Posted by Mark Withall: 2016-10-02

Yesterday (1st October 2016) I braved the coldest morning for quite some time to make the long trek north to Leeds (a much nicer journey now most of the M1 is open) for DDD North 2016. I had been to the 2014 edition of the conference and found it excellent value for the price (free), so I thought I’d go again this year.

Yet again, it was a great day (with the one exception of the increasingly unpleasant aroma from the gents restroom). Alas, I was forced to miss the final session of talks due to a prior engagement but the rest of the talks that I saw were excellent. It was also nice to catch up with my Northern colleagues, whom I hadn’t seen for a while.

This is not the Async you are looking for

This talk was by Liam Westley. I’ve not really played with async/await much as yet, so hopefully having watched this talk will prompt me to do so. In particular, it prompted me to look into TPL Dataflow. I also have to look at the white paper Task-based Asynchronous Pattern. Liam also gave a very entertaining lunchtime talk on what the point of Microsoft is.

10 more things you need to do to succeed as a Tech Lead

This talk was by Joel Hammond-Turner. As I had not seen the first talk in this series, I gained 20 things, as the first 10 were summarised at the beginning. I’m sure the full list can be found upon the Internet but a couple of them persuaded me that I should probably do more logging than I currently do and that I should be more aware of the real cost of projects.

Run Your Team Lean and Deliver More

This talk was by Stephen Haunts. It was worth attending for the discovery of the Derbyshire DotNet group alone. That said, the rest of the talk was worthwhile to clarify in my mind Lean, Kanban and related things.

Take Control - Control Code Complexity

This talk was by Fan Yang. This talk suggested I read Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes (of Haskell fame). I was also pointed at Resharper’s Cyclomatic Complexity checker, which I didn’t know existed. The talk itself was very entertaining and practical; walking through example code and refactoring it to reduce cyclomatic complexity. The code for which can be found at her GitHub.

Overall the day was definitely worth the trip. Many thanks to all of the organisers and sponsors for making it happen.