AngularJS is one of the most popular, complete and advanced HTML frameworks of the moment. Recently, the first Angular conference in Europe – ng-europe – took place in Paris. My colleague Thomas Anciaux and I attended it and in this post I will highlight the most important takeaways.

My colleague Glenn Dejaeger and I recently visited the Fronteers 2014 conference. It was the first time we attended, but it surely will not be the last. The organization was impeccable, the venue wonderful and the talks interesting. Although there wasn't an overall theme, there were some recurring topics, which I have listed in this post.

A few weeks ago I attended the very first installment of Techorama, a new conference for developers hosted in Mechelen, Belgium. This post will walk you through my experiences of the conference and will highlight the most important takeaways from the various talks I attended.

General impressions

The conference had tracks on ALM, Mobile, Web, Cloud, Language & Tools, Sharepoint & SQL and best-of Build 2014. I mostly attended the Web and ALM tracks since they are most relevant for my current work, but I dabbled in the other tracks here and there. I expected this conference to be heavily Microsoft-oriented but it turned out that there were a lot of non-Microsoft specific talks. As a matter of fact, it would have been entirely possible to schedule your conference without attending a single Microsoft-specific talk. Most of the talks I attended were high-quality presentations. The booth hall had some entertaining side tracks and there was a lot of swag up for grabs. The food was delicious (warm meals instead of the usual sandwiches!). Overall there was a very good vibe during these two days.

You might be a developer like me. You might also wander around in the deep and dark layers of relational database systems. You might've been face to face with this thing some call a composite index.

Why are you talking in this denigrating tone?

Because in the fairly limited experience I have, I have seen some grave cases of index abuse. Of them, badly designed composite indexes - or multi-column indexes - were always the most aggravating ones.

In this post I will summarize some of the main principles of Jez Humble and David Farley’s great book on Continuous Delivery and share my experiences of applying them on software projects I’ve been involved in. First, I’d like to share a story to give this discussion some context.

Meet Joe

Joe is a software developer. It’s a regular Friday afternoon, 15 PM. Before heading home, Joe has to start this thing called a “weekly build”. Joe makes sure everyone on the team has checked in their changes to the source control system.

Joe starts the fully-automated build at the click of a button. The current build process takes some time, so he grabs a coffee. Five minutes later Joe returns to his computer, only to be shocked by what his monitor is displaying:

build failed.