My BCTechDays 2022

This does not need any introduction or will not come as a surprise – BCTechDays is just around the corner.  At the time writing this blogpost, it’s only a mere 20 days away – and quite honestly, I’m starting to crap my pants 🤪. 

Why? 

Excitement, fear, nerves  – you pick ;-). 

Why? 

Well, because also this year, I’ll be quite busy: 2 sessions, 2 workshops and an ISV Session.  Pretty much the same as in 2019, and I can still hear myself saying: “never ever again anymore – this was crazy” .. and here we go: a few years of Covid later, I lost my mind and got myself into the same mess 😂.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m just joking of course – it’s not a mess at all.  In fact, I’m feeling very fortunate to get the opportunity to do this again, and I’m very much looking forward to it.  Even more – I’m already working for quite some time on my sessions ;-).  But before I’ll go into what I am up to – let’s say a few words on …

BCTechDays

BCTechDays (formally known as “NAVTechDays”) is in my eyes THE tech conference for AL Developers on the planet.  And when you look at the statistics, the entire planet indeed seems to find the conference here in my home country Belgium.  Last year, there were about 1400 attendees from 46 different countries! 

This year, the numbers look really good again.  I can’t share details (that will be announced during the conference as always), but I was allowed to give these numbers already:

• +400 workshop tickets
• +1200 participants
• +30 countries
• +35 Microsoft employees

Absolutely amazing!  And when you look at the session list, you’ll notice we’re in for a treat.  You haven’t registered?  Don’t worry – you still can!

If you want to know more about the convention – well, you can read my final thoughts of the previous edition right here or simply go to the conference site, of course ;-).

Sessions

The session I will be involved with will all be 90-minute sessions:

Coding 4 Performance (Thursday 16:00 – 17:30)

That’s right, I’ll be between you and your beer as it’s the last session-slot of the day :D. 

I have been having an idea for the content of this session as I don’t “just” want to share a few do’s and don’t concerning performance – I also want to provide a way to be more considerate for anything coding & performance related.  So besides quite some do’s and don’ts, I’ll have a few things to announce/show as well ;-). 

But in any case – my goal is to show you how you can consciously code with performance in the back of your mind.

Bad habits of AL Developers (Friday 13:30 – 15:00)

I already did a similar session at NAVTechDays back in the days which you can find on youtube here.  Again, I’ll be doing this with Vjeko, and this time, it’s a whole new ballgame, of course as compared with back in 2016.  Now we have a new language (AL), new tools, VSCode, DevOps, Cloud/OnPrem, Dot-Or-Don’tNet, Azure, PowerStuff .. .  During this session, we’ll share our view on the matter, and share what we think is a good or a bad habit.  For you to judge if we make any sense or not ;-).

Workshop

As you probably will know, at BCTechDays, you have the opportunity to do pre-conference workshops as well.  I will be one of the teachers, and I made it a bit easier for me this year.  I’ll be doing a workshop that I already have given a few times:

Coding 4 Performance

You can already guess that parts of the workshop will be repeated during the session (it’s all the same topic anyway) – but I promise that not everything will be repeated.  Even more – I think that I’ll be holding a few things back just for the session ;-). Who knows .. .

It’s a workshop that I usually do together with AJ online.  But we have had such good feedback that I decided to do this one at BCTechDays as well – and apparently that was a good idea, because the workshop was sold out fast!

ALOps (Thursday 13:35 – 13:50)

Last but not least, we (ALOps) are a Platinum sponsor as well – and that means I’ll be presenting how ALOps can help you in setting up pipelines on DevOps for your product(s) and customer(s).  I’ll shortly introduce ALOps, show you how it can help you – but of course, since we have a booth, you’ll be able to be fully informed at our booth as well! You’re all invited to both ;-).