The Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC Oslo) has made a name for itself over the years, and is known as the biggest software developer conference (or festival) in Europe. And for the first time ever, the NDC organisers have decided to organise NDC London (New Developer Conference) to give software engineers in the UK a better opportunity to take part in this high quality training and networking event. Given that it was practically on my doorstep, I decided it would be remiss of me not to attend.

And I wasn’t disappointed. I dropped by yesterday (alas only for the day), and found myself talking to rather sophisticated development teams telling me all about their continuous delivery process, their optimisation of memory usage and performance profiling of their applications, or how they source-control their database changes. This was a seriously forward-thinking crowd. And they came en masse from London, the rest of the UK, but also from the continent – I met a development team from France, another from the Czech Republic, from Poland, Germany and the list goes on. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet representatives from all over the European developer community, and build some great relationships.

But the quality of the event didn’t stop there. The organisers pulled out all the stops to bring together some really high quality speakers too. The session I personally found the most fascinating yesterday (and which was packed!) was Ingo Rammer’s talk on debugging JavaScript where he showed how easy it was to generate HAR files using the Google Chrome debugger to troubleshoot JavaScript performance issues and other neat things you can do with the developer tools in Chrome.

And the cherry on the top for me: our very own Simon Elliston Ball, Head of the Big Data team at Red Gate, was thrilled to make the grade, and is offering a practical introduction to MongoDB and showing how to use it with your C# applications later this afternoon.

And as the sessions drew to a close, the party started with .NET Rocks‘ Carl Franklin rocking the mic, as he happens to be, amongst many other things, a very accomplished musician!

The organisers are telling me that they had about 700 people there over the course of the week which is very respectable for their first conference in London. I sincerely hope they choose to bring it back to London next year.