Last week I took part in .NET DeveloperDays 2016. Unfortunate I didn’t manage to attend to workshops and I took part only in conference. I wondered how I could summarize this event. I decided that this time I will not describe presentations but I will focus on main reason why I attended to such event. Few years ago this main reason would be presentations. Right now I went there to meet people. And presentations are something like a bonus to networking.

In this sense conference was very successful. You could find a lot of space where you could talk to each other. Even when I stood in middle of area / path I felt quite comfortable. It is because hall was very big. In this area 3 conference rooms have been prepared. In other area you could find places with coffee machines, cookies, fruits and also XBoxes. There was only a bit crowdy during lunch breaks – then in the hall you could found long queues of hungry software developers.

In this year I went to conference alone. And I think this decision was very good. Of course when you are traveling in group it is a better fun. But together with this you potentially close for meeting new people. And as always I managed to meet a lot of friends from Wrocław and got to know a lot of new interesting people.

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As I mentioned before I will not describe each presentation from this conference. I would like to mention only two people – Jon Skeet and Ted Neward. I think they made the best presentations on this conference. There were two issues related to presentation that I would like to point out:

  1. I think that level of presentation that has been provided next to the title was in most cases excessive
  2. Next time I would try to verify a bit better speakers. During one of presentations speaker said that he will be not able to present this topic in one hour and he presented something like a table of content.

And at the end I would like to write few words about conference. There were some small issues that need to be improved. First of all I really liked idea of personalization gifts. But this personalization blocked registration. Ladies lost a lot of time for searching bag connected to specific person. I believe that personalization could be done during registration – ladies could just extend this packages as new people would register. The second issue was connected with hardware. During first presentations in main hall there were some issues with screen. At beginning nothing was visible. And latter some lines covered part of screen. It was a bit weird because this hall has been constructed for presentation purposes and such situations should not happen.

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