and his reputation is well deserved, I enjoyed the level of detail and appreciated the amount of code – showing the changes rather than explaining the changes not only made them make more sense but also showed how and why you’d use the new features.
Not Everything is an Object by Gary Short (@garyshort)
I have never studied any kind of Functional Programming so was looking forward to hearing about it from Gary who has always been an excellent speaker when I have seen him before and I was not disappointed. As well as a good introduction to the fundamentals of Functional Programming, Gary launched into a humorous and informative history of programming language development. I know I’ll take at least something out of his comparison of inanimate objects and classes.
A Developer’s Guide to Encryption by Barry Dorrans
Knowing this was going to be Barry’s last talk at a DDD for the forseeable future, and last community event before “jumping the fence”, it was bound to be an entertaining talk and it was. Several of the organisers had arranged some.. interuptions themed around Barry’s departure. After several videos from people like Liam Westley (@westleyl) and Phil Winstanley (@plip) (including Barry’s poor book being burned to keep Phil’s hands warm) a video from Barry’s past showed up – The Crystal Maze. I’ll let you guess how that went down! The presentation was excellent (between videos) and as always Barry’s technical content was great. Of course, Barry’s book (Beginning ASP.NET Security) will fill the gaps!
By pcurd
Last month I attempted to take part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I didn’t do very well (as can be seen here), barely managing 4,000 words.
I had hoped this would be my chance to actually write a decent amount of prose and possibly actually articulate a few ideas and characters I’ve had knocking around.
As it turns out, it wasn’t. I have fleshed out part of one character, but nothing more. The back story was unbelievable and even I did care what happened to him. I clearly have some work to do on my style.
I had hoped having “Writing Buddies” would spur me on but even carocat and amykate didn’t finish. In fact, I wrote more than either of them (at least, that they logged on the website).
So what went wrong?
Well, Dragon Age: Origins came out – I have invested 16 hours or so in that so far, that’s valuable writing time lost. I could have been using my Starbucks time to work on it but.. I didn’t. I think the primary reason I stopped writing was I got fixated on the word count. Against better advise I began to measure my progress based on 1,666 words a day, and this wasn’t feasible. By day 3 I was far behind and even a brief splurge on day 4 couldn’t bring it back up.
Why did the word count matter? It didn’t, not at all. But it was symbolic of my failure to give NaNoWriMo the care and attention it needed. Perhaps if I had pushed myself harder I would have gotten into the story, that alone might have kept me going. Perhaps if I had been challenged to keep up with some other target rather than words, although what that might have been is beyond me.
All told though, it was an enjoyable few evenings – even if I was a little too presumptuous, declaring the book a triumph by the second day…
Maybe next year, maybe some other time but I feel there is a book in me somewhere.
Amykate herself explains her own failure in a eloquence most becoming an author on her blog here.
Carocat .. well perhaps trails off is the best way to explain, I’ll let her cover the basics in her last NaNoWriMo post too.
I can't find it either 
<- true dat #