OOPSLA 2008 Wrap Up
DesignFest at OOPSLA
Life has gotten terribly busy as of late, and I have neglected to followup with my blog. First, I want to get my OOPSLA 2008 closing thoughts out of the way.
I attended OOPSLA back in 2006 and was very impressed with the program… I got to meet a lot of big names in the software design and development community, met a lot of authors who’s books helped shape my software engineering mindset, and overall had a great time and learned a ton of new things. I even learned of db4o and AOP for the first time. For these reasons alone I decided to revisit OOPSLA a 2nd time.
First let me cover what I loved about the conference. It’s almost absent of “vendorness.” You get a lot of close interaction with a lot of smart people, and in retrospect I think that I enjoyed the conversations and new contacts I made over any of the sessions I attended. Likewise, some of the sessions were very good too… I especially liked Linda Rising’s session on initiating change in your organization. The only sad part is I missed Rebecca Wirfs-Brock’s sessions on design. I opted out as I had a co-worker attend her sessions, only to find out my co-worker finds design and UML diagrams boring. At least I did attend Rebecca’s keynote on Design, which was top notch. 
This year was quite a bit different from the last time I went back in 2006 though. Noticeably, the attendance was a lot smaller. I think it was due to this smaller attendance that the sessions offered were somewhat limited and very specific… there were times when I was confused about what I should go to as there wasn’t anything scheduled in that particular block that interested me. This year also had a bit too much focus on DSLs. Yes, DSLs are awesome and hip and very very useful, but as someone just delving into them, there’s only so much I could absorb. Likewise, I was really hoping to attend more AOP sessions, but alas there were none (there were workshops, but no real tutorials or sessions).
I think OOPSLA needs to evolve a bit if it wants to continue and thrive. To me, it’s been a conference that brings together the top minds, engineers and developers in our industry to help improve and nourish our community. It’s a conference that one should be able to learn a lot from as well, so no matter how much our industry advances, we need to keep the barrier to entry small. Also, I think it’s the only conference I have attended that charges an arm and a leg for tutorials… although one can buy an all access pass, why not just be like Agile or other conferences and include unlimited session attendance / participation in the conference price?
I think a lot of people would like to see more modernism… there’s a lot of events and sessions around smalltalk and lisp (which is cool because I learned about Squeak at OOPSLA in 2006) but you won’t find many sessions or talks centered around javascript, groovy, ruby, or other interesting languages. The web facing portion of the conference is also quite absent with only one or two tutorials. Sadly, there was also no domain driven design sessions either. 
I think the conference will survive though… and again one thing that marks today’s OOPSLA from OOPSLAs of years past is that a lot of the topics born or covered there have spun their own targeted conferences that draw large attendance numbers, and even those focus areas have many conferences.
In closing, I would like to say that Gail Harris DID do a great job of organizing the conference, and the Big Event at the Parthenon was completely awesome. I was also quite pleased that there were a few functional programming sessions mixed in as well. Although I plan to attend more web / agile based conferences next year, I am still going to try and attend OOPSLA yet again next year in Orlando… because despite any shortcomings, it’s still educational and fun! 
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