Dotnetdays 2020, Post-Conference Follow-Up and Review

Keeping up to date with the latest technological developments is vital in any field, but especially when it comes to software and programming. One of the fastest and most enjoyable ways to continue learning is to attend a conference. 

On Saturday, February 29, I and my 3 other colleagues from Indrivo attended the Dotnetdays Conference conference with national and international speakers, focused on .NET, software architecture and Microsoft related technologies which took place in Iasi, Romania. 

In this article, I will review various aspects of my experiences, hoping that they will be useful to you when looking to attend this event in future years. 

For me personally, this was a new experience, I had the opportunity to attend conferences and IT events before, but the experience of attending a dedicated .NET conference was a new one for me. 

Some time before the event, I received an email from the conference organizing team, containing a poll regarding the topics we would be interested in and which we would like to be included in the conference agenda, lately, participating in the conference, I was delighted to find out that the topics I chose were of interest for other people too, and were included in the list of topics discussed at the event. 

Dotnetdays 2020 addressed the mid-senior level of experience, targeting the .Net programming area, Cloud Architecture and Development, during the conference the latest technologies and trends in .NET and Microsoft Azure were discussed. 

What I liked about this event was that there was a mix of local speakers and speakers from out of the area who have recognizable names. The list of speakers, experts in their field, authors of books and libraries commonly used by .NET developers, included notable names, such as: 

• Alex Thissen - Cloud Architect at Xprit, Microsoft MVP;  
• Martin Beeby - Principle Developer Advocate at Amazon; 
• Jon Galloway - Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, Executive Director at dotnetfoundation.org; 
• Alex Mang - Microsoft MVP & Regional Director, CEO of KeyTicket Solutions; 
• Dennis Doomen - Software Architect Aviva Solutions, author of FluentAssertions (library with over 30 million downloads); 
• Dennis van der Stelt - part of the NServiceBus team; 
• Tomasz Pęczek - Microsoft MVP, Software Architect; and other. 

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that other people in the industry use techniques similar to those used by our company to solve similar problems. 

The audience really appreciated the presentation about Real-Time Architecture. I personally, had previously worked on real-time tasks on some projects, and this presentation was a refreshed vision on the things we dealt with, and now I have an overview on how others are facing issues like "A lot to Send" & "A lot of Clients". 

I and my colleagues had a keen interest in the Resiliency Design Patterns for the Cloud presentation. Some of the discussed ways to increase the resiliency were the Multi-AZ architecture, how to efficiently implement call retries with exponential backoff by taking advantage of advanced .NET libraries like the open-source Polly library.

Logging, Tracing & Metrics, was a presentation based on how DevOps guys monitor the performance of systems. After reading "The Phoenix Project" and "DevOps Handbook", this was another great presentation I was looking forward to from which I learned with which tools and how the “big guys” monitor their systems. 

This year's conference had about 400 attendees, which is up from the last year. It was a well-organized and executed first-class event, an event that every developer should be looking to attend in future years. Be sure to watch for when the next year Dotnetdays conference is announced, because I really think this event is worth attending.