Yesterday I went up to Sunderland to the DDD brand of one day community conferences up in the North East, called DDD North – organised by Andrew Westgarth (who runs the NEBytes user group) and others. I have been to a few DDD’s! and this one was very well organised and the variety of talks provided by the community was very good.

I predominantly spent the day in JavaScript talks and met some interesting people.. The venue was really easy to get to transport wise and the facilities were good. I tried to not overdoes on the coffee mind you!

I went to the following talks:


Node.js – lets look at it – Rob Ashton
He really did have the demo gremlins! But he did manage to get the enthusiasm across in terms of what an interesting technology this is. I have read a few blogs and played around a teeny bit with the technology but it was good to see it in action – when his demo worked. Although I think it was more to do with the network connectivity more than anything else.
http://codeofrob.com/
https://github.com/robashton/dddnorth

Re-build – A one hour view of Windows 8 – Robert Hogg and Steve Spencer
Not so sure regarding all the statements they made within the session, but Windows 8 does look like it will be an interesting operating system to work with. It will be more interesting many more facts come out! I also watched the keynote after from the Build conference, yes okay lots of over excited marketing people but hey it does look quite good.
http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/boss/

Coffeescript 101 – Mark Rendle
Always an entertaining speaker. I hadn’t actually looked at CoffeeScript and to be honest I didn’t really have an idea of what it was, so was definitely a newbie on this front! I guess my poor initial interpretation of it was that it was a pre-compiler for JavaScript – either on the fly or using the IDE. The speaker demostrated very well how to wrap 50 or so lines of JavaScript loveliness into about 5-6 lines of CoffeeScript – so instantly sold!! Of course I think you still need a very good understanding of Java Script but at least this helps you to be more productive. I liked the look of CoffeeScript so much I bought a book!
http://blog.markrendle.net/

Advanced NodeJS – Gary Short
Post lunch, I decided to go to another NodeJS talk. A guide into how Node.JS avoids blocking on the server by heavy use of callbacks. He went into detail regarding Routing within Node.JS as well. All very interesting stuff!
http://garyshortblog.wordpress.com/

Introduction to Backbone.js – Gary Shutler
I’ve used the MVVM pattern extensively in some of the Silverlight work, so I was quite interested in hearing the speakers experience of using these patterns with JavaScript. I’ve heard of Knockout.js but was quite interested to see what else is out there. He demoed a to-do list showing how complex views could be broken down into smaller views and so forth. He covered all his material a bit quickly and would have been nice to see some more features.
http://www.robustsoftware.co.uk/
https://github.com/gshutler/dddnorth

Talks I missed, which I would have liked to have seen were “Reactive Extensions for .NET for the Rest of Us” by Mike Taulty – I went to a similar talk he did at NextGenUG Fest 11 earlier in the year, but I suspect things have moved on from there! Paul Stack’s Continuous Delivery – i’ve done a lot of CI work delivering Click Once wrapped up WPF clients and silverlight controls hosted web apps recently – so it would have been interesting to hear how someone else had got on (I think he is doing a talk in Hereford NextGenUG in a few days). I’m sure the rest would have been good as well!

I would like to thank the organisers including Andy Westgarth for sorting out a great community event. The twitter feed is still going here. Look forward to another event next year!

Addition: Some photos from others..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_88/6225448885/
http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2011/10/09/ddd-north-sunderland-8th-october.aspx