Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, October 31st 2007 at 12:55pm
It was barely a week before the conference when they announced that Kathy Sierra would be a surprise special guest keynote speaker at ooPSLA. The second I read that on the web site I was excited. I adore Kathy Sierra. Her blog has offered countless insights on software engineering, usability, passion and people.
I saw Kathy speak at CUSEC 2006, and it still sticks in my head as one of (if not the) best presentation at CUSEC. Ever. So even though she was giving the “Creating Passionate Users” speech at ooPSLA, and even though that was the same talk I had already seen, I made sure to attend Kathy’s keynote – and give her greetings from Ed.
Kathy hinted that she might be coming back to the blogging world, and I sincerely hope she does. The world needs people like her, even if it doesn’t always deserve her.
Tags: 2007, conference, events, oopsla | 1 comment
Posted by Skrud at Friday, October 26th 2007 at 6:51pm
Following the Fred Brooks keynote speech, I went to the coffee break room to caffeinate before going to the Kathy Sierra presentation. I was minding my own business, sipping some coffee, reading my RSS feeds, chatting with some friends from UVic; until they walked off to go their presentations. I noticed out of the corner of my eye two old guys putting their jackers on the chairs around my table and sitting down. Looking up, I was faced with Fred Brooks and David Parnas. Wow!. These two guys practically created software engineering as we know it. What do you say to them?
I told Dr. Parnas about the time I saw him speak at CUSEC 2004: That one presentation was an extremely influential moment of my life. I remember he was talking about the importance of software quality, and how it needs to be engineered as oppose to hacked together by a rogue band of coders. Most importantly, I remember looking up at Dr. Parnas giving that speech and thinking “that’s what I want to do”. As soon as I got back to school following that conference, I applied to transfer my major from Computer Science to Software Engineering. I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, and I thanked Dr. Parnas for that.
David Parnas replied to me: “Thanks for that! That actually just made my day.”
And Fred Brooks added: “As well it should!”
And I got a picture with both of them.
Tags: 2007, acm, computerscience, conference, events, oopsla, soen | 2 comments
Posted by Skrud at Saturday, October 20th 2007 at 8:27pm
I’m a Student Volunteer at this year’s OOPSLA (Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications) conference. It’s the biggest nerd conference that I’ve heard of (and it’s probably safe to say that it’s the biggest programming conference there is). When I showed up today to man the information booth, I flipped through the list of speakers and panelists …
The names at this year’s conference are mindblowing. There are a number of former CUSEC speakers: Dave Thomas, Dave Parnas, Kathy Sierra and Ralph Johnson. I can’t even begin to express how happy I am that Kathy’s back on the speaking circuit! She delivered what was probably the best CUSEC keynote of all time.
But that’s not all, there are guys like Richard Gabriel (this year’s conference chair), Guy Steele, Ward Cunningham, James Gosling and Fred Brooks. And these are just the names that caught my eye at a glance!
Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel are giving a talk together called “50 in 50″, where they talk about 50 programming languages in 50 minutes. I was told not to miss it, and I won’t. :D
This next week is going to be insane.
Tags: computers, conference, events, geek, oopsla, soen, tech | no comments
