On the 12 of March I’ve attended Wroc# 2015 - a free software developer conference organized by Objectivity company. This was the first edition (and I hope not the last!) of this event, but the organization was so good, that you would rather say that it’s the next one. The organizers provide free food, drinks, gadgets and even an after party with live music and table football tournament. Big thanks for that!
Of course infrastructure is only an addition to the sessions that define conference content. Hera are my opinions about those:
- “Innovating the other web” by Chris Heilmann
Chris presented his point of view on HTML5 and its benefits over native, mobile, apps. It was also a very brief introduction to Microsoft new HTML browser - Spartan. It contains not many new informations, but overall I liked this talk.
- "Little changes to make your app a lot faster"Matt Ellis
This presentation focused on micro-optimizations of C# code. Matt showed code samples and the ways you could improve performance of them (especially the memory and garbage collector usage). Probably you won’t use this knowledge very often in your code, but it’s good to know how C# compiler works and how you can improve parts of your critical code. This talk was good, but without anything above that.
- “Type-Driven Development” by Mark Seemann
On stage coding session, showing power of F# type inference and how type system can guide you to better solutions. Right now I’m interested in functional languages (although more in dynamic ones like Clojure) so this was ideal session for me. Be warn only that it requires your full attention to understand Mark’s thinking process.
- “I, Programmer” by Dan North
This was my second time (previous on DevDay 2014) when I saw Dan live on stage and again I think he’s a great speaker. In this light and entertaining talk he pointed directions on which good programmer should focus during his career. For me it was the best speech of the day.
- “What is new in ASP.NET vNext?” by Maurice De Beijer
Quite complete overview of new version of ASP.NET ecosystem (mvc, web api). If you don’t know a lot about next version of Microsoft web framework then this talk is for you. For me this wasn’t anything new, but even though I think Maurice did a good job.
- “Decomposing AngularJS” by Chris Klug
I’m not a big fan of AngularJS framework (sounds like a good topic for a blog post) but this talk wasn’t really about Angular. It was about data binding in this framework and how it works - which is very interesting thing! Chris, even with technical problems, did a great live - coding session. He started with empty text file and finished with working data binding solution in JavaScript. I like to understand how “the magic” works, so such presentation are for me.
- Discussion panel
Unfortunately, the last speaker - Mark Rendle couldn’t come to Wroclaw (because of the flue). Instead of his talk there was a discussion panel with all speakers moderated by Dan North. Dan again showed his talent by selecting interesting topics and “forcing” others for answers. This was great finishing session and I suggest you to watch it when it’s available online.
I’m glad that I could be on this event. It was well spent day with people that care about what they do. Such events make that I want to be part of this awesome community! It would be great to be there next year! Thanks guys for organizing it!
The only sad news that day was that Terry Pratchett died. Rest in peace Sir Terry!