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Two weeks ago I got to spend four days attending the IDDD Tour by Vaughn Vernon. Although my book queue has only allowed me to shallowly browse the book, I had high hopes for this course. I anticipated a week of getting lectured on DDD with a few practical exercises, but was blown away by the openness and interaction promoted by Vaughn and his associate Alberto Brandolini. A passionate group, engaging workshops, long days and lots of sharing made these few days exceptionally satisfying and inspirational. I’m grateful to those who got this show on the road; it was more than worth your trouble. ...

A lot has already been said and written about meetings, and some have carried the message above par; ‘Meetings: where work goes to die’. Today, I’m not going to foul the internet with another rant, but I’d like to show you a small application built over the last few weeks after work. I regularly find myself building small things as an antitoxin to the regular periods of not writing and shipping code at work. This time, me and @cgeers, built a not-so-serious application that aims to kill long meetings by visualizing the amount of time and money burned in a meeting. ...

I attended and spoke at Web.NET Europe in Milan over the weekend. This was only my fourth full day- or more conference (Techdays Belgium, TechEd Berlin and HTML5 WebCamps), but it was undoubtedly the best one so far. The quality of the sessions was definitely not inferior to those of bigger conferences. I especially enjoyed the talks on SignalR, OAuth and scaling data (I included some of my notes below). The strength of this conference doesn’t lie in the exceptional speakers or sessions though, but in its cozy size and the type of attendees it attracts. Being hosted on a Saturday, you already preclude all the developers who merely think of technology as a job. And when you put together those who care about what they do, and want to get better at it, good things happen. This was the first conference where I was able to talk to such a wide range of people - I guess I even spoke to more than six different nationalities - and where it didn’t feel awkward one bit. What helps in attracting such a variety of people, is that the conference is practically free and survives on donations from sponsors and attendees, making it very affordable even if you fly in from outside of Italy. Freelancers also seemed to appreciate that it was on a non-billable day. ...

I just returned to the hotel after attending and speaking at Web.NET Europe 2012. There were multiple sessions on ASP.NET Web API today, and I was responsible for delivering the first one of the day. Being first, and to avoid overlap with others, I tried to lay a solid foundation by focusing on the REST and ASP.NET Web API basics: resources, identifiers, representations, verbs and hypermedia. More people than I expected showed up for my talk; somewhere around 50 to 70 attendees, I guess. I think it was fairly well received; after 25 votes, the session rating stands at 90%. It’s great to see your preparations have such a fruitful outcome. ...

I just returned from a four day trip to Tunisia with Euricom. Next to indulging on the sun, food and all-inclusive cocktails, getting to know each other in a less professional setting, we spent somewhere around half of our days - and this is a rather generous estimate - doing technical sessions and workshops. I gave a 90 minute long crash course on REST and ASP.NET Web API. Content REST: Concepts Architectural values Left overs ASP.NET Web API ...

After writing a few things on HTML5 offline web applications earlier this year, I got contacted by InfoQ to write an in-detail article on the subject for them. I hesitated at first, because I was afraid that it would feel too much like work, taking the fun out of my writing. Turns out it wasn’t like that at all. The guys at infoQ were really relaxed to work with, asking interesting questions and giving useful feedback, without forcing me into a certain direction. A pleasant experience. ...

My mini-website arealdeveloper.com will no longer be available online after tomorrow. I slapped it together over a weekend, trying out WebMatrix, which turned out to be the perfect companion for building small things. A pleasant surprise was the mention of ‘A Real Developer’ by the guys at Channel9. This made the traffic go through the roof for a few days. A few months later the site was a ghosttown. But I don’t mind, had to happen. It never had the ambition to deliver real value. I was more than happy to deliver five minutes of entertainment. ...

While nosing around in the arealdeveloper.com analytics, I saw a bunch of traffic coming from Channel9. Clicking through, I found out A Real Developer was mentioned in this video (02:01). That’s a Channel9 front-page video! That’s so awesome, I think it’s great people find it a fun project. I have been listening to your feedback, and this Sunday I implemented some of your requests: Easier linking Sharing A feed Voting Comments I try to keep everything as simple as possible, that’s why I implemented most of these features using two popular free plug-ins: AddThis and Disqus. ...

A Real Developer is a side-project I built over the weekend poking around with WebMatrix. It got a little out of hand. After publishing, I showed it to a few popular tweeps, and they were kind enough to mention it. 24 hours after the launch it has gotten over 3.5k unique visitors, 39k page views (see what I did there?) and over 240 submissions. Being mentioned by Scott Hanselman and Rey Bango helps. ...

Yesterday, I gave a talk on WebSockets at HTML5 WebCamps Belgium. WebSockets on Fire While the WebSockets API specification is not stable yet, various browser vendors have already implemented a prototype in their latest browser versions. Microsoft released their WebSockets prototype in December 2010. While there is no native implementation of WebSockets in IE9 just yet, for now they are providing a solution which works cross-browser, relying on a Silverlight client. Server-side a Windows Communication Foundation server is made available, which implements the latest version of the WebSockets protocol. ...