Looking back at NSBCon 2014 by Roy Cornelissen and Mark Taling

A few weeks ago, Roy Cornelissen and I left for London to speak at the first ever “All about NServiceBus”-conference: NSBCon 2014. Coincidentally it was also a first time I would be attending a conference, ever! Needless to say, I was pretty excited…

After hearing Udi Dahan talk about the Past, P resent and Future of NServiceBus it really hit me: I would be speaking in front of roughly 90 IT-professionals about NServiceBus, in a foreign language! I was getting rather nervous, which only got worse when Charlie Barker starting talking about proper monitoring of your NServiceBus services during his NServiceBus at Scale talk. Exactly the topic most of my slides were covering… (After our session, when I spoke to Charlie about this, we agreed that this only reinforced the message we were trying to get across: monitoring is vital!)

At 3 pm, after slightly adjusting some slides, Roy and I were ready to give our talk. If you did not attend, or if you wish to see it again, check it out here:

NSBCon 2014 - Roy Cornelissen and Mark Taling - 26.06.2014 from Skills Matter on Vimeo .

Or check out the slides here:

You can view slides directly on SlideShare

In hindsight I believe the talk went rather well, although I completely forgot to mention the benefits of upgrading regularly while I did put emphasis of the downsides of not doing it. Luckily a question from the audience gave us a proper window to rectify this omission.

For me, personally, NSBCon has been a great two days of talking about NServiceBus, meeting new people and finally putting some faces to names. The sessions were very insightful, each in its own field. I would strongly recommend watching them if you haven’t already, especially my favourite: the NServiceBus – Lego Style talk by John Simmons and Indu Alagarsamy in which they present the new NServiceBus pipeline architecture of NServiceBus 5. This new architecture allows for some cleaner implementations of the code snippets I showed during our talk. (You can expect some migration blogposts on my own blog in the near future!)

Like Mark, I immensely enjoyed NSBCon London, and the ADSD Unconference the day before. The great sessions aside, I had the privilege of sharing experiences and knowledge with some of the great minds at Particular and the awesome people that are using NServiceBus in a variety of scenarios. With the new pipeline architecture in NServiceBus 5, and after all these discussions, Mark and I went home with a bunch of fresh ideas.

It was an honor to speak at the first NServiceBus conference. Looking at what Particular has in store, this promises to be a yearly celebration of distributed system architecture!

I’ve put down my thoughts about NSBCon on my own blog as well.