Back from SPA2008
Got back from SPA2008 earlier this evening. The past couple of days have been pretty exhausting, with some good sessions and some that didn’t quite hit the spot. The Erlang session ended up being a little disappointing, as there was insufficient time to get to grips with many of the exercises and hence develop a feel for the language. Another session, on embedding domain-specific languages in Java, turned out to be really thought-provoking. I was familiar with the concept of method chaining, but it hadn’t really registered with me that doing this essentially created a domain-specific language from Java syntax. The final session I attended, on the principles behind MapReduce and Hadoop, also turned out to be very interesting.
I didn’t get to many of the diversions, but I did make time for the Spanish guitar recital by David Harvey on Tuesday - an excellent way of winding down after a long day.
On balance, I’d say this was an even better SPA conference for me than the one in 2005. I’ve come to the conclusion that these are tremendously valuable events, even for folk in academia. I can’t think of many better ways of picking up on current trends in industry. SPA folk are friendly, passionate about their profession, keen to share what they know with you, and equally keen to learn from the things that you have to say. The event is intense, stimulating, but good fun, too. I hope it won’t be another three years until my next visit…