Almost three years ago I went to Oslo to attend the Norwegian Developers Conference, NDC 2009. This was a major awakening and an almost religious experience for me. I can remember listening to Roy Osherove explaining the terminology and benefits of Test Driven Development and Ayende explaining how to break out of dependency hell like it was yesterday!

After three intensive days, when the conference was over, me and my friends went back to Stockholm. During the trip back I remember thinking that one day, one day I want to speak at this conference!

Back at work in Stockholm I started to channel my newly gained knowledge and the ton of inspiration that I had gotten at NDC into various projects. As I was working primarily with EPiServer CMS, which in many ways is a great product but which lacks some of the openness and flexibility required to apply many of the lessons I learned in Oslo, I felt frustrated. While I know EPiServer is working on fixing this, I decided to take matters in my own hands.

First Page Type Builder was born and later also EPiAbstractions and various other open source projects. They were all aimed to make it possible to apply concepts such as inversion of control and test driven development to EPiServer development. As well as making the development experience with EPiServer more enjoyable of course.

In the fall of last year I received an invitation to speak at DevSum11, a conference taking place in Stockholm in may this year. My suggestion to talk on the topic of Progressive EPiServer Development, a term I use to describe the concept I’m aiming for with Page Type Builder, my other open source projects as well as attempts by others to make the EPiServer development experience more modern, was accepted and my session was booked.

Later, when the NDC arrangers were sending out a call for papers for NDC 2011, I decided to send in a paper describing this same session to NDC. Last week I got the e-mail I could only dream of back in 2009. It said “Congratulations, You have been selected as a speaker at NDC 2011.”. By channeling the inspiration from NDC 2009 into open source projects and being active in the community my dream had come true!

I hope you will join me, and many of the other great people that are active in the EPiServer community such as Ted Nyberg and Emil Cardell to mention a few, in Oslo in June for NDC 2011, and in Stockholm in May for DevSum11!

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