TITLE: Thinking Ahead to OOPSLA
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 10, 2007 5:53 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I haven't written much in anticipation of
OOPSLA 2007,
but not because I haven't been thinking about it. In
years when I have had a role in content, such as the
2004
and
2005
Educators' Symposia or even the
2006
tutorials track, I have been excited to be deep in the
ideas of a particular part of OOPSLA. This year I have
blogged just once, about the
December planning meeting.
(I did write once from the spring planning meeting, but
about a movies.)
My work this year for the conference has been in an
administrative role, as communications chair, which has
focused on sessions and schedules and some web content.
Too be honest, I haven't done a very good job so far,
but that is a subject for another post. For now, let's
just say that I have not been a very good
Mediator
nor a good
Facade.
I am excited about some of the new things we are doing
this year to get the word out about the conference. At
the top of this list is a podcast. Now, podcasts have
been around for a while now, but they are just now becoming
a part of the promotional engine for many organizations.
We figured that hearing about some of the cool stuff that
will happen at OOPSLA this year would complement what you
can read on the web. So we arranged to have two outfits,
Software Engineering Radio
and
DimSumThinking,
co-produce a series of episodes on some of the hot topics
covered at this year's conference.
Our first episode, on a workshop titled No Silver Bullet:
A Retrospective on the Essence and Accidents of Software
Engineering, organized by Dennis Mancl, Steven Fraser,
and Bill Opdyke, is on-line at the
OOPSLA 2007 Podcast
page. Stop by, give it a listen, and
subscribe
to the podcast's feed so that you don't miss any of the
upcoming episodes. (We are available in iTunes, too.) We
plan to role new interviews out every 7-10 for the next few
months. Next up is a discussion of a Scala tutorial with
Martin Odersky, due out on July 16.
If you would like to read a bit more about the conference,
check out conference chair Richard Gabriel's
The (Unofficial) How To Get Around OOPSLA Guide,
and especially his
ooPSLA Impressions.
As I've written a few times, there really isn't another
conference like OOPSLA. Richard's impressions page does
a good job communicating just how, mostly in the words of
people who've been to OOPSLA and seen it.
While putting together some of his podcast episodes, Daniel
Steinberg of
DimSumThinking
ran into something different than usual: fun.
I've done three interviews for the oopsla podcast -- every
interviewee has used the same word to describe OOPSLA: fun.
I just thought that was notable -- I do a lot of this sort
of thing and that's not generally a word that comes up to
describe conferences.
And that fun comes on top of the ideas and the people you
will encounter, that will stretch you. We can't offer a
Turing Award winner
every year, but you may not notice with all the intellectual
foment. (And this year, we can offer
John McCarthy
as an invited speaker...)
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