Winning tickets to NDC London

Way back in April 2019 I attended the free DDD South West in Bristol. It was my first experience of a Developer Conference and I had an amazing day.

The talks were great, I learnt a lot. The stands were great, I learned about products I’d never heard of and got to chat to some really friendly people.

Then there were the various competitions. There were raffles at various stands for cool gadgets all of which I entered because, why not?

At the end of the day we headed back to the main room for the announcements and I watched as every prize was given to someone else :(

Then came the final prize which wasn’t a raffle in the sense that everyone had a ticket, but from anyone who had used the app during the day to look up the right room for the talk they wanted and had given feedback, 2 people were picked at random to win tickets to NDC London 2020.

I’m not going to lie, I’d never heard of NDC (with DDD being my first conference) and I turned to my then colleague James and asked him what it was.

When he finished explaining they were ready to announce the names from the computer that had just picked 2 people at random and I whispered my name to James as if it was being announced… as a joke.

And then the guy said my name.

James and I looked at each other in disbelief that this had actually just happened and it took me a second to actually stand up and go and speak to the guy to give him my contact details to send me more info.

Fast forward to the day general tickets came on sale, I was sent a code to redeem on the site, that was effectively a coupon code giving me 100% off a ticket. I was excited but also felt it was a bit of a shame that I would be going alone and not know anyone there… But when I put in the code it asked me if I wanted 1 or 2 tickets, so I obviously chose 2 and told James to make sure he had it off work (he’d left the company we worked at together by then ) because he was coming with me.