The day started with a keynote by Brian Goetz called "move deliberately and don't break anything", as kind of an answer to Erics talk and going against Mark Zuckerbergs "move fast and break things". He quoted Bob Dylan saying "when you aing got nothing, you got nothing to loose" making the argument that move fast and break things make sence for startups, that have all to gain and not much to loose, but for a mature company with a large userbase it is a different story. He described programming as an economic exercise, where programmer time and pizza is turned into software and technical debt. Building on this he argued pragmatism and that there is no good or bad, this time quoting Yoda saying: there is no good, there is only good for.

The rest of day one i skipped blogging, in order to stat focused for my own talk. I ende me up seeing the other talks on the Microsoft track, which were really good. Anders Lybecker did a nice talk on comming things in ASP.NET, Mark Seeman had fun with a tennis kata demobstrating property based testing and Jeppe Andersen introduced the new build feature in Visual Studio Online - something I have an actual need for on a current project.

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Today GOTO Copenhagen was kicked off and it has been packed with good talks. The keynote was by Anita Sengupta, who talked about working on descent and landing on Mars based on her work at NASA. Amasingly interesting subject, and some really extreme conditions that these people work under. To illustrate it takes 7 minutes from when they enter the atmosphere on Mars until the robot has landed, but the signal takes 14 minutes minutes from it is sent until it reaches control on earth. More...

We are at that time of the year where GOTO Copenhagen is in sight, and I am once again on board as a blogger. This year will be a little different though, because I will also be speaking myself. My talk is titled "TypeScript - a look at SPA's with Angular 2", a topic that I've had the pleasure of speaking quite a bit about, so I look forward to doing it at GOTO.

At Build there was a number of huge announcements. It is amazing to see that Azure is keeping up the pace, and as a developer I am excited about the promise of services that will enable me to focus on implementing solutions rather than fiddeling with servers and infrastructure.

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Besides App Services, Azure offers an alternative that is slightly to the left of the far right on the big IaaS to PaaS scale called Azure Service Fabric. Conceptually Service Fabric is based on containers, allowing you to fit many services into a single VM and it gives you more fine grained control than with App Services by providing a manifest describing how it should operate.

Since I am watching Satya Nadellas the keynote and taking notes, I figured I might as well put them into a blogpost. So here it goes.

As I wrote before the conference I was glad to see some good speakers on the Microsoft track. So of course I prioritized a couple of these sessions, and went to Mads Torgersens C# talk and to Mads Kristensen talking about tooling in ASP.NET. Well technically Thorgersens talk was on the architecture track, but you get the point.

The new world after Roslyn

The C# talk went a bit more into writing analyzers and codefixes than what I had seen before, so that was quite interesting and one of the very concretely usefull takeaways. The idea is that writing an analyzer is just like working with any object model. No more magic, so writing extentions is becomming something any developer can do and no longer reserved for the minority with too much time on their hands. Torgersen also demoed some of the new language features that I blogged about earlier, but on top of that let slide that primary constructors probably won't make it into the language for the final release  in the comming version. The reason is that they want to do more and look at providing recordtypes as well as pattern matching - and want to make sure that they get it right. These are two great features that I miss from F# on a daily basis, so I was glad to hear this. I also aired the idea of make shorthands for stuff like factory methods, which could also reduce some of the boilerplate code that I see a lot.

At other conferences I have attended the last year or so, distribution and concurrency have been hot topics, coupled with functional programming and immutability which leands itself well to these kinds of problems. Todays program has certainly been no exception - at least for the talks I ended up picking.

The right Elixir for concurrent fault tolerant systems

In the afternoon I ended up sticking with the bleeding edge track, which has been really interesting. First off was a talk on Idioms of distributed applications with Elixir by Jose Valim, who wrote the language. In his talk Jose went over the idioms of Erlang, which is what Elixir is built on top of. He did a good job at presenting why light weight processes that are allowed to fail fast and recreated by supervisors makes it possible to build fault tolerant distributed systems that are easier to understand and run faster than other paradigmes often based on handeling exceptions via try catch blocks.

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So first day of GOTO in Copenhagen has kicked off, with a somewhat provocative talk entitled "Does the browser have a future?" by Tim Bray - the farther of XML. His initial point was that the browser being declared dead hardly is a new thing since this also happened on the frontpage of Wired magazine in both 1997 and 2010.

A backend detour

Tim went on a detour to cover how this is the golden era of backend development, where life is good because you have few interfaces and testing is easy because it is machines talking to machines. He went over how Erlang, Clojure and Scala are popular but probably not the answer, where he was more optimistic about Go. This should hardly be a surprise, because he has been working at google for a number of years until quite recently. He did however make some good points about having a simple way to work with asyncronicity in a simple language. In the same way he made a short argument that it is also the golden era of persistence, with big companies using NoSQL solutions like Cassandra that enables them to build huge systems that scale with relative ease.

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