Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) Oslo. Part 2.

While the talks I mentioned in the last post were standout for me, the other ones were also great. Here are a few notes on what I feel were general themes throughout the conference.

Security, Security, Security.

Security was already a hugely important topic, but now with GDPR, it’s even bigger. GDPR has certainly put it on more companies’ radars in recent months.

• Data Breaches are happening more often and are getting bigger. It is within the region of 5m+ records that are breached every day and only 4% of those are encrypted data. Companies are now beginning to recognise the damaging costs to business: loss of sales, confidence levels and reputation damage being just a few.
• Secure Development and Secure Development Lifecycles are becoming important to a greater number of companies. GDPR may have played a role in this change.
• Staff training in security matters is as important as having your systems and services being secure
• New and previously low use types of attacks are being seen more frequently
• Some security can be easily automated and should be
• Security should be reviewed periodically and not just at build time
• Cloud services can be used to augment security of systems by leveraging dedicated security functionality within them
  
  

API First & API Management

• It feels like everyone is just doing this by default now.
• API Management is hard and almost no one gets it right. There are so many things to consider.
  
  

Devops

DevOps is still a big challenge for most companies, but lots are trying it now and there are some challenges to overcome.

• It can be hard for a company to accept DevOps and Continuous Practices
• Value streams can be created to help show the worth of DevOps to a company
• Certain Metrics are very important:

• Lead Time to Change
• Release Frequency
• Defect Rates
• Mean time to Recovery (not failure rates)

Smart Devices and voice Interfaces

Smart Devices and voice Interfaces are getting a lot more attention:

• It is predicted that over 50% of companies will spend more on voice interfaces by 2020 than they do on mobile apps now.
• Voice interfaces are easy to get up and going quickly but hard to get right. They need to be dynamic allow natural interaction and adapt to situations as humans aren’t that predictable and don’t listen.
• Every talk I saw had someone using a CMS for the actual content for voice commands to allow the actual content to be changed on a regular basis without releases.
• These interfaces need to be treated differently to visual interfaces as there is nothing visual to look at. They are an emerging area of UX in themselves. 
  
  

Quantum Computing is coming (but it may take a little while to get here)

• There are lots of big companies trying to build a quantum computer and some are getting there, however, it’s likely to be a few years before anyone actually has a useful one.
• Effects on traditional encryption will be massive when it does come along. For example, some forms of RSA encryption, which would take over a billion years to crack traditionally, could be done by a quantum computer in around 100 seconds. It doesn’t matter too much though as most modern algorithms are made to be quantum safe, so if we stay up to date it won’t be too bad!

• It has the potential to revolutionise certain industries but for a lot of applications it won’t be required, so traditional computing is here to stay.
  
  

As I mentioned earlier, conferences are a great place to go for ideas, see the latest happenings in the dev world and just generally see what everyone else is doing. I really enjoyed my visit to the NDC and would like to attend again in the future. If you ever get the chance to go, I would recommend that you do. Not only is the conference amazing but Oslo is a brilliant place to visit - I even stayed on for a few days for a holiday afterwards!