Ask any of our software development authors what their favorite dev conference is. Many will probably respond with a passionate and resounding: “NDC!” From the quality of speakers to variety of topics and the open, social atmosphere to knowledge sharing, here's why our authors LOVE this conf and what you can watch out for in their respective speaking sessions at NDC London 2017.

1. Aaron Powell

“The sheer variety of talks means there’s something for everyone—from C++ for F#, server to serverless and coding to soft skills. This brings a great mix of people together of different backgrounds.”

“My talk, “The beauty of stupid ideas,” is one I’ve been mulling over for a while now. So, I’m really looking forward to talking to people about why experimenting, exploring and building something that might have no real-world use is a great thing to do.”

2. Chris Klug

“It’s just a different conference. The open space with lots of seating and food makes it perfect for interacting with people. You just grab something to eat or drink, have a seat and talk away. The knowledge sharing is great!”

“I always love speaking at NDC. The attendants are awesome, and the speakers are top notch. This year, I’m speaking about TypeScript, which is something that has really changed the way I work pretty much every single day. I’m excited to be able to show the attendees how it can make their lives easier as well!”

3. Christian Wenz

“I’ve been to the very first NDC London (and to a couple of the Oslo editions), and not only is the conference extremely well-run with an exceptional speaker roster, but it also takes place in one of my most favorite cities, so it gives me yet another excuse to come back.” 

“I will be speaking about browser features that can help make web applications more secure, especially for support for several useful HTTP headers. Many of them provide a “quick win” in that they require very little effort for much gain. Many of these techniques are not only useful, but pretty mandatory for modern web applications. I am excited to share my experiences with the other attendees.” 

4. Damian Brady

“NDC is one of the best run conferences I've been to. It's extremely well organized and the speaker lineup is always top class, so you get your money's worth every time.”

“I've seen so many talks about unicorn dev shops that deploy to production tens of times per day using the latest tech stacks, but that doesn't represent reality for many people. I want to talk about DevOps for the rest of us—realistic ways to get closer to that pipe-dream even if your situation makes it hard.”

5. Dave Fancher

“What makes NDC so unique is how it manages to attract some of the biggest names in software to speak. I'm a small fish in the giant pond of NDC speakers and I can't wait to sit in on the talks and meet the other speakers from around the world.”

“I'm excited to speak at NDC London because of the opportunities it presents to learn from people around the world–be it other speakers or attendees. Too often we get caught up in our silos and it's easy to lose site of different ways of doing things. What better way to break out of the silo than to travel halfway around the world? Both of my sessions are about functional programming topics. I really want to show developers that functional programming is making waves in the industry for a reason and that by embracing its principles, their software can be more reliable, predictable and testable in both the front and back end.”

6. Duncan Hunter

“NDC provides really high-quality technical talks by the thought leaders [software development]. Individuals who come to NDC are usually among the most passionate developers, and I love sharing and learning from those who are absorbed in learning new things. I love seeing where everyone is focusing their energy regarding technology choices and design patterns. I feel like I get to see what next year’s best practices will be and where our team should be focusing our energy.”

“If you are about to start a new Angular project, then come to my sessions to learn how to save your team some time and headaches by both starting and testing your Angular projects.”

7. Elton Stoneman

“This will be my first NDC! I've been meaning to go for years as the line-up is always fantastic and the sessions are about exactly what people need to know. Everyone I speak to who goes to NDC plans to go again, and the venue in London is superb.”

“The technologies I've been interested in the last few years are really taking off now. Docker on Windows lets you take existing .NET apps and run them in a lightweight container without any code changes, and that's the first step in modernizing apps to make them fun to work on, easy to manage and fast to deliver value. I'm looking forward to telling that story [in my sessions].”

8. Filip Ekberg

“NDC brings so many interesting people together with unique experiences from all over the world. Sharing stories with these people is what makes the conference a huge success, and a total no-brainer to attend! There's such a vast variety of different sessions—everything from digging deep into programming languages to learning more about practices that could help us be better and more productive at what we do. The people is what I love about this conference!”

“It's such an amazing place to share your ideas and your experience with people from your field. Asynchronous Programming is something I get very excited to talk about, as you'd expect since I've got a course on the subject! It's one of those things that, even as a speaker, I learn something new every time I talk about it. And that ultimately helps me in my day-to-day work.” 

9. Gill Cleeren

“I’m happy to be at NDC London once again—haven’t missed one so far. It’s always a great conference to be part of. Just like last year, I’ll be talking about Xamarin, one of my passions. This year, I’ll be doing a deep-dive into the creation of an architecture for Xamarin-based enterprise-ready applications. The session is closely related to one of my recent Pluralsight courses so I hope to be able to share one of my passions with a lot of attendees again this year!”

10. Jeremy Clark

“NDC London is a mix of world-class speakers, great topics and people from all over the world. As a speaker, I love the interaction with people from around the world. And as an attendee, it's great to meet and talk to that speaker who was influential in my career.”

“As a developer, my goal is to make the world a better place. All developers can make an impact, and I'm excited that I get to share how I've built partnerships and improved the world by focusing on my users.”

11. Kathleen Dollard

 “I’m really excited about NDC because it’s my first appearance at an NDC conference. The reputation of the conference is great, and the breadth of topics fantastic. I have a light schedule so I’m really looking forward to spending time learning in other sessions and from other attendees.” 

 “I am giving two presentations I really enjoy: C# 7 and “An independent look at the arc of .NET.” I love talking about C# 7, and my independent look at the arc of .NET is fun because I can remove the marketing hype and focus on the big picture in the midst of so many important details. I’ll also be answering Stack Overflow questions in a Head-to-Head with Jon Skeet—what could possibly go wrong?"

12. Lars Klint

“NDC conferences are the pinnacle of developer conferences. Everything from the amazing lineup of world renowned speakers to the social and community atmosphere to the great food and coffee, NDC has it all. The London chapter embodies all the original values and aims from Oslo and it makes people come back year after year.” 

“I can’t wait to share the HoloLens and mixed reality with the UK at NDC London. This new branch of digital technology is breaking down walls and creating new (holographic) benchmarks for the future of computing.”

13. Robert Boedigheimer

“My favorite part about NDC is the quality of the speakers. There are top Pluralsight authors, major international speakers and members of the ASP.NET team. It’s unique to have that level of talent at a single conference.”

“I am excited to speak at NDC because it is one of my favorite topics: debugging websites. The session will review the best features of both Fiddler and Chrome Developer Tools. It will take a problem-driven approach and demonstrate proven techniques to troubleshoot issues with JavaScript, CSS, performance and many other concerns."

14. Robert Smallshire

“It's exciting to see NDC (which has been a huge success over the last decade in its home country of Norway, where I live) now growing in London. The conference has the brand and organization to attract and support leading speakers from around the world."

“I'm excited about broadening the field of topics at NDC, which has traditionally been fairly Microsoft focused. This year, I'll be speaking on asynchronous programming in Python, which is a hot-topic in the fastest growing programming language. I'm looking forward to conferring with Python developers in my home country of the UK, and also growing my own skills by attending talks by other solid speakers.”

15. Roland Guijit

“I love NDC because of the people that do such a perfect job of organizing every single NDC event and the high level content that makes it one of the best conferences in the world.”

“There are revolutionary changes going on with data storage. We're transitioning from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions. DocumentDB in Azure is a front-runner in the cloud-based storage world and I am so happy that I have the honor to tell NDC attendees about it.”

16. Sahil Malik 

“NDC brings together the world’s best speakers together in one place. It gives you the unique opportunity to connect with the world’s best experts in most major topics under one roof.” 

“I'm excited about doing a workshop on cross platform dev, along with my talk on VSCODE. Today, I feel we are truly at a pivotal moment where, for the very first time, “write once, run everywhere” is a reality. Those who will manage to tame this beast will rule.”

17. Sasha Goldshtein 

“NDC is a great conference because it brings together so many people from different disciplines in software development. The expo is always immaculately organized and it's just so much fun to hang out at! People at NDC tend to ask great questions and stay involved after the talk is done, which makes speaking at the conference so much more enjoyable, with the opportunity to truly connect to people attending my presentations.”

“My talk at NDC London touches on low-level performance optimization, which is becoming increasingly important in this age of smaller, low-power devices. It was a great deal of fun building this talk and benchmarking a bunch of code for my demos, and I'm really looking forward to delivering this to the NDC crowd.”

18. Scott Allen

“I've been to every NDC conference held during the last five years in Oslo, London and Sydney. This is the one conference I keep coming back to because the quality and variety of speakers is exceptional. My dream is to one day go as an attendee so I can work less and soak it all in. I've also seen how the NDC team works and I can tell you they care about every individual who is at the conference, speakers and attendees alike. They want us *all* to have the best experience, which is unique in the world of technical conferences.”

19. Stephen Haunts

“I love NDC because there are so many talented people, from attendees to speakers, all under one roof. I always love speaking at NDC as it leaves me feeling really inspired. My session this year is about recognizing and mitigating social engineering attacks against you and your companies. We will look at some classic techniques used by social engineers and ways to stop them.”

20. Tomas Petricek 

 “What makes NDC unique for me is the continuity – I spoke at the functional track at NDC a number of times and, of course, it is always great to meet friends you know from previous years. More importantly though, this also lets us reflect, learn and improve the functional track. For example, we thought there was never enough time for free-form chat between speakers and attendees and so NDC now hosts “Functional Programming Lab hour” where anyone can come, ask questions and talk about projects!”

“During the last year, I have been working on tools that make it easier to build transparent and reproducible data visualizations (thegamma.net), which now seems more important than ever before. I’m looking forward to sharing the experience in my NDC talk not just because it is a fun project, but also because it uses cool technology—it is a simple programming language written in F#, compiled to JavaScript using Fable and running fully in your web browser!”

21. Troy Hunt

“NDC was the first international event I spoke at so that alone sets it apart for me personally. But years later as I’ve travelled the world speaking, NDC remains the standout event for the year. In fact, it’s the only conference I do “no questions asked” no matter where it’s running anywhere in the world!”

“This year I’m doing two talks and the first is “The Fun Talk” before the party on Thursday night. This one is great as it’s in front of all the attendees and it’s in a more relaxed, social setting and it’s precisely that – fun! The next day I’ll do a more “traditional” security talk, which is both entertaining and educational which is my favourite combination!”

See you at NDC!

Be sure to catch a few more of our authors speaking at NDC: Austin Bingham, Jon Skeet, Jonathan Mills and Rob Conery. And, very importantly, don't miss out on the fun at the after party and Pluralsight-sponsored event, PubConf. 

So even if you can't make it to see Big Ben and this year's conference, join the conversation on Twitter with #NDCLondon.