great day at OOPSLA

Today has been a great day at OOPSLA. I'm so glad that I came this year.

The day started off with Fred Brooks talking about collaboration in design. I am an unabashed fan of Fred Brooks, so there was no chance of me missing his talk. He has to be one of the most amazing minds in software engineering. He mentioned a couple of papers that I haven't read yet, so now I have to make sure that I get them. It's also time to get a new copy of The Mythical Man-Month to see what changes he made to it for the 25th anniversary edition. You can tell you've got a great session when you've got people like Dave Ungar, Ralph Johnson, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock queuing up at the microphones to ask questions of the speaker.

During the break, I did a stint in the Microsoft booth. Several people came over specifically to talk to me about what it's like to work at Microsoft and in MacBU, others just came over to say that they like my blog. It's always good to be able to connect with people, and my time in the Microsoft booth has given me ample opportunity for that.

Then it was over to the Onward! films to see what the filmmakers had come up with. One film made the point that we don't really know a lot about how software evolves. This, coming so soon after Fred Brooks talking about the design of software, has my mind racing. How does software evolve, and how do we manage it better?

Lunch was the OOPSLA 2008 committee lunch. Gail Harris, next year's general chair, has decided that it's time to refactor the committee. To that end, she has created a new Development Chair. The chair is being held by two people for OOPSLA 2008, since refactoring the committee is going to be quite a lot of work. I'm one of the two co-chairs. I've got some ideas for how to proceed and how to make this a success; you'll probably see me blogging more about this in the future.

After lunch, I ran across the hallway to conduct the second round of the ACM Student Research Competition. Five submissions were selected by the judges for this second round, where they gave ten-minute presentations about their work. The presentations were phenomenal. After the students left, the judges selected the winners, who will be announced on Thursday during the OOPSLA awards ceremony. The decision was hard, but we walked out of the room with a clear understanding of the submissions that we selected and why. I'm immensely proud of the work that all of the accepted students did for the SRC. The breadth of the topics that their research covers is one of the reasons that I love OOPSLA so very much.

Then it was time for my women of OOPSLA birds-of-a-feather meeting. I've had the general feeling that the number of women at OOPSLA has been declining. This year, we gathered demographic information on the registration form, and were pleased to discover that ~10% of the attendees are female. I wanted to gather some people together to talk about this and what we can do about it. The people who showed up were articulate and passionate. We came up with some great ideas that we can implement at OOPSLA 2008, as well as some ideas to take home with us as we think about how to get more women into computer science.

And now it's time for the special event of the conference. I'm hungry and in need of red wine, so I'll sign off now. Bonsoir!