TechDays’ Developer Foundations Track

Last week, John Oxley announced the addition of a new track to TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto: the Developer Foundations track, whose sessions are devoted to the practices and principles of good coding. While the other tracks will be about Microsoft tools and technologies, Developer Foundations will be about answering a single question: How do I write good code?

How Developer Foundations Came to Be

We added the track in response to calls for it from a number of developers who care about about the state of software development in the .NET community: Donald Belcham (whose upcoming book, Brownfield Application Development in .NET, is worth checking out), Justice Gray and Peter Ritchie. We put out a call for suggestions in a post titled TechDays, Blogs and the Fundamentals, and based on those suggestions, we added the Developer Foundations track to the Vancouver and Toronto stops of the TechDays tour and put Justice and Peter in charge. We’re taking care of the physical logistics like the room and the audiovisual gear, but when it comes to content, Justice and Peter are calling the shots.

How Developer Foundations Will Work

Developer Foundations will be a four-session track, with the same four sessions being held on Day 1 and Day 2 of the Vancouver and Toronto conferences. With the same sessions happening on both days, we’re hoping to make it as easy as possible to catch a Developer Foundations session while still catching all the other great tool- and tech-specific presentations that TechDays is known for. We’re treating the Vancouver and Toronto Developer Foundations sessions as a test run – we’re going to watch this track, take in attendee feedback, make a note of all the lessons we learn and if it’s success, we’ll build on it and make the track a part of TechDays for all cities.

What You Can Do

Justice and Peter have a lot of work ahead of them, what with the TechDays conferences in Vancouver and Toronto taking place next month. If you’ve got suggestions or ideas for what they should cover – perhaps you’re a bit iffy on patterns, exception handling, the use of version control or how to do test-driven development – let them know! If you’re on Twitter, send a tweet to @JusticeGray or @PeterRitchie. You should also feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line; I’ll make sure it gets to them.

The other thing you can do is watch this space! I’ve got all sorts of articles coming up on the topic of good code which you’ll find useful, especially if you’re planning on hitting the Developer Foundations track at TechDays.

The early bird special price – a mere CDN$299 – is going away very, very soon. If you want to catch the great tracks at TechDays, you’d better register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.