For the last year and a half I have been a part of the Øredev Conference Program Committee. I should at some point write a post about it, and yes, I have had a draft laying around for a while, so here it goes:

I have always felt at home at Øredev as the conference was founded by Jayway and it is very much held close to our hearts. Of course, having played a part in the creation of the program makes it even more special for me to attend and last year I had the chance to attend Wednesday and also be at the Speakers’ dinner the evening before. This was a great opportunity to meet and greet, and I could have been more efficient there, but I did get to talk to a whole heap of interesting people.

The unrelenting search for quality speakers my colleagues pursued over the course of the year made Øredev 2012 angst-ridden in a good way. Whatever you chose to go see, there was always another talk you wanted to see going on at the same time. This is a good thing, when you are one of the ones putting together the program.

Last year

Last year we brought Mads Torgersen, Program Manager for the C# Language at Microsoft, which is pretty huge for a .NET guy like myself. He had a secret talk he wanted to do, and weeks before the conference, TypeScript was announced and we got to be the first ones to really bring that out there to our attendees.

TypeScript – JavaScript development at Scale
Async in C#5.0 – No More Callbacks!

Scott Barnes is a former Product Manager for Silverlight at Microsoft, now with Riagenic in Brisbane. He used his experience and laid out a plausible explanation to the twists and turns involving UI frameworks at Microsoft over the last year, as well as doing a very popular talk on a Design eye for the Developer Person. A very entertaining speaker that underplays his smarts.

Sebastien Lambla is another favourite of mine who took last year’s meme theme one step farther to combat session narcolepsy by leading the attendees in a Gangnam Style dance. He did an extremely initiated talk on HTTP Caching.

Jim McCarthy’s closing keynote on the Wednesday was mesmerising. I had to leave for the airport but I had a hard time breaking the spell to get up and leave.

Glenn Block is a good friend to the Øredev and a dream to work with. He is a very busy man but has the admirable quality of always wanting to help. In 2012 he talked about Hypermedia and WebApi as well as Node.js on Azure.

I have been a fan of Oren Eini’s since I saw him deliver a talk and demo on NHibernate back in 2009, and he is a very skilled and formidable speaker with a huge following on his blog. This time he delivered Raven DB training and two talks on Advanced RavenDB and an architecture talk entitled Hard Coding.

So what about 2013?

As experience tells us, you never know everything until November, but the program is out  and is looking rather complete. I went for .NET Open Source and F# this year, no point in trying to hide it. Maybe that’s a bit preachy, but so be it. We have great content on ASP.NET for IIS 8.5 and VS 2013 (“blue”) as well, of course and so on, but I really wanted to feature F# and functional in general as well as give props to some really mature OSS that isn’t getting enough praise.

In DDD with Value Objects, with ES and with the concept of Inversion of Control (well, OK, bear with me here), immutability and pure functions have already been shown to be the awesomesauce when trying to reduce complexity and increase parallelizability. Julie Lerman will talk DDD and Entity Framework, by the way.

Jessica Kerr will talk about Functional Principles for Object Oriented developers which explores how you can write better code in OO without going full Functional and Phil Trelford will talk about  F# for C# developers, when you do decide to go full Functional. Once you have decided to bridge the chasm, you go see Rachel Reese talk about the Actor model in F#, as in F# Agents, and about F# Type Providers. If you are ready to put the pieces together, there is Phil Trelford’s talk on F# for Trading, which is an example of why the City of London is crawling with F# developers  or at least recruiters looking for them.

NancyFx and ServiceStack are among the most popular Open Source frameworks out there for .NET and they have large communities, rich featuresets and proven track records and their respective fathers Andreas Håkansson and Demis Bellot will talk about them in greater detail and of course they will be available to be accosted for further questions you may have, which is the awesomest thing with Øredev.

A long time goal of mine was to bring Michele Leroux Bustamante to Malmö and Øredev. I became a fan back with her book Learning WCF which is the best programming book I have ever read, in tough competition with W Richard Stevens’ book Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. Since then Michele has created and sold a startup in the Identity field and is a Windows Azure MVP so what she doesn’t know about cloud and identity in the .NET space is probably not worth knowing.

Another important thing that you cannot miss is the excellent Anders Janmyr who with his talk on Habits of a Responsible Programmer managed to overcome the impossible standards you need to keep if you are both a part of Jayway and the Program Committee and still want to speak at the conference. You may think we would hand out speaking positions like candy to “our own”, but it’s rather the other way around as the last thing we would want to be accused of is playing favors and not striving for quality first.

This is just for starters, explore the program and book your tickets now. The conference will be the best ever.