This year I was so lucky to join the Copenhagen Developer Festival (www.cphdevfest.com) - I got a two-day pass so I could attend Wednesday and Thursday.
The Conference is called a festival, as it tries to stick a little out from other tech conferences. It did so by having a "normal" conference schedule during the day, and then at night time, they had different types of entertainment, like music gigs, and talks that were not fun and inspiring, but that would not fit into the normal agenda. for instance a talk from the Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang who was talking about his experience doing space traveling.
The Conference had a really nice lineup - it had a dotnet / C# / Microsoft vibe going on, though not exclusive. I'll try to go through and highlight a few of the I found interesting, and do links to those talks as they become available on Youtube.
Keynote: Iron Man or Ultron: Is AI here to help us or hurt us?
By: Scott Hanselman, Microsoft
For the keynote the conference was headlining Scott Hanselman from Microsoft - He is one of my personal inspirations and always does a great performance when on stage. The talk was super relevant - talking about AI, and looking at the ethical aspects of using AI. Also touching how we as technical people have a responsibility for using it for good. The headline more or less summons it up, either we are going to embrace AI as a tool that can make us more awesome, or AI could end up being fully autonomous and against humanity (deep).
The keynote was delivered via demos directly showing what and how a tool like ChatGPT can be used, and how it would reply in certain circumstances.
Automating the maintenance of thousands of components - Fleet management at Spotify
By: Niklas Gustavsson, Chief architect, Spotify
This is the second time I have attended a talk by someone from Spotify. I must say it surely brings much value - The first time it was about organizing teams at Spotify - This time it was about fleet management at Spotify - the art of managing and updating many services, to make them comply with certain things, like configuration.
At Spotify, they are running somewhere like 3500 services. Most of these are run via Kubernetes, and each team is responsible for their own services - they have 600 engineering teams.
Having this great number of services requires some automation for updating specific components, i.e. if they are to update the number of resources a service requires to run (updating a deployment YAML file), or updating a dependent package that has a security volubility. Via their fleet management system, they were able to push PRs to specific service repositories, so the team in charge of the service could merge the change in.
This talk was relevant in my daily job at Umbraco, where we are maintaining a good bunch of services - having a tool that could apply changes across all services, could be a thing to investigate.
Whats next in C#
By: Mads Torgersen, Microsoft
If you are doing dotnet or C# development and get a chance to go to a talk with Mads, you should. He has a great way of presenting the latest features that they have implemented, or are about to implement in C#. As he is one of the final decision-makers on what goes in, he knows his stuff.
This is the second time I get to attend one of these talks - both times it was him just doing live demos of all the good things that are coming to the language.
Great talk, with much inspiration for your C# skills
Youtube: What’s Next in C#? - Mads Torgersen - Copenhagen DevFest 2023
Also on that note - the C# one - I did see most of this talk which walked through some of the newer features that have been added to the latest versions of C#, so 9. 10, 11 and 12- definitely also a watch worth
Youtube: What's new in C#? Exciting new features in C# 9, 10 and 11! - Filip Ekberg - Copenhagen DevFest 2023
How Work Works
By: James Lewis, ThoughtWorks
This talk was one I didn't schedule for going to, but I'm really happy that I ended up in the crowd when it happened. James Lewis talked about how to build and deliver software. Starting from a number of books, that have been praised and highly evaluated by multiple people in the industry.
In the talk, James mentions books like "Team topologies", "Evolutionary architecture" and "Accelerate" - concluding that the things that those books cover are the things they at ThoughtWorks have seen actually work, when you want to de efficient software delivery.
The talk was an inspiration, as I have read some of these books, and find the topic of software delivery very interesting.
Youtube: How Work Works - James Lewis - Copenhagen DevFest 2023
Honorable mentions
The above few talks were the highlights for me at the festival, but there were so many great talks performed throughout the days. I'll bring a few links to some honorable mentions here:
- ASP.NET Basics for Experts - Layla Porter - CPH DevFest 2023
- Why are you making a new platform? - Christin Gorman - Copenhagen DevFest 2023
- Inventing Guitaraoke: A Tale of Tech, Bugs, and Rock'n'Roll - Dylan Beattie - CPH DevFest 2023
- You are doing logging in .NET wrong. Let’s fix it - Nick Chapsas - Copenhagen DevFest 2023
Also as more talks becomes available ill try to extend the list with them.
Everything else
The above are just some of my personal highlights from the conference, NDC conferences has published all the talks from the conference on their YouTube channel, and you can pick and choose what you would like to see here: Copenhagen Developers Festival 2023 - YouTube