NDC returned to Sydney this year and SSW TV was there alongside .NET Rocks! to catch all of the action with our Ask Me Anything! sessions.

As usual there were a host of top industry pros talking about various subjects related to software development. This year, SSW TV worked alongside .NET Rocks! to run and entire track of live interviews with some of those speakers after their sessions and talked about a number of topics.

While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Adam Stephensen about his experiences building bots. The bot craze has died down a bit these days, but that means that more serious work is being done. Adam talks about what it takes to build a good bot, looking beyond the FaqBot and into more context-sensitive and service-oriented bots. In the end, a bot is just another front-end over your well-organized services layer that can handle web and mobile front-end services as well. But what does it do that is unique? How does it help people? Are bots just a fad, or are they here to stay? Adam has thoughts!

About the speakers

About the speakers

Mr Bots

Richard Campbell wrote his first line of code in 1977. His career has spanned the computing industry both on the hardware and software sides, development and operations. He was a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks, acquired by Radware in 2013 and was on the board of directors of Telerik which was acquired by Progress Software in 2014. Today he is a consultant and advisor to a number of successful technology firms and is the founder and chairman of Humanitarian Toolbox (www.htbox.org), a public charity that builds open source software for disaster relief. Richard is also the host of two podcasts: .NET Rocks! (www.dotnetrocks.com) which publishes three shows a week to .NET developers and RunAs Radio (www.runasradio.com) which is a weekly show for IT Professionals.

Carl Franklin is Executive Vice President of App vNext, a software development firm focused on modern methodologies and technologies. Carl is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, co-host and founder of .NET Rocks!, the first and most widely listened to podcast for .NET developers, aMicrosoft MVP for Kinect for Windows, a MicrosoftRegional Director, and Senior Executive of Pwop Studios, a full-service audio and video production/post production studio located in Southeastern Connecticut.

Adam loves to talk. You'll hear him around the place sharing his passion for technologies, patterns, processes and getting software shipped: Azure, Agile, AI, .NET Core, DevOps, Scrum, clean code and continuous delivery.

Adam believes communication and agility lead to success: 'fail fast', inspect, adapt, have a lot of fun.

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