Last week my son Sean and I popped over to Norway for NDC Oslo, billed as one of the world’s largest independent software conferences.
Venue
The venue, the Oslo Spektrum in the centre of the city was huge, with a large lower floor for vendors and refreshments surrounded by 9 rooms for talks. There were nearly 2000 delegates and nearly 200 speakers at the event, enjoying a veritable binge festival of hour long talks, and even a room where you could watch all the talks simultaneously on a series of big screens. Invitation
My 8yo Sean had been invited to do a lightning talk, and according to one NDC conference organizer they were then stuck with inviting me along too, apparently something they wouldn’t have done otherwise, or so he felt compelled to tell me on our first meeting. The other organizers seemed happier to see me or perhaps were more able to exercise tact. Regardless, it was great to meet up with many friends old and new and from far and wide.
Travel
NDC were kind enough to arrange flights and accommodation for me, but I had to pay for Sean’s travel myself. The hotel was close to the venue, unfortunately when we arrived late on Wednesday night it was over-booked and the room we were initially sent to was already occupied, where the phrase what is seen cannot be unseen is probably quite fitting. Thankfully we were eventually rehoused in another hotel nearby. The next day we were asked to pay 4500Kr (450GBP) to remain in the hotel. After some assistance from organizer Charlotte Lyng we were relieved to be given an unoccupied room at the original hotel for the following nights.
Lightning talk
Sean’s lightning talk was after lunch on the Thursday, the room was standing room only with over 100 attending, and he had a great reception. He started with a short rendition of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here while I set up the laptop (thanks to Carl Franklin of .Net Rocks for the loan of the guitar). Followed by the main content, a live coding session on Composing 3D Objects in OpenGL with F#.
There was a lot of reaction on Twitter, here's a few of the many tweets:
Thanks for all the supportive comments, this was only Sean's third public speaking engagement and he really enjoyed speaking at and attending the conference.
You can try composing your own 3D scenes in the browser with F# and WebGL at Fun3D.net
F# for C# developers
My talk was an introduction to the F# programming language from a C# developer's perspective and also seemed to be well received, although in terms of Twitter I was rightly eclipsed by my son Sean's efforts. In fact from now on I think I might be more commonly known as Sean's dad.
I also appear to have made the NDC Oslo speaker leaderboard, in the 100-200 audience category, thanks for all the greens votes! :)
Other talks
We saw some fantastic talks including Phil Nash on his C++ unit testing framework Catch, Gojko Azdic's thoughts on Continuous Delivery, Grey Young's new project PrivateEye, Tomas Petricek's live coded F# web programming session, Gary Short's Troll Hunting talk and many more. It was also great to see F# feature so heavily both on and off the functional programming track, and attendance on the FP track doubling since last year!
Summary
Both Sean and I really enjoyed the conference, there were a vast array of speakers to learn from, huge numbers of passionate developers to mingle with during the breaks and a very child friendly vendor floor. The floor was complete with a surfboard simulator, and Sean was very happy to win a Raspberry Pi for his efforts on it, along with enjoying an endless supply of ice cream! Also, look out for Sean's interview on Herding Code which should be out in a month or so.