Anchr takes a journey through the ‘technology jungle’ at Techorama 2023

Techorama 2023, the annual tech conference, took place from 15 to 17 May 2023 at Kinepolis Antwerp. The conference brought together a mix of developers and IT and data professionals from around the world. Good for around 1,700 attendees who immersed themselves for three days in everything that Azure and .NET are. Joselien Maes, IT Consultant at Anchr, was present and saw that it was good! 

• ‘You are doing logging wrong! Let’s fix it’ (Nick Chapsas, influencer/YouTuber) ‘This session was given by the well-known YouTuber Nick Chapsas. He spoke about how logging can be improved and what the impact of this can be on performance. Under the format of ‘I shall not …’ he presented seven rules that, according to him, are best practices when implementing logging and how they can be used efficiently for debugging.’  
• What’s new in EF Core 7 (Jiri Cincura, Microsoft)  ‘Jiri Cincura provided an overview of the new features in Microsoft’s Entity Framework Core 7. He explained what major changes are present and also pointed out some nice ‘nice to haves’.  
• Building context-aware IoT solutions with Azure Digital Twins (Glenn Colpaert, Zure)  ‘Glenn Colpaert’s session was very interesting with a real-life example of how digital twins can be used in daily life. Glenn provided an explanation of how he used digital twins to calculate how many solar panels he would need for his house, taking into account the entire architectural plan and influences of parameters such as shade from a nearby tree, the seasons, etc. In addition, he gave some examples that are already being used in practice. For example, Apica uses it for optimizing the arrival times of ships in the port of Antwerp, and Imac simulates the impact of a closed street in Antwerp on traffic.  
• Using feature flags in an ASP.NET Core app on Azure (Joonas Westlin, Zure) ‘Joonas Westlin provided an extensive explanation of what feature flags are and how they should (or should not) be used and how this can be integrated with Azure to ensure that no extra deployments are needed (which is the case with hardcoded flags). Feature flags, say what? This is making certain parts of an application available under certain circumstances. For example, making something available in the testing environment but not in production, premium features for a paid part of an application, beta features that are tested by certain users, gradual releases of new features, etc.’
• The fantastic 9 (Yves Goeleven, freelancer)  ‘Yves Goeleven’s session was about which design patterns he believes are truly important and why. He believes that there are 9 key patterns with which you can handle all types of development. Platform development, BI, and IoT; all other design patterns are then nice to haves and can sometimes cause too much overhead, making the code worse instead. Fun fact: this talk was so popular that attendees were sitting on the stairs, myself included.’  
• Why developer experience matters (Rasmus Hald, Lego)  Ramus Hald spoke about how companies can impact developer experience (DX). Hald believes that companies can ensure that developers are relieved in such a way that they have more time for their development work. He talked about how companies can eliminate overhead through clear communication, consistency throughout the company regarding tools, and a clear repository of documentation.  

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