The SDN – Software Development Network – is a special interest group for dutch developers. Four times a year they organise an event where people present and talk about their passion.

As a member of the SDN you are aware of the latest developments. You are part of a network of professional developers who assist each other in word and deed. This means there is a technical helpdesk at your fingertips so you can book considerable time savings in solving problems.
sdn.nl with Google translate

Here are the talks I attended.

Keynote: The Development Platform Landscape in 2017

Developers have been used to write some code and run some code. This was easy when the devices of developers were the same devices the customer would run the product on. Today the diversity of devices is huge. We don’t write code on the same machine as the product would run (eg tablet, mobile) This makes the write some code and run some code cycle take longer.

The diversity of platforms has been the standard. Microsoft’s monopoly was the abnormally. Today we again have multiple platforms. But devices have more compute power and can afford the write-once run everywhere principle (which is slower than native) without being surpassed bij Lotus 1-2-3.

With the discovery of greyball in Uber apps the developers have the responsibility: are we going to allow this to happen or do we choose the right thing to do?

Image courtesy of patryk gradys / unsplash.com

Blockchain concepts and experiments

Rob Koelman of De Nederlandsche Bank has made the transition from Enterprise Architect to the Business. They needed to have someone with deep knowledge of blockchain (bitcoin) to help them advise other companies. This was two years ago.

On the bitcoin.org site you can download the root paper (bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system) The main thing they tried to solve was the double spending problem: paper money (or coins) can only be spend once, but what about virtual money?

Rob explains the concept of Distributed Ledger Technology and the implementation in the Bitcoin arena such a double spending, mining and forks. Then he talks about his experiment with the DnBcoin where he downloaded the code from BitCoin from github and changed it. He discovered a lot of asserts and checks in the code that made his experiment not as trivial.

At the end of the talk Roel Hans showed us the Microsoft (Azure) template for creating your own implementation based on Ethereum.

Convergence: How Mobile, Cloud and Open Source Come Together to Save the World

Richard Campbell talks about his role in htbox.org where developers code for humanitarian organizations. Why? Because when money is off the table you want:

1. Autonomy: choose where you participate in, do what you like
2. Mastery: become skilled, learn new things
3. Purpose: because it matters

Microsoft graph: a way to build secure and smart apps

Sjoukje Zaal showed the v1 and the beta of microsoft graph. Access all Microsoft products (Azure Ad, Intune, Office365) from graph.microsoft.com.

Conclusion

Nice to hear something about blockchain from someone with first hand experience. No sales pitches but ready to use tips-and-tricks. Again a very good meeting.

Some links:

• Impression on youtube (I’m the guy in the red shirt)
• https://www.programmableweb.com/ tip from a fellow developer 💡