My experience as a crew member at NDC
If you ask a hundred of any software developers around the world what their favourite dev conference is, many of them will probably respond with a passionate and resounding: “NDC!”. Yes, I agree! It’s impeccable from the quality of speakers to the variety of topics and the open, social atmosphere and first-class food.
I really LOVE it and I had the great opportunity to join Crew Team at NDC Oslo 2017. NDC stands for Norwegian Developers Conference and is one of Europe’s largest conferences for .NET & Agile development. The first conference was held in Oslo in 2008 and today NDC Conferences are 5-day events with 2 days of pre-conference workshops and 3 days of conference sessions and are being held in Oslo, London, Sydney, and Copenhagen. What makes the NDC different is the quality and the quantity of the speakers and the topics it offers. Having this in mind I must say it was a challenge for me to dive into the heart of the conference where the crew made all these wonderful talks happened. It was my first experience working abroad at the conference.
Firstly, thanks to my friend Alexey Volkov who lives in Oslo for a hearty welcome. I can’t imagine my trip without his incredible support and it was a pleasure for me to spend time with him and his welcoming family. Secondly, Oslo is a festive city and deserves a dedicated post about the amazing places I visited. The only minus point is that almost everything there is exorbitantly expensive. The attendance to the conference is also not cheap; fortunately, crew members don’t pay for it.
The atmosphere at the conference was totally amazing and yes, inspiring. I worked in the morning in conference rooms but also had a lot of free-time in the afternoon. I was backstage and connected with different people from all over the world. The open space with lots of seating and food made it perfect for interacting with people. You just grabbed something to eat or drink, took a seat and talked away.
I’d like to say some words about working as a crew member, the hardest day was the first one with preceding preparation the day before. For making NDC really stunning and fantastic there were a lot of jobs to do but it’s worth every seconds and we felt relaxed but motivated during all the workshop and conference days. I was responsible for one of conference room during most of my working time. I had to check the presence of speakers and prevent any kind of occurrence that could affect on quality or even being of particular talk. Also, I presented special gifts to every speaker and collected feedback cards (from red to green, very bad to very good respectively) from the audience. These results were quickly handled by our great crew team and entered into computer. In composition with big screens and news feed the event became near real-time and very interactive. I did my best to help every attendee to get most of every conference day. Of course, there were a lot of conference partners and they brought nice entertainment part of every day. Robots, artificial intelligent, virtual reality games, … I felt I was in future.
But don’t forget that NDC is in the top list because of its awesome talks and first-class speakers, so, if you are interested in NDC Conference talks, you can easily find specific day or talk at NDC Oslo on Channel9, e.g. start with this one about ASP.NET Core
or watch NDC talks on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTdw38Cw6jcm0atBPA39a0Q/videos
And, of course, join one of the greatest Software Developer Conference in Oslo https://ndcoslo.com (June) in London https://ndc-london.com (January) or Sydney https://ndcsydney.com (September).
I wish you aspiration and hope to visit you at NDC!
Thank you for reading!
