NDC London was the first really big conference I ever went to - as a paying attendee, way back in 2014 (or was it 2013?), when I was trying to figure out ASP.NET MVC and jQuery and how to get all my team’s code out of Subversion and into this new Git thing everybody was talking about.

I love it. I love welcoming everybody to my home city, I love the atmosphere, I love the location. It’s also where we held the very first PubConf, an event that celebrates just how incredibly funny a lot of conference speakers are - especially when the drinks are free and everybody promises not to post clips on the internet; there is something genuinely delightful about watching a speaker spend an hour artfully deconstructing distributed systems architecture or unit testing strategies in front of a conference audience, and then the next night they’re on a tiny stage in a crowded pub making you laugh until the milk comes out of your nose.

I’ve been at NDC London every year since, wearing all kinds of hats both metaphorical and literal, and become the de facto organiser of PubConf London since Todd Gardner cut down on conference travel a few years ago to focus on growing TrackJS and Request Metrics. With NDC London and PubConf successfully signed, sealed and delivered for another year, here’s a bit of a reflection on it.

Now please bear in mind, this is my experience - not yours. Unless you are also (a) living in London, (b) teaching a conference workshop, (c) giving a talk, (d) running the attendee party, (e) organising the unofficial after-party on Friday night, (f) playing lead guitar and singing in the band that will be performing at that party, (g) mixing the backing tracks and videos that band is going to use on stage, (h) running the website that handles all the event ticketing and registrations, and (i) flying to Stockholm 72 hours later for another conference, this is not how NDC London was, is, or ever will be for you.

Think of this more as a glimpse into how Dylan’s link of the proverbial sausage gets made.* (I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether the story is told from the perspective of the butcher, or the perspective of the pig…)*

The thing that makes NDC London different to most other events in my calendar is that it’s a hometown show. I live in London; it’s been home for nearly 25 years. But London isn’t like other places. Not even close. I live about 6 miles away from the QEII conference centre, as the crow flies (although this being London the crow is probably a feral pigeon) - but 6 miles in London is not like 6 miles where you live. The easiest way to explain it is that I probably pass two million people on my way in to Westminster every morning. Think about wherever you live. Draw a line from your house to whatever your nearest analog for “city centre” looks like… now keep going along that line until you’ve gone past two million people. See?

A typical conference week for me is half a day of packing - what do I need this time? If I’m running a workshop, I have a bunch of gear I use for that - portable HD screen, HDMI splitter, external keyboard. If I’m playing music at the after-party, I bring one set of music gear. If I’m doing a show with The Linebreakers, it’s a different set of music gear. Laptop, spare laptop, cables, chargers, clothes, wash bag, passport, pack all the things, head to the airport - and that’s it. The logistics are all front-loaded; once that bag’s been checked in and I’m through security, we’re done; the rest of the week is hotel breakfast, catered lunches, restaurant dinners, housekeeping bringing fresh towels… the actual event itself is often hard work, ‘cos that’s what makes it worthwhile, but the rest runs on autopilot.

When it’s a hometown show, things run a little different. Tuesday is a workshop day, which means up at 6am, coffee, porridge - always porridge on workshop days ‘cos it keeps my brain running until lunchtime - and then on a train by 7:15, which gets me to Westminster by 8, which is an hour early, but if I leave it any later than that there’s a good chance the Jubilee line trains are all too full to get on. Twenty minutes to set up the laptop, screen, HDMI splitter, keyboard, check the WiFi, find out which websites are being blocked, figure out how to work around them. Workshop 9am-5pm - live coding exercises, demos, examples, Q&A. Wrap up, deal with the day’s admin and reply to emails, then another hour on trains to get home. Unpack, figure out what I need to take in with me on Wednesday, make dinner, do the laundry, sleep. The Linebreakers are playing PubConf on Friday night, so my plan is to take a case full of band gear into the conference venue each day - as much as I can comfortably carry on public transport - then on Friday shift the whole lot to the PubConf venue in a cab. Wednesday’s an electric guitar and 10kg of effects and cables shoved in my rucksack. Thursday, a 15kg flight case full of microphones and XLR cables. Friday, 25kg wheely case with the mic stands, second guitar, laptop stand, and all the other bits that make the show happen.

My actual talk is on Wednesday morning - and it’s a new one, so I’ve been up late the night before finessing animations and checking videos. New talks normally get run through a user group a month or so before the conference… but with NDC London always happening at the end of January, Christmas tends to get in the way a bit and there’s not a whole lot of meetups going on in the weeks leading up to it. The talk goes well, although the room’s a little emptier than I expected; maybe it’s just the general dip in conference numbers, maybe it’s just that people don’t want to learn about CSS? But I’m happy with it, the folks in the room said very positive things.

Wednesday afternoon is band rehearsal - the downside of having a band who all live in different countries is that we don’t get a whole lot of rehearsal time, so this is where weeks of everybody learning their own parts and playing along to backing tracks finally gels into something approximating a show. It goes well. I skip the speaker dinner in favour of sleep. Sleep is good.

Thursday I have every intention of going to some talks. It doesn’t happen - the day disappears into a series of the sort of excellent conversations that only happen when the right people are all in the same room, catching up with folks from Particular, and Dometrain, and Twilio, and Umbraco, and old friends from the nerd circuit who I haven’t seen in way too long.

Thursday evening I’m running the NDC party. Now, I think the social events at conferences are just as much a part of the attendee experience as the talks, but the speakers who do the fun talks and comedy bits at the party? Most of them aren’t giving it the slightest thought until their “proper” session is out of the way - which is absolutely fair enough. This means the party inevitably coalesces out of chaos at about 3pm on Thursday - but you know, after more than a decade of doing this, we are damn good at coalescing things out of chaos. The party itself is a blast - Alan Smith’s Sonic Pi DJ set is fantastic, there are great comedy bits from Glenn Henriksen, Hannes Lowette, Amy Kapernick, Ash Bzak, Richard Campbell tells the story of Goliath, which I have seen half-a-dozen times and still makes me roar with laughter every time. I dust off my old “How To Succeed in the Enterprise” talk I wrote for PubConf a few years back, which goes down a storm, and we round out with karaoke, which works great in this kind of venue ‘cos you’ve already got a laptop, a huge projector screen, and a couple of handheld mics so there’s nothing much to pack up at the end of the night.

Home just after midnight (and stone cold sober, because Friday is another day). Dinner was Mexican food at the party (did I mention the food at NDC is always excellent?) but that was a long time ago, so second dinner is a chicken baguette from Greggs in Westminster station, which happens to be open and adjacent at the exact moment I realise I’m starving. Just in case any of you were reading this thinking that the international conference circuit was 100% glitz and glamour.

Friday morning, I take an hour out of conference time to get out on my bike; cycling the five-mile loop to the top of Crystal Palace Park every day this winter has been doing good things for my blood pressure and my brain - not to mention my knees - and as loathe as I am do admit it, I actually miss it after three days of conference. This is, of course, the day that I get a puncture right at the top of the hill. I figure it’ll be quicker to fix it and cycle than to wheel my bike all the way home, so I spend fifteen minutes in the cold changing the tyre; cycle home, shower, get dressed, grab my backpack and the 25kg wheely case and head into Westminster again.

Friday lunchtime is about the point when the folks speaking at PubConf finally start sending me their presentations, so on Friday afternoon all I need to do is transport 50kg of music gear to the pub, schlep it downstairs, figure out their PA system and projector set-up, plug it all in - which would be enough of a pain in the ass if it was on a bench in a well-lit workshop; doing it on the floor in a dimly-lit pub is definitely my least favourite part of the whole enterprise - while simultaneously building the PubConf deck as people send me Dropbox and OneDrive links to MP4 and PPTX files.

There’s always a list of things we think would be cool - let’s record the show! Let’s get video of the show! - that, by the time we’re set up and sound-checked, we’re already too knackered to think about… and then the audience starts to arrive, and the excitement starts to build, and the room fills up, and there’s a buzz, and I get the last few bits dropped into the presentation deck, and then… showtime.

With, inevitably, a handful of technical glitches. PowerPoint on macOS decides today’s the day it’s going to play Chris Ayers’ MP4 at three frames per second. It has never done this before. Ever. Sorry, Chris. Computer says meh. A reboot seems to clear it. The XVive wireless monitors that we use in the band, which worked flawlessly during soundcheck (and at every show we’ve done before) - tonight, channel 1 isn’t working. It worked earlier… maybe interference from 75 nerds with at least one WiFi-enabled device each packed into a basement that’s basically a giant Faraday cage? Channel 2 isn’t great either, but hey, we’ve got four more to try… cue some hastily improvised jokes about the history of UK broadcast television and how we don’t want to try Channel 5 in case it all comes out sounding like the Spice Girls - while we’re simultaneously channel-hopping our wireless units to find a channel that works; channel 3 saves the day. In the logistical chaos, I forgot one tiny bit of gear - the thing that clips my phone onto my mic stand, so I can adjust my own in-ear monitor mix during the show. Probably no big deal… right up until the point I realise during “Playing the Planning Poker” that I can’t hear the drum track, and I can’t fix it right away ‘cos it’s hard to get your phone out your pocket when both hands are busy playing the guitar… I make a mental note that it is, in fact, a Big Deal and I probably shouldn’t forget it again.


But the show is a triumph. The PubConf speakers - Chris Ayers, Brandon Minnick, Glenn Henriksen, Chris Simon - and the PubConf singers (yep, that’s a thing now) - Ash Bzak, Helvira Goma, Jo Minney, Damian Brady, David Whitney, William Brander, Jordan Miller, and Arthur Doler - absolutely smash it out of the park; the band plays a couple of new things we’ve not played in London before that go down really well, Rytis does a fantastic job running the sound mix on the venue’s slightly temperamental PA system, and Vagif gets the biggest applause of the night after dropping out of the gig because of a broken shoulder but then deciding to come along and play a couple of tunes anyway.

There’s a surprise, too… as we’re about to launch into “Enterprise Waterfall”, Hannes stops the show, Chris Ayers approaches the stage with a VERY LARGE BOX, and the gang presents me with the Lego Starship Enterprise - a little something to say thank you for Making The Crazy Things Happen. I’m lost for words. I actually cry a little. It’s perfect. It’s lovely. It’s completely unexpected. (It’s also another 6kg of luggage to take home at the end of the night… but hey, at this point, who’s counting? 🤣)

And then there’s music, and dancing, and laughter, and karaoke, and rye whisky, and single malt scotch and a very expensive cab home, and more scotch, and something approximating sleep, and then a day of bad TV and tactical naps and Chinese food and working on promo materials for the next thing I’m doing, and then a day of unpacking and repacking (and another puncture), and now, less than 72 hours after it all wrapped up, I’m on an aeroplane somewhere over the North Sea on my way to Stockholm, where there’s four inches of snow on the ground, a load of Java developers at one conference, and a load of .NET developers at another conference. The plan is two talks, two dinners, one live music and comedy show, say hello to as many people as I possibly can, give the stone lions a hug, pay my respects to Pub Anchor if I can find the time, and be home in time for the open mic at Ignition on Thursday night.

Should be fun.