NDC Minnesota is the inaugural NDC Conference event for the United States. I’ve long followed the event online as they post most of their conference sessions on Vimeo. The event was held in the very well appointed St. Paul RiverCentre in downtown St. Paul, MN. Absolutely no complaints about the venue, the event itself, or any of the speaker presentations. I honestly was expecting a number of hang-ups since the first year for a conference is usually a learning experience but it feels as though the NDC team is really on top of everything given their past events at other locations.

Sessions & Speakers

I attended a number of really great sessions. Some of my favorites were Steve Sanderson talking about Blazor, the new experimental WebAssembly transpiler, Scott Allen discussing his opinionated approach to .NET Core development, and Nik Molnar talking about progressive web apps (PWAs).

On top of my favorites there were other really wonderful sessions on AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, React + TypeScript, Docker, Azure Data Lake, and Webpack. All of the speakers were well prepared, well rehearsed, and there were no technical issues in any of the talks I attended. It was a great way to process a lot of information in a very short period of time.

Final Thoughts

I always leave a developer conference feeling inspired. NDC Minnesota was no different. During the sessions I’m usually furiously pounding notes away on OneNote and I have a laundry list of topics I’d like to spend more time learning in the near future. Most of my current weaknesses are on the client, centered around TypeScript, Unit Testing, and React. I’d really like to spend more time on those technologies in the near future and NDC Minnesota provided a lot of really great material to help point me in the right direction to improve those before the year is out.