NDC Sydney 2018 was awesome

General, NDC Sydney , 1 Comment

September has come and gone and NDC Sydney is over. SSW was a large part of this great conference, which is personally my favourite event of the year.

Of course, I love going to NDC Oslo, but there’s nothing like having the Norwegians come to your hometown. This was the 3rd annual Sydney event and it was awesome. The conference is a 5-day event (September 18-21), composed of 2 days of workshops and 3 days of presentations. SSW and lots of companies really work hard for this event – we made sure our guys were presenting leading-edge technologies and practices and we also had a cool booth and cool marketing collateral, such as t-shirts and brochures, a live Azure conversation bot, a HoloLens and more.

This year, a bunch of SSW developers worked really hard to have a conversation bot working against live data that has real business benefits. It used Azure, Google, Dynamics CRM, Office 365, SharePoint, and answered some really cool questions. Our team worked really hard and finished it the night before the event!

SSW was an event partner, so we had a booth showing off our Sophie-bot and our Sophie-receptionist, and everyone looked great in our 3 new SSW t-shirts (see below!).

SSW TV and .NET Rocks!

Figure: SSW TV Multimedia Producer Raj Dhatt hard at work filming the first Ask Me Anything! session of the conference with me and Dylan Beattie

I’m proud to announce that this year we had our own track at the conference! We shared the top room with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from the .NET Rocks podcast, and took turns recording Ask Me Anything! sessions and .NET Rocks podcasts. And of course, the SSW TV team were there to film and live stream everything – so don’t worry if you missed our live stream. We’ll be releasing all of the videos on SSW TV as soon as they’re ready.

On 24 Sep 2018, at 5:11 pm, Mehmet Ozdemir <MehmetOzdemir[at]xxxxxx.com> wrote:

 

Hey Adam,

Quick note the things that impressed me at NDC (well other than the Ribs at Thursdays lunch).

It was seeing Richard and Carl present .Net Rocks Live. It was amazing to see how polished they were in interviewing guests, with no pauses, breaks, stutters.

I wanted to check if it was a one-off so I went back to a second session to see them again and yep they were bang on. I only used to listen to .Net Rocks intermittently, more than likely to listen to more episodes now!

The second favorite talk was the Web that Wasn’t from Dylan

—

Mehmet Ozdemir
SSW Solution Architect

Figure: Great feedback on our track with .NET Rocks 🙂

My highlights

There were a number of other highlights for me:

  • I was lucky enough to present a session, The 9 Knights of Azure
  • My SSW TV Ask Me Anything! session with David Neal on leadership
  • Attending great sessions
  • Getting to catch up with so many international friends
  • Having my family with me on the NDC Night cruise around Sydney harbour
Adam Cogan presenting at NDC 2018
Figure: I presented “The 9 Knights of Azure: services to get you started”
Figure: I sat down with David Neal for an Ask Me Anything session about leadership
Figure: I sat down with David Neal for an Ask Me Anything! session about leadership

A cool time for everyone

Figure: The SSW booth was well supported by the many SSWers in attendance
Figure: The SSW booth was well supported by the many SSWers in attendance
Figure: That’s a lot of SSWers - and it wasn’t even all of them!
Figure: That’s a lot of SSWers – and it wasn’t even all of them!
Figure: At the Thusday night party
Figure: At the Thursday night party
Figure: Carl Franklin snapped this nice photo of me (and Stevo in the background) on the NDC cruise
Figure: Carl Franklin snapped this nice photo of me (and Stevo in the background) on the NDC cruise
Figure: My daughter Eve tried her first champagne
Figure: My daughter Eve tried her first champagne
Figure: The SSW TV crew and their helpers grin with relief after managing to fit all the filming equipment into the van
Figure: The SSW TV crew and their helpers grin with relief after managing to fit all the filming equipment into the van
Figure: Saying goodbye is bitter-sweet
Figure: Saying goodbye is bitter-sweet
Figure: Thank you to the NDC crew! Pictured: Jakob Bradford, myself, Steinar Eraaten, Charlotte Ling, Henriette Motzfeldt, and William Liebenberg
Figure: Thank you to the NDC crew! Pictured: Jakob Bradford, myself, Steinar Eraaten, Charlotte Ling, Henriette Motzfeldt, and William Liebenberg

The dates for NDC Sydney 2019 have just been announced – put October 14-18 in your calendars now.

See you next year!