For this month's .NET Oxford meetup we had two talks - one from .NET Oxford co-founder Matt Nield, speaking about Bots; and the other from Clifford Agius talking about Pilot Decision Management.

Our .NET Oxford meetup this month was all about Microsoft's globally-distributed database, Cosmos DB - and we were very pleased to welcome James Broome and Mike Larah from Endjin to tell us all about it! It also turned out that Endjin (being a remote working team), decided to spend the day in sunny Oxford for their team catch-up. Which was perfect, as it meant that we also had the entire team joining us for the meetup!

I'm now using Docker for quite a few projects, but up until now, my build workflow had tended to involve building the application outside of Docker. Then whilst building the Docker image (using the Dockerfile of course), it would then just copy those published files into the image.

Last week was our July .NET Oxford meetup, and this time it was all about Quantum computing and Microsoft's new Q# programming language! Joining us this month was Anita Ramanan and Frances Tibble from Microsoft, doing a fantastic job with introducing us to the fascinating world of Quantum computing!

Earlier this week we had our 15th .NET Oxford meetup. This time it was another lightning talk event, making it our 3rd one to date. For normal events, we have one or two long talks - but the idea behind the lightning events is that we have shorter talks, where more people can get up. I really enjoy these types of meetup, as they add much more variation and also have a great social feel!

Last week, we had our May meetup with guest speaker Jon P Smith, telling us all about Entity Framework Core! And Jon did not only one, but two EF packed talks! The first explaining Entity Framework Core, and after the break, the second talking about performance tuning Entity Framework!

Last week we had our 13th .NET Oxford, with a Security double-bill from Robin Minto talking about lessons learnt from past infosec failures, and Frans Lytzen telling us about how to secure your webapps in Azure!

One of my goals this year was to do a talk at a developer conference. I did a few talks at .NET Oxford last year, and wanted to take my public speaking a little bit further, and the fantastic Developer Developer Developer conferences gave the perfect opportunity! For those that haven't heard of these conferences - there are a number of them throughout the year at different locations. They're always free to attend, and always on a Saturday. This means that most of the attendees are there because they want to be there, not just because they've being sent and paid for by their work. I've been to a few now, and there's always a really great community vibe.

A very common problem I see in most companies I work with, is both a lack of internal developer documentation, and also a lack of appreciation for how important this really is. There seems to be this assumption that the developer who has all that undocumented knowledge in their head (yes, you know the person) will always be around. They'll never leave for another job, they'll never get run over by a bus, they will always be available. Okay, hopefully the bus thing will never happen, but you get the point! Even when the developer goes on holiday - their knowledge is not available until they get back.

Last week we had our 12th .NET Oxford, and this time, our guest speaker was Ian Cooper - Lead Application Architect at Huddle, owner of the open-source Brighter, and regular conference speaker.