Warm Croc Conference – Expectations

I’ve been so fortunate to receive a ticket for the Warm Crocodile Developer Conference in Copenhagen from my employer d60. The conference is set on January 15th and 16th. The conference is probably the most attractive conference on Danish soil, with respect to the line-up of speakers. To name a few, Scott Hanselman, Udi Dahan, and Greg Young. In this post I’ll outline some of my expectations and session most-goes.

My employer is partnering with Microsoft on this conference, this means that I’ll be responsible for sharing my thoughts on the company’s Twitter and Facebook account. I did some of this during last years Danish Developer Conference as well. I’m planning on sharing my thoughts on my blog as well. The co-workers of mine who is also participating, either as attendees or speakers, will do sharing a larger hotel condor. We’re planning on setting up some hacking and coding during the late nights of the conference. So I’m expecting a lot of socializing with my colleagues. Besides these late night sessions, the conference will hold both a conference dinner and conference party, were I’ll be socializing with other attendees and speakers.

The fact that Scott Hanselman is speaking, is major asset of the conference. Since the first time I heard Scott talk, back in 2008 at PDC, he keeps giving some awesome talks. No matter the subject, you’ll get away with something. Therefore I’ll prioritize his talks. He’ll be giving two talks and give the opening keynote.

Mark Seemann, a Danish pro developer and architect, known for his thoughts on TDD and Dependency Injection. He wrote an award-winning book, Dependency Injection in .Net, which I have recommended several times on this blog. Over the past few years he has improved his speaker skills, and now gives some great talks. He is very passionate about software craftsmanship and SOLID principles, almost religiously. He’ll be giving a productivity talk, which I expects a lot from.

My first software conference was back in 2006, which was the OOPSLA conference, held in Portland, OR, in 2006. The OOPSLA conference is an annual ACM research conference. Among the abstract talks there was a guy named Erik Meijer from Microsoft Research. This guy, always wearing a bright and colorful shirt, gave an introduction to LINQ. A great talk, but also very abstract and complex. Today, LINQ is vital tool in every .Net developers toolbox. I’m looking forward meeting Erik again, and hear what he is up to these days. He gives a a keynote on the second of the conference, and some sessions with promising titles.

JetBrains Evangelist, Maarten Balliauw, is a Microsoft Azure MVP and will show-off some promising Azure stuff. Maarten has received praise for his talks, so I’m looking forward.

The Roslyn project has been ongoing for some time now, a CTP has been released, but I still need to see and grasp the ideas and application of Roslyn. Justin Rusbatch is a dedicated OSS developer and heavily involved in the ScriptCS project, so I will therefore attend Justin’s session on Roslyn, which ScriptCS is dependent on. Besides his talk I’m looking forward to have a chat with him. Filip Wojcieszyn, ASP.NET MVP, known for doing cool stuff with Web API, is also a coordinator on the ScriptCS project. He will give an entire session on ScriptCS, which I look forward to. I puzzle with an idea of introducing ScriptCS on a current project I’m working on.

Back in 2011 I attended Udi Dahan’s Advanced Distributed Systems Design with SOA course. Which was a great experience. Udi is an extremely talented instructor, and kept focus the entire week of the course. When it comes to messaging infrastructure and loosely-coupled architectures, Udi is great resource. He is always well-prepared for his sessions and comes with a message for the audience.

There will be several slots during the conference where I will have a hard time to decide which session to attend. These slots are perfect opportunities to hang out with industry experts and former colleagues. 

Conferences like this is a great chance to meet some of the gurus in the industry. I have a semi-agreement with Maarten Balliauw, to bring some of his Belgian home-brew of beer. Oh, and he recently released a Glimpse plugin for Azure, which I hope he can demo for me.

All social activities during the conference will be held at Nørrebro Bryghus. This brewery makes great beer, and as a beer lover I anticipate some great hours.