Cynical Monkey

I just got back from the 2004 OOPSLA conference in Vancouver. This was my first OOPSLA ever so I am approaching this without the perspective of a longtime OOPSLA veteran. Overall it was a great experience the really got the head-gears turning.

From the keynote “The Future of Programming,” Richard Rashid makes it clear that the future of programming is M$ visual studio 2005. Rashid shamelessly made an OOPSLA exclusive product announcement midway through his keynote and invited an assistant to give a protracted demonstration of the new and improved modeling tool in the latest version of Visual Studio. Many people walked out of the room.

Notes on Notes on Postmodern Programming with James Noble, Robert Biddle was an interesting commentary on the state of modern software development practices. Their point being that all of our “failures” in software development are really a symptom of our modern view of development and maybe we should just take a different view of the current state of things and approach the practice of our craft with more love and creativity, instead of building the same systems over and over again on grander and grander scales.

Alan Kay’s Turing lecture was a refreshing and wonderful talk that challenges the frontiers of imaginable Human computer interaction. His point being that we are simply creating marginal improvements on the great ideas of thirty year ago. His inspired outlook and challenge to transcend modern human computer interaction gives me hope for the future of the profession, and the great advancements still waiting to be made.

Steve McConnell’s talk was great but very economically oriented. One might call him the “Too Pragmatic Programmer,” but his message was very clear and very true. We should really make an effort to follow our current practices and methodologies with exactness and discipline before we throw them away chasing the next big thing.

There were also many other great talks and presentations but I will leave my discussion at the big talks that really made an impression on my current views.

Last month I attended a No Fluff Just Stuff Conference in my home state of Wisconsin. I wanted to say a small piece about it. After all, they did work hard at planting the “Blog about the Conference” Meme in my head.

The conference was great. I can’t say enough how much of a value it is to come and see these speakers in person. The speakers at this conference are top notch. I always walk away with a wow factor.
I have to say my personal favorite speaker is Stuart Halloway. Stuart always has the sessions that look a little deeper into the platform and bring the more enigmatic and powerful features of the Java Platform to the surface. That and he’s just a very charismatic guy.

So now my gripes.

• One of the conference’s main tenants is that doesn’t try to sell anything, I totally agree with that ideal, and so I say they should try selling conference a little less. I don’t think Jay Zimmerman(organizer) ever stopped praising up the conference to the attendees.
• Last year they branched out and did some lessons learned from other OO languages (Objective-C, Ruby). I was hoping for that breadth again this year. Ohh yeah, and what about mobile Java, Java for Games?
• They did cover Test Driven development. Out of 50 sessions nine were TDD related. It was so bad that some of the buzzword zombies started asking TDD questions during a Java Reflection session.
• Finally, I know some consulting groups in the area wanted to help sponsor the event, but were turned down because, “they don’t accept sponsors.” Except that our conference packets contained blatant advertisements for one consulting firm along with skill matrixes. I thought that was very hypocritical.

All in all besides my gripes it was an excellent conference that I would recommend to anyone. I am a little biased because it’s the only professional conference that I have ever attended. I am planning on going to OOPLSA this year and would be very interested in feedback from people who have attended this conference in the past.