London .NET November 2023 with Eli Holderness and Martin Costello

November's an exciting month for .NET, because .NET 8 officially ships on November 14th! Some of you have probably been working with it for a while, some of you are waiting for the final release (and, yes, we know some of you are stuck on .NET Framework 4.x for now... but hey, at least it's not VBScript ASP, right? 😉*)*

This month we're back at Accurx in Shoreditch. Martin Costello from Just Eat Takeaway will be giving us the heads-up on some of the new features in .NET 8, and we've got Eli Holderness joining us to talk about the history of data storage. Eli presented an absolutely excellent opening keynote at NDC Porto in October, and we're really excited to have them speaking at London .NET.

Eli Holderness: A Brief History of Data Storage

For millennia, humans have known things. Pretty quickly, we started writing them down; our brains aren't particularly good at storing all the things we know reliably, and we needed something more durable.

A long time ago, 'writing things down' looked like clay tablets with cuneiform on them, and affairs have only got more complicated from there. Nowadays, we try and write things down so that computers can understand them too, and that's given us a bewildering array of options - disk drives, magnetic tape storage and so much more.

In this talk, we're going to take a look at the history of writing things down, and discuss why some methods have worked better than others. We're going to talk about why writing things down for humans is different than doing it for a computer, and why it's difficult to try and do both at the same time (this is what code is). Finally, we'll take a look at what the state-of-the-art is today for keeping data safe, and what the future might hold.

Eli Holderness has been in tech since being released back into the wild from studying maths at university 7 years ago. They've spent their time working in industries ranging from telecoms to biotech to analog circuit design, continually getting nerd-sniped along the way. These days, they're a freelancer who speaks at conferences, runs workshops, and learns whatever they want. In their spare time, they like to play video games, knit and sew, and hang out with their cat. Eli's on X-formerly-Twitter @EliHolderness and on Mastodon at hachyderm.io/@eli

Martin Costello: What's New in .NET 8

A high-level tour of some of the many new features and capabilities available as part of the new .NET 8 release. We'll cover new language features for C#, new utility APIs and new approaches for eking out just a little bit more performance from your infrastructure.

Martin Costello is a software developer and tester based in London. I'm currently a Principal Engineer at Just Eat Takeaway.com. Martin's been working in software development since 2006, primarily with C# and ASP.NET and related technologies, as well as Cloud infrastructure on Azure and AWS. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies since 2019, and he's online at martincostello.com and on X-formerly-Twitter as @martin_costello.