Developer Developer Developer 13
This was the third year that I have visited Reading for their annual conference. You can also see my write ups of DDD12 and DDD11.
The first positive sign was, unlike in 2017, the Union Jack was proudly flying at full mast again.
The first talk I went to was Git Deep Dive by James World.
And we started the day with some satirical Git memes:
https://xkcd.com/1296/ for Git Commit messages.
And this is a still from an animation that got more and more messy:
The talk covered many of the commands that are useful to remember for developing with Git using the command line. James stressed that although GUIs can be useful, it was very important to first learn how to use Git via the command line.
There is a video of the 2017 version of James World’s Git Deep Dive talk on YouTube. Check it out!
Ian Johnson is an expert at drawing Sketch Notes and was here at the event to draw this one for Git Deep Dive:
Meanwhile there were three other talks going on. My brother Peter was at Quantum Computing: Don’t Panic by Anita Ramanan and Frances Tibble and made notes on it. I didn’t understand Quantum Computing at first, but then I watched another short talk by Dario Gil of IBM Research which explains the basics nicely. Microsoft’s Top 3 breakthroughs with Krysta Svore explains also explains why this technology is truly revolutionary.
Quantum Computing is a new and exciting technology, based on Quantum bits, or Qubits for short, which are based on the concept of superposition, a strange quantum mechanics phenomena that allows for matter to be in two places at once. It is fundamentally very different from classical computing.
See Anita’s blog post The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Quantum Computing and Q# Blog and her Quantum Workshop at github.com/frtibble/QuantumWorkshop
The Speakers Twitter links are @whywontitbuild and @frances_tibble. Also follow Microsoft Quantum.
Microsoft expect to have a working qubit within a year, and a useful quantum computer within 5 years.
I have written up the full Quantum Computing article here.
The second talk was Web Assembly, Blazor and the future of Web Development by Joseph Woodward. I have written this up in its own article.
There is a great website learn blazor, thanks to Mathieu Cornic for taking the time to make this for us. There’s also a good technical intro from Steve Sanderson.
Ian Johnson was also at this talk and drew these Sketch Notes:
The third talk I visited was The Code Behind The Vulnerability by Barry Dorrans. Thank you very much Barry for flying over to the U.K. just to give this talk to us, and I hope to see you again before another 7 years have past!
His talk discussed many security vulnerabilities which were reported to Microsoft has have since either been fixed or Microsoft have issued guidance to protect against them.
I have posted the details in a separate article The Code Behind The Vulnerability.
Here are Ian Johnson’s sketch notes:
The first lunchtime grok talk was by Anjalee Burr, Chief Operations Officer at Rise. She spoke about the Rise platform for blockchain developers, which is written in TypeScript.
To find out more about RISE take a look at these links:
Next up was Joel Hammond-Turner who presented Honey, I shrunk Startup.cs
Here are the links to try out:
Robin Minto was up next with a demonstration of the OWASP ZAP security tool.
ZAP stands for Zed Attack Proxy, a free tool which offers much of the same functionality as Burp Suite.
You can find a discussion of ZAP vs Burp here.
ZAP is a tool for finding vulnerabilities in websites, so that you can fix them.
One the ZAP website there are links to video tutorials by the project leader, Simon Bennetts.
Microsoft MVP Davide Zordan spoke next on the topic of HoloLens and Mixed Reality (a.k.a. Augmented Reality)
In the slide below, we see how Artificial Intelligence is used to process the image of the Microsoft building. There are some inaccuracies, such as the A.I. seeing a large white building instead of a large grey building, and tagging snow on a good weather day. However, it is still impressive how much category information the A.I. gains from processing this image.
Davide used Unity for developing his software.
Then I went to Dan Clark’s talk on Developer Productivity.
I like going to talks that are more general purpose than just focusing on one particular currently hot technology. Last year I wrote about how useful Joel Hammond-Turners talk on tips for Tech Leads was.
This year, Dan’s talk was possibly the most useful one. I have written up the details in a separate Developer Productivity article.
Finally I saw Neil Barnwell’s talk on Lessons Learned applying DDD, CQRS and Event Sourcing.
I have written up on this talk in detail here.
The four main takeaway points were shown on his penultimate slide:
You can contact Neil directly if you have questions or are interested in working for ByBox:
The last session that Ian Johnson visited was Automate your Test Infrastructure with Kubernetes by Joe Stead. Here are his sketch notes:
The day ended with the giveaways. Thank you to Microsoft, all the speakers and all the sponsors for a great day.
