Thoughts on DDD Brisbane 2013

Last Saturday I went to DDD Brisbane. I was giving a talk on Octopus Deploy and TeamCity.

I caught four other talks that day:

• Brendan Kowitz, who talked about Real-time Web Applications with SignalR
  The highlight was Brendan demoing SignalR integrated with Excel for real time pivot chart updates. Crazy.
• Damian Maclennan and Andrew Harcourt who talked about Messaging patterns for scalable, distributed systems
  This was a good introduction for those who have some familiarity with messaging but haven't put them into practice yet. The talk used a lot of good examples and anecdotes to help explain the differences between the patterns. Damian and Andrew also present well together; they're like a comedy duo. They also introduced their open source Azure service bus library to the world.
• Scott Hanselman on What's new for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2013
  Scott is always entertaining, and he doesn't just present a bunch of demos - he tells a good story using demos to help narrate it.
• Artem Govorov on JavaScript tracing, debugging, profiling made simple with spy-js
  Artem demonstrated a technology that he developed, called SpyJS, which uses a proxy server to rewrite JavaScript with instrumentation - the end result is similar to how code coverage works on C# code. Artem now works for JetBrains, and SpyJS is being integrated into WebStorm.

One theme at the conference made me very happy. A few years ago, every conference I went to in Australia was all about: "What's new in some Microsoft product". Very rarely did anyone speak about something they built. Watching Andrew and Damian present their Azure library, watching Artem present his own technology, and ourselves with Octopus Deploy, I noticed that people were now finally talking about things they built themselves.

"Look at what Microsoft built" presentations are important, but in the future, I hope to see a lot more of these "look at what I built" presentations. I think they are a hundred times more interesting.

Hello, I'm Paul Stovell

I'm a Brisbane-based software developer, and founder of Octopus Deploy, a DevOps automation software company. This is my personal blog where I write about my journey with Octopus and software development.

I write new blog posts about once a month. Subscribe and I'll send you an email when I publish something new.

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