So, nearly a month back now I had the fantastic opportunity to speak at this year's Software, Design & Development at the Barbican on property based testing - or more specifically, FsCheck.

It was a fun experience and a very different type of conference to the smaller, generally open source community based events that I normally attend. There were a wide variety of expert speakers, covering the whole range from people like myself presenting on potentially useful but relatively unknown technology (in the enterprise world, at least - property based testing is pretty well known in functional programming circles) through to known industry names.

I won't go into the details of all the talks I attended as I was there for 3 days. But there were a lot of good ideas on display ranging through sane naming (always worth watching anything by Kevlin Henney if you get a chance) to project design (as opposed to project planning, probably more thoughts on that later) to practical DDD examples in .net to the "Zen of Architecture".

As a thank you to Kurt Schelfthout who wrote FsCheck, to spread further what I think is an awesome concept and to give an idea of some of the kind of things we do at 15below to any interested developers I managed to arrange for the recording of my talk to be released publicly. It's an unmanned camera, so you have a pretty good view of the slides with out having to see my face at any point, which many people will see as an advantage! I strongly recommend full screen viewing; there's a fair amount of code in the presentation.

If you want to play with the code from the demo yourself, it's available on Github. The slides are also available as a PDF.

Many thanks to the conference organisers Yellowstone TechMedia, and I'll definitely be considering submitting talks/attending again next year.