So half way through day 2 of the GOTO conference I have spent all day so far hearing about security. Well with the small twist that I will shield you from todays keynote – which in my eyes should have been a regular talk as a historical view of java has very little interest to me.

I decided to follow the web security track and I am really happy I did. Aaron Bedra gave a really good talk about how to detect when your site is under attack and what you can do about it. He made it clear that you should always avoid bothering your users when building in security – something not all sites are too good at sadly. His analogy was a casino, where there is pleanty of security but you won’t know unless you have bad intentions.

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I picked Mike West’s talk because I felt certain it was a place where I could pick something up that I can use. Security on the web is difficult, and it is something that is still being worked on. Mike works at google, writes  a ton of articles on html5rocks and is working on some of the comming specs and proposals around security.

To put it short his advice is that you need SSL – otherwise any kind of security talk is mute. Even for sites that just display content, it is the only way that you can be sure the content is actually comming from the source that you think. Startssl.com is a great place to start, if you need a free cert, that uses the same level of cryptograhy as he enterprise certs that you can buy.

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First talk that I chose to go to was Dan North on why agile doesn’t scale – or how agile can cross the chasm as he corrected himself. His premis was that people put stuff around agile for it to scale, so it is not a property of agile that it scales. In his words it is like putting a car on a ferry, and claiming that the car floats.

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So GOTO has been kicked off, with a pretty good crowd for the walkthrough of todays speakers. As always the crowd is a bit slow at first until the first cop of coffee starts to work. It helped a bit when an Opera singer went on stage, forcing everybody to ask them selves of that was really happening of they had fallen back asleep.

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In the spirit of being well prepared and with GOTO just over a month away it is time to look a bit at this years program. Personally I will try and get around and also pick some talks on topics that are outside my normal area of interest. I know you probably already heard this, but it pretty much always ends up as the talks I get the most value from.

Monday

“JS beyond the browser”, “Architectures” and “Microsoft Devices and Services” are the three obvious tracks for me on the first day. However I will probably start out with Dan North’s talk on the track “When the Agile Manifesto isn't enough” about “Embracing uncertainty” . Dan is a really good speaker and last year he gave some of the very best talks IMHO.

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GOTO 2013 is slowly getting closer, and once again I am lucky enough to be blogging from the conference. Next week the bloggers will meet up to get some practical information as well as to collect ideas for which tracks to follow and what to blog about.

Last year I think went really well both with reguard to picking some interesting talks and that I was pleasently surprised that I got to interview Scott Hanselman and Anders Hejlsberg. So when it was decided to repeat the success and invite bloggers to the conference I definately wanted to go again.

After 4½ years at Vertica and 6½ years doing e-commerce I recently made the decision to look for new challanges. I am really happy with the years I have spent both with Hedal:Kruse:Brohus and Vertica doing e-commerce where I have learned a lot and had some great colleagues, but I really felt like making a change. Timing wise it made sense to do it now, because my girlfriend and I were looking to move to the other end of the country, where she got a job.

Looking around d60 caught my eye as a very interesting company, where things are evolving quickly and where I know they have a skilled group of developers - some of whom I already knew from the developer community. I sent them and email, and after a meeting there was no doubt that it was a good match, as a place where I can learn new skills as well as contribute new ideas.

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Azure is growing at an incredible pace and provides a good balance between lots of great services and easy ways to get started. I recently took a look at Azure mobile services, which seems to be an offering that has an interesting future with the rise of mobile development. So building a platform around features that you need to build these kinds of applications make all kinds of sense. Wanting to look more at Azure and with my recent focus on mobile it seems like a perfect fit for me.

Naming is hard

Diving into it you quickly become aware that the words "mobile services" are somewhat misleading, because although the service can be used for mobile it is just as much for building any other kind of small application. Only directly targeted mobile feature is push notifications. The featuers for working with data, scheduling and identity are very general purpose, but as a package this seems like a good idea - even though it name could be limiting to who will end up using it.

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While looking at how you can do your common scenarios in F# an obvious thing to look at is data access. I already covered type providers which are fantastic for consuming data. However type providers won't help you when you need to create data or in other ways interact with your SQL database, MongoDB, RavenDB or any other NoSQL solution you might be using. For this you will most likely want to use some of the libraries you already know and love - there is no reason to reinvent everything.

Working with existing libraries is mostly trivial, but F# likes types that are immutable which straight out of the box doesn't play well with serialization and mapping. This means that ORM's and libraries for MongoDB and RavenDB will throw exceptions when they try to construct your F# types. This basically boils down to the fact that code like the sample below won’t work, because the serializer can not instantiate the type and fill in the values.

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With my latest dive into F# I recently came across Canopy, which is a really nice and simple web testing framework. It really is as simple as installing a package and writing a few lines in a console application.

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