DDD South West 5

Last Saturday I was at DDD South West in Bristol. Unlike 2012 I was marginally more organised (thanks to a timely prompt from @mjjames) so I was straight in rather than going via the waiting list.

As ever, this instalment maintained the high standards of organisation, variety of quality sessions and great weather (at least ones I’ve attended) that I've come to expect from DDD events.

This year's addition of the Pocket DDD web app which allowed you to browse the agenda and collected session feedback added an extra point of interaction which seemed to work really well. I look forward to seeing how the DDD guys utilise the app for other things in future – linking out to Twitter and pre-populating a session hashtag, maybe?

Sessions

This time around I ended up only attending sessions from people I haven’t seen speak before. The ones I went to were:

​Continuous Integration, in an hour, on a shoestring; Phil Collins

I found this session to be a great, light-hearted opener to the day with much praying to the demo gods as Phil attempted to set up a complete CI environment and show it working end-to-end in an hour. He was successful.

Complexity => Simplicity; Ashic Mahtab

This session was broadly a look at Domain Driven Design and how, when exercising it, you need to change your way of thinking about problems to create a less coupled solution.

F# Eye for the C# Guy; Phil Trelford

This was one of those "mind blown" sessions and it provided a great introduction to the power of F#. I understand what @dantup has been banging on about now.

The amount of content covered I found to be ideal and Phil’s delivery was great – definitely a presenter I’ll look out for in future!

An introduction to Nancy; Mathew McLoughlin

Somehow I’ve managed to avoid talks about Nancy up to now and, although I’ve had cursory looks at the documentation for it in the past, I thought I’d attend Mat’s talk and actually see it in action to gain a better insight.

Mat managed to cover quite a lot in this session and it was interesting to see how it differed from ASP.NET MVC and Simple.Web which I’m more familiar with.

10 things I learnt about web application security being pen tested by banks; James Crowley

Security talks tend to have a habit of making you walk out incredibly worried about your products out in the wild and this one was no exception.

I’m pretty familiar with the standard vulnerabilities for web sites – things like the OWASP Top 10 – but there’s nothing like a really scary demo of exploiting them with some script kiddie tools to really hammer home how much of a security risk they represent.

James managed to pack a lot of good advice into the hour with demos where appropriate and this was a great end to the day.

 

Overall it was a very enjoyable day – organisation and catering were great, the sessions were of a very high standard and it was good to catch up with some folks I haven’t seen in a while. Big thanks to everyone involved.