So Build is well underway, and I finally got around to diving into some of the talks that are online. One of my early favorites is Anders Hejlsbergs talk on news in TypeScript.  Anders gives a good run through of the TypeScript typesystem, starting with the basics and covering why it is so different from other type systems, and in many ways ground breaking work even for a language designer like him. More...

I just came home from the 25th MVP Summit and as always it has been a blast. As I ended up tweeting, "tech by day and beer by night, what's not to like".

Sadly I am not allowed to write much about the tech, because it is still confidential, but it should be safe to say that things are continuing to move fast with ASP.NETCore, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and of course Azure, which have been my main areas of interest.

Another year has flown by, and it has been quite a change of pace for me. With my daughter being born last year, I have had to prioritise more than ever. Not really a surprise, but when you are going into it you don’t really know what will be possible. Looking back it has definitely changed my every day life for the better, although I have had to cut down on some spare time activities.

More...

What a year this has been, and now is the time for my yearly review. Work wise my business has been very simple to run and very stable, because I have continued to extend my contract with DI. This may sound boring initially, but the reason this has worked for me is that I get to dive into a lot of technologies especilly around Azure and Visual Studio Team Services. I have been building a greenfield self-service application, for one of the biggest and most influential organisations in the country, while having the hands on the wheel with reguard to tech and design. So although I have not been moving on to new projects as much as I expected I am loving it.

A subject that I find myself reading about and discussing over the dinner table a lot recently is the promise of self-driving cars. I absolutely love the idea because of all of the problems it can solve in society. No more drunk driving, no more wasting time in traffic jams, no more parking issues and no need to own an expensive heap of metal that looses value even though you only use it a few hours a week.

With this in mind I went to Sanna Pampels talk called “Automated driving - are we taking the human factors researcher out of the loop?”. The talk was relly good with Sanna starting out by covering the different levels of automation. Going from a level 0 with no automation, over different levels of assisted and partially automated driving to level 5 which is full automation or autonomous cars.

Sanna said that british drivers spend 124 hrs in traffic jams each year, and dribing is not as safe as it could be, mainly because of human errors in traffic.

Today I chose to take up an old advice and picked a track that was completely out of my comfort zone for the first day of GOTO. When jumping off the deep end you might as well do it completely, so I decided to go for a number of talks on Deep Learning Analytics.

I had high hopes because the first talk was an introduction to the subject called “what is it and what can it do for you”. Sadly the talk didn’t really do it for me, because it started out really theoretical, and Diogo Almeida seemed almost too passionate, which meant that he started speaking really fast and jumped between usecases, both current and some for the possible future.

This year is, believe it or not, the 20th anniversary of the GOTO conference. So I think the expectations are high, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center.

Dan North, who is a regular speaker at GOTO, was tasked with doing the first half of the keynote, and as always he delivered. The topic was on the future of agile, so a topic that I have seen Dan speak about a number of times. He went over how we are still a young industry with the vast majority of us being the first in our families to work in IT.

One of the things that makes GOTO special for me is that it is the one conference i visit every year where I run into developers with so many different backgrounds. Most conferences are in one way or another centered around one platform and one programming language. Even though GOTO started as a Java conference back when it was called Jaoo, this is no longer the case, with Microsoft being regulars on the speaker list, and with tracks on languages like Elixir, Pearl and NodeJS being a regular occurance in the past.

More...

So it's that time of the year again. GOTO Copenhagen is just around the corner, and this year it is the 20th anniversary, so I expect it to be an even bigger deal than it normally is. It certainly looks like it, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center on the 3.-4. October, and with a very impressive speaker lineup.

After lunch I picked a talk by Dave Thomas on Fast data - tools and peopleware. Dave threw some punches at SCRUM and OO languages, while describing the challenges of handeling the huge amounts of data and the variery of devices that we have today. With that he concluded that the amount of serialization and modelling we are doing is hopeless and that going through layers like ODBC is terrible. More...