.NET Fringe Portland Oregon 2017 With RIMdev

As a team empowered by .NET open source, we’ve always been sensitive to the people, projects, and conferences that make the .NET community a joy to be part of. With .NET Fringe being a conference the RIMdev team was looking forward to, we had to go this year. With a mix of backend .NET developers, frontend developers, and quality assurance engineers we made our way to Portland.

Favorite People Moments

The best part of being a developer in 2017 is access to your community. You can reach out to friends, library authors, and community leaders in ways you couldn’t even 5 years ago. What’s better than Twitter Friends? How about meeting them in real life?!.

Team Bonding

The team I work with is amazing. While we work long eight hour days with each other, it was nice to get a different perspective on individuals. Portland and .NET Fringe brought us closer together.

Jon Galloway

Jon Galloway does a lot for the .NET Community, and it was an honor to meet him in person. I thanked him for the work he is doing with the .NET Foundation and we also got a chance to take some pictures. Maybe I’ll even get a 2018 calendar out of it. His talk about what the .NET Foundation does is illuminating and I recommend it.

Tasha, Greg, and Dave

A great moment is when you get a chance to sit and share drinks with individuals you feel you’ve known for a long time but meeting for the first time. Tasha, Greg, and Dave are awesome people and strong advocates in the .NET community to stay positive and do your best. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Not to mention, we somehow got talked into wearing bowls on our heads.

Glenn Block and Troy Howard

The organizers of the conference are passionate individuals and they exude it. It was great talking to them about the growth of the .NET Fringe community and a possible East Coast iteration. If it happens, RIMdev team members will be there to help.

Elastic People

The elastic team of Martijn and Michelle were friendly and knowledgeable. They also told me about more training opportunities to level up my Elasticsearch skills.

Favorite Talks

The point of conferences is to absorb as much knowledge from smart individuals. The display of intelligence at .NET Fringe was humbling.

Distributed Sagas

My favorite talk was given by Caitie McCaffrey about distributed sagas and their role in microservices architectures (Video). A sign of any good talk is leaving me with more questions to answer myself through exploration, and this one had our team talking through out the night.

Iconoclasts

Ted Neward is a shoe-in for “the dude”, but even cooler was his talk on breaking the mold and pushing the boundaries of comfort imposed by existing structures. It was both hilarious and thought provoking.

.NET Standard

Immo Landwerth gave a very detailed and informed talk about the changes happening in .NET and clears up a lot of the confusion around .NET Standard and .NET Core.

Seeing Sumaya Block Give a JewelBots Talk

Her lightning talk on JewelBots was inspiring and professional, on top of the fact that she is twelve years old. I hope she keeps pursuing programming as she has a bright future. #CodeLikeAGirl.

Portland Weird Moments

• Sharing an expensive shot of Pappy Van Winkle with Kevin Hougasian.
• Wearing red bowls on our heads.
• Walking straight into Voodoo Doughnuts with no line (lucky).
• Driving 20 hours around Oregon to natural beauties.
• The bouncy floors of the Crystal Ballroom that gave some of our team members motion sickness.
• Eating a bowl of Poke for the first time.
• Watching my wife get accupuncture while someone played VR next to her.
• Witnessing 1 minute speed dating interviews quickly go off the rails :).
• Sara Ford telling dad jokes.
• Volunteering and actually giving good advice about Portland. Should I move there now?
• Winning a Star Wars BB8 droid..
• Being in the longest and most fun Twitter thread of my life.

Conclusion

.NET Fringe was an intimate conference with some .NET Community heavy weights. It provided us a great oppurtunity to bond as a team and as a community. We will cherish our memories and look forward to making more at .NET Fringe 2018. I hope to see you there.

If you want to experience .NET Fringe checkout out the hashtag #dotnetfringe.