Hanselman Unplugged 2

Last week was awesome! NDC Sydney was such a fantastic event. It was super well-run by the Vikings from Norway + SSW was well represented with 2 cool stands at the conference and 4 speakers. We had Adam Stephensen (aka Stevo) and Duncan Hunter from our Brisbane office + Danijel Malik and myself from Sydney. We spoke on a range of topics from Angular 2 best practices to .NET Core and DevOps.

To cap off a fabulous week, on Friday night SSW had the pleasure of hosting Scott Hanselman at an extraordinary Sydney .NET User Group. 

The blood rushed to my head in the last two weeks before the Scott Hanselman night. I knew Scott would pull the crowds – we had 80 registrations on the first day alone and 294 before we had to cut off ticket sales). That meant I had get our new event/conference space renovated in a really short amount of time. Thanks to the pressure of the Hanselman event, the SSW Chapel is now nicely renovated. This is the second time I’ve had to fast track a renovation this year, and probably not the last.

We had dozens of tradesmen here for a week straight and we were making changes every day. Builders don’t take as kindly to changes as software developers :-). So, running a building project agile is no picnic. However, it was an incredible success. The Chapel was jam-packed with geeks,
which is awesome, especially since we had an unfortunate clash with NDC’s amazing PubConf – their “non-after party” after party. That event was sold out too.

Since the SSW Chapel can only hold 200 people, the late attendees still had the opportunity to watch in our overflow room downstairs, with our LiveStream feeding through to downstairs. We had champagne and canapés passed around, and devs chatting to each other, exchanging contact details and geeky anecdotes. It was a success thanks to my dedicated staff and builders, and all of the enthusiastic attendees. Scott Hanselman also contributed slightly ;-).

There were a couple of things that didn’t go smoothly that we need to work through. We had some problems with the LiveStream and static noises coming through the mic, which
you will hear in the recording. We haven’t reproduced it yet, but it appears that when there is a large crowd in the room, many additional wireless lapel mics, doesn’t give a clear signal to Raj in AV.

The event proves again that the .NET community in Sydney is alive and vibrant, with everyone wanting to learn new stuff. I was so impressed by the crowd that turned up, especially when there was no paid advertising, just our own social media and word of mouth.

Scott was incredibly “edutaining” as usual, delivering his talk with both wit and technical insight. It made me very happy to see so many keen attendees taking in all his valuable information about Azure, the restructuring of .NET Core and other technologies, and how to be a great developer in 2016. A big shout out to Scott in thanks for giving his time to us.

Let’s keep the party going for our next User Group!

Brendan Richards, one of our very own SSW software architects, will reveal how to make search in your application sing. You’ll learn how to have your database queries lightning fast by leveraging the capabilities of the top Open Source search index tools and libraries. To make your life as a developer so much easier, come to:

SYDNEY – 6:00pm – 8:30pm Wednesday 17th August 2016

SSW Chapel
Suite 15, 81-91 Military Road
Neutral Bay NSW 2089

CANBERRA – 5.30pm – 7:30pm Monday 15th August 2016

Microsoft Canberra Branch
Level 4, 6 National Circuit
Barton ACT 2600

Or watch it live streamed, as always, on http://ssw.com.au/ssw/live.