last chance for OOPSLA 2006 advance registration
Advance registration for OOPSLA 2006 closes on Friday, 15 September. Take a look over the conference schedule (although you might like the unofficial schedule at a glance better) and the unofficial guide of how to get around OOPSLA. It's in the unofficial guide that I learned how to tell the weather in Portland: if you can see Mount Hood, it's about to rain; if you can't see Mount Hood, it's raining.
Where will you find me at OOPSLA? Oh, I'm glad you asked.
Saturday, 21 October
Okay, Saturday's actually a set-up day. But if you come early to get your registration materials, you'll find me there.
Sunday, 22 October
Sunday's a busy day for me, but if I can get away from my duties, I like the looks of the Programmers are from Mars, customers are from Venus tutorial. I also like the looks of George Platt's tutorial titled Coherence and Community: Exploring coherence via group problem solving and an overview of team building exercises, but that's a morning tutorial and I doubt that I'll be able to pull myself away in the morning.
Monday, 23 October
Monday's just as busy as Sunday is for me. The Rapidly designing and testing great user interfaces looks good. I'll also poke my head into the dynamic languages symposium and the educator's symposium. The paper in the educator's symposium about writing better use cases looks especially interesting.
Tuesday, 24 October
Tuesday is when the conference really begins, and concidentally is when I have a lot more free time to actually see the conference. The conference kicks off with Brenda Laurel's keynote address. I cannot wait to hear her talk. Then it's over to the Onward! track to check out a couple of papers: Conscientious Software (the main author of this is the conference chair for OOPSLA 2007) and The Geography of Programming. The latter looks especially interesting: OOP from an Eastern perspective.
In the afternoon, Linda Northrop is giving an invited talk. She was OOPSLA conference chair in 2001, which turned out to be a tougher job than normal, due to the attacks the previous month.
And in the evening, we're having a special reception to honour the memory of John Vlissides. John was OOPSLA conference chair in 2004, and (of course) one of the authors of the seminal Design Patterns. After the reception, there's a special panel with the remaining members of the Gang of Four to talk about the beginnings and future of design patterns.
Wednesday, 25 October
Wednesday kicks off with a keynote that I suspect might be my favourite: Guy Steele. Then there's Jim Waldo's essay On System Design.
In the afternoon, I'm headed to Friedrich Steimann's essay about the paradoxical success of aspect-oriented programming, although I might swing by the lightning talks first. Then it's off to either the Onward! Films or the practitioner reports about applications crossing the hardware/software boundary. Or I might try to go to the Ruby on Rails: A Kickstart tutorial instead, since I keep on meaning to try out RoR.
The evening is the big reception, which this year will be held at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). When I was in Portland for our last committee meeting, we got to go around and tour the facility. We spent just as much time playing with the stuff in OMSI as we did paying attention to the woman giving us the tour. This is such a great place to take a thousand or so geeks.
Thursday, 26 October
Usually, the conference winds down on Thursday. I can usually count on being able to go back to my hotel room and crashing by 5pm. Not so this year!
Philip Wadler starts the day off with his keynote about faith, evolution, and programming languages. I haven't heard him speak before, but I keep on hearing great things. Then the Onward! track has me again, this time with the Collaborative Diffusion: Programming Anti-Objects paper. Although the panel about the convergence of XP and scrum also looks interesting. In the afternoon, it's the young guns panel that I really want to see, followed by the most influential paper awards.