Enough time has passed since the recent Moscow DotNext so that the dust subsides and the audience ratings of each report have been calculated.
And in the spring of 2020, the DotNext in St. Petersburg should be especially large-scale: for example, Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin will come.
What other famous speakers will be there? And what reports of the past DotNext, especially liked by the audience, can right now be seen in the recording? And what was interesting besides the reports? We made a post about how everything went in Moscow and what to expect in St. Petersburg.
Reports
How to talk about the program of the conference if you can’t write about all the dozens of reports? For example, you can name the three best by audience ratings.
The top three were the speeches from which the conference began: “Platform Wars” by Cyril Skrygan , who is responsible for the Rider at JetBrains. The opening keynote is well suited for a bird's-eye view, and it was just like that. Developers are sometimes called to break away from the code and think about the product as a whole, but Cyril took it even more extensively: he urged to think not just about the product, but about how it exists in the context of the entire industry with its complex market relations.
I want to hear about this from someone who can clearly see the interactions of different forces in the industry, and here Kirill is just right for dealing with them (a necessary disclaimer: as the speaker himself warns, his personal opinion is voiced in the speech, and not the position company). This report was in the public broadcast of DotNext on YouTube, but due to a technical malfunction, part of it was not available - so now we are sharing with Habr the full video of the report:
Another performance in the top three is also keynote, and not yet about development. The last performance of the day, when it is already difficult for everyone to absorb information about .NET, is suitable in order to change the subject and broaden one's horizons. And Alexander Panchin , known for his popular science performances, was responsible for this: he compared biotechnology from science fiction to what is currently available to humanity.
According to the description, such a performance sounds light: well, let's hear about the Jurassic Park, the brain can not be turned on. But in fact, having lured posters of familiar films, Alexander brought down such an avalanche of biological information that when viewing a recording, the pause button may come in handy. Fortunately, this report got into the open broadcast, so you can already start pressing the button.
Do not think that only reports without harsh .NET-specifics got high marks. The third of the leaders was Yegor Grishechko with his speech “Distributed Request Tracing in .NET”. And this is already a conversation not about industry as a whole or biology, but about the very specifics. But this report did not get into the public broadcast, so only DotNext viewers have the recording so far - the rest will receive it later when the videos become public.
The top reports are interesting, but it shows a generalized picture, and for a particular viewer, the most striking impression may be something completely different. To assess the range of opinions, we asked two members of the program committee what they remembered:
Igor:
“In my personal priority were reports that did not fall into the audience top 3. One is the “Treatment of Addictions” by Evgeny epeshk Peshkova ( video recording ). The topic seems to be quite simple, but in practice it turns out that everything is quite complicated there. And every second developer, if not every first, is faced with this. Not everyone liked that the report paid much attention to the classical framework, but I consider this an advantage: of course, .NET Core wins and all that, but the classic framework has not disappeared, they still write on it and will write.
Another report that I was particularly interested in was Dan Scheckter's talk about intrinsics . It’s cool that intrinsics were used for a slightly non-standard purpose: sorting. Usually, when people talk about them, it comes to the multiplication of matrices, vectors, calculations - but here, it would seem, a simple thing, but suddenly they are useful in it. I participated in the runs of this report and as a result I understood a lot about intrinsics, before that they somehow didn’t enter me.
And also on this DotNext was a report that I was interested in, but which I still hadn’t seen, I’ll look at the video: “Metaprogramming for the Masses” by Federico Luis ”.
Anatoly:
“Speaking about the program, I remembered the conference by three speakers whom we had pulled out for a long time, and now they have arrived for the first time: these are Dan Schecker , Stephen Cleary and Scott Vlashin . They are all completely different, each about their own, but each very deep expert in their field.
Dan is a famous master of performance, optimizations, low-level work of the CLR. He talks very deeply and interestingly about his topics, and he still has a huge amount of valuable material, so I hope that we will cooperate with him more than once. His report has excellent ratings, and we have already agreed that he will be at the next DotNext.
Stephen Cleary is also a famous person, a master of asynchrony and tricks with async / await, who wrote an excellent book about this and a bunch of answers to Stack Overflow. He talked about Async Streams, and this report is available live.
Scott Vlashin is also an icon, primarily in the functional world. He does a lot to popularize F # among ordinary programmers (not mathematicians). And he prepared an excellent laid-back keynote, where he explained on simple fingers, cucumbers and bananas difficult concepts from the world of functionalism. ”
Everything besides reports
The conference consists not only of reports - what else can be said about the past DotNext?
To begin with, it is worth noting that the site has changed. The audience has grown over the years, at the previous Moscow DotNext it was already crowded, so now it was held at the WTC, and the size was enough with a margin.
BOF sessions have traditionally been held - and if the report can be viewed at home on video, then in such a lively discussion with the participation of speakers and spectators, you must participate in person. The topics this time were Future of .NET, Performance, and .NET Core (the first two discussions were in English, the third in Russian).
But what was not there before: this time the podcast “DotNet & More” was recorded at the conference. So far, based on the results of DotNext, a release with Yegor Bogatov has been released , but much more material has been recorded, so that new releases can be expected.
As far as the reports are concerned, the audience experience is especially subjective: someone will have an interesting dialogue at a party, and someone will stick to the tasks from the stand. Therefore, here we also turned to Igor and Anatoly to find out: what did they see during the conference?
Igor:
“I was at the Performance BOF session for a short time. It was very good there, because we had an excellent composition of speakers ready to talk about the performance: Federico Luis, Dan Scheckter, Pavel Yosifovich, Christoph Nazar ...
From the point of view of the site, I think this DotNext excelled everyone. Others experienced some inconvenience (for example, leaving the main hall through a single door), but here everything is convenient with regard to the halls. However, since the demo stage was on another floor, I really did not see it. But I am not indicative here: when the audience found themselves there on coffee breaks, I was in the speaker room, in discussion zones and at the DotNetRu stand.
And, by the way, a lot of movement took place at this stand - from a round table with Dmitry Soshnikov and Roma Nevolin to quizzes. ”
Anatoly:
“I like that the“ out-of-band ”part of the conference is getting richer every year. Moreover, those viewers whose attention is focused on reports may not even notice this. For example, for the fifth time we have assembled the DotNetRu community booth, and there our reports and motions take place right during the main lectures (and not just during breaks, as is usually the case at stands). That is, in fact, a “hidden track” also appears at the conference, where a lot of things happen: for example, you can talk about machine learning with Dmitry Soshnikov or find out AvaloniaUI news from Nikita Tsukanov.
There was also an evening program: when the party and BOF sessions took place, DotNetRu held "ChGK" for programmers. Since by the end of the day everyone is tired of .NET, the questions were simply logical thinking, ingenuity. It was an experiment for us, and I think it’s very successful: a lot of people gathered, participated actively, sat until the last, battles were cruel.
I also had other stands, and I liked that everyone tried not to be like each other. Often at conferences, stands differ from each other only in corporate colors, but here everyone tried to remember in their own way: someone could have coffee, on the other stand they cut into the console for prizes, on the third they solved interesting tasks (which even cost no prizes ”to puzzle over them), and on the fourth, developers living in Thailand were lured to work there with them.”
Next dotnext
Now let's switch from the past to the future. What is known about spring St. Petersburg DotNext?
First, dates: April 6-7, 2020 .
Secondly, the platform - and here, as with the Moscow DotNext, changes have occurred. The conference is growing, and it's time to move into a more spacious space: Expoforum . The growth margin is large (no matter how many spectators come, it will not be crowded), and there are also no difficulties like “one door in the main hall”.
And thirdly, seven speakers are already known - and this is perhaps the most impressive initial line-up in the history of DotNext. Since speakers are the responsibility of the PC, we will again give the floor to Anatoly and Igor.
Anatoly:
“The next St. Petersburg DotNext, even before it was announced, persistently shouted to us that it would be epoch-making.
First, there will be Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin . We were asked about him for a very long time, almost from the first DotNext: when we asked "who to bring", he was always in first place. This is a pillar on the writings of which many have studied, and it will be very pleasant to recharge its energy.
Secondly, there will be another leader in audience polls: Andrei Akinshin . He leads the “come back, I'll forgive everything” category, because he had already triumphantly performed on DotNext, but then took a long pause as a speaker, participating only in PCs. And now everyone who prayed tearfully for Andrei’s new report will finally receive it.
Thirdly, there will be two more speakers who have already performed on DotNext with great success: the legendary John Skeet and the aforementioned Dan Scheckter .
So far, we are not ready to announce the topics of the reports, but we can assume the topics on the speaker’s specialization: Uncle Bob, apparently, will have keynote in the direction of “clean code”, Scheckter will have something about performance. But with Akinshin, of course, while the intrigue, he can about different things!
And among those speakers whose names we are not yet ready to announce, there are those whom donors already know and love; there will be reports with new original topics as well as fundamental ones. ”
Igor:
“Also among the announced speakers there are very significant figures from Microsoft. One is Mei-Chin Tsai : she has been working in the .NET runtime team since “minus the first day”, when it was not even called .NET. She started as an engineer, wrote code, and now the manager of this team. So she has a huge expertise in issues of runtime, and she is in demand as a speaker - she even spoke at a Java conference. We are going to interview her soon, so stay tuned, you will still find out the details first hand.
Besides her, there will be Richard Lander from the .NET Core team. In addition to his work directly on .NET, he is also one of those who began to promote the use of GitHub inside Microsoft: his team was one of the first to be open-minded. And those who monitor the open source activity of Microsoft may well know its GitHub profile .
There will be another "Microsoft", previously on DotNext already repeatedly speaking - Dmitry Soshnikov .
And who else will be? The program is now in preparation - so you can be on a par with the listed blocks, submit applications for the report. I remember how I was a beginning speaker, and it seemed to me that it was interesting to speak only with complex or hype topics. But practice shows that the "old and hackneyed" in fact, too, may be relevant for many. If you know a certain area well, submit an application and we will deal with the program committee. ”
In general, you understand the essence, but if you want more details, the most relevant information is always on the site , you can buy a ticket there. Closer to the conference, there will be more information about the program, but now the list of speakers is such that it becomes clear: many affiliates will regret if they miss this.
