Dan Weinreb’s blog

The SPLASH Conference is my favorite technical conference every year. Wait, don’t stop reading just because you’re not a “researcher”!

I started this blog so that I could post a trip report from the conference in 2007. The name has since changed from “OOPSLA” to “SPLASH”. Actually it now has three tracks. Here’s what each is about:

• OOPSLA: High quality research work that uses established scientific methodologies, written using high standards of academic technical publications.
• Wavefront: Original and innovative architecture, design, and/or implementation techniques used in actual leading-edge software system. Our goal with Wavefront is to engage the software developers who are actually creating next generation of software systems and to make sure that their innovations are captured in the technical archives of computing.
• Onward!: Innovative ideas that challenge existing beliefs, or early work well written and well argued for; essays and ideas worth hearing about. (This includes things too “far out” to get published in existing journals and other conferences.

If I am judging my own audience properly, Wavefront is what most of you would be interested in. Here is a great blog post by Allan Wirfs-Brock, who has been a leader in object-oriented and dynamic programming for decades. The Wavefront track is to revive what made the early OOPSLA conferences so energetic and valuable: interaction between researchers and people out there getting stuff done. Both groups have a lot to tell, and learn from, the other.

I am the “Panels Chair”, and I’m actively seeking people who would like to lead a panel, be on a panel, and/or suggest topics for panels. Panels are fun to be on. It’s far less work than submitting a paper. All you have to do is come up with five minutes of something to say, after which it’s all questions and answers. Let me know! Tell your friends!

The overall theme of the conference is The Internet as the world-wide Virtual Machine. This theme captures the change in the order of magnitude of computing that happened over the past few years. These days, software systems are rarely designed in isolation; they connect to pieces written by 3rd parties, they communicate with other pieces over the Internet, they use big data produced elsewhere, and they touch millions of interacting users through an ever larger variety of physical devices. In other words, the “machine” is now a global computing network. What does this entail for software development itself?

SPLASH 2011 will be in Portland, OR, October 22 – 27; the main tracks will probably be from Tuesday Oct 25 to Thursday Oct 27. The information is all here, including the calls for papers for each track. If you want to submit a paper, the deadline is April 8, 2001.

Just to get you started, and to show how broad the scope of the conference is, here are some possible areas. You could come up with something that impinges on one of these, but that’s not necessary. Panels can be in any of the tracks of SPLASH (OOPSLA, Wavefront, or Onward!).

• Any aspect of software development, including prototyping, design, testing, evaluation, maintenance, reuse, static or dynamic analysis, frameworks and toolkits.
• Language design issues, such as dynamic or static programming, type systems and type inference, use of modularity and parallelism, patterns. Dynamic languages are welcome. JavaScript, in particular, has become important lately, but any language is fine.
• Language implementation issues: virtual machines, garbage collectors, compilers/interpreters, power efficiency.
• Tools designed to reduce the time, effort, and/or cost of software systems.
• And any of a wide range of topics: cloud computing and web platforms, mobile platforms, security and privacy issues, UI technology, location-awareness, storage, reliability.

I hope to see you there!

OpenSQL Camp Boston happens this weekend. It’s an unConference, which means anybody can give a talk and anybody can listen. There arew usually several parallel tracks. This is an unConference about open source databases, both relational and non-relational databases, database alternatives like “NoSQL stores”, and so on. There will be people from PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, VoltDB, Rackspace, InfoBright, BerkeleyDB, MIT, and others.

The events are:

• Friday Oct 15, at 6pm: social event at WorkBar Boston, 711 Atlantic Ave, Boston, MA
• Saturday, Oct 16: unConference at the Stata Center
• Saturday, Oct 17: more unConference at the Stata Center, ending 6:00 p.m.

Click here for the full info.

If any of you deal with the technology press, i.e. want them to publish stories on your stuff, you may know about the concept of a “press embargo”, where you send them info and say “don’t release this until X date”. Last night at a panel I found out some interesting info about this.

These used to exist and be widely used. They let a company manage the time at which it’s “big news” would come out, and it let reporters have some extra time to prepare their story and make it higher-quality without risking being out of date.

However, lately the whole thing has broken down. TechCrunch and the Wall St. Journal, in particular, have been undermining the “gentleman’s agreement” that made this work. A tech jouralist now has to assume that by following the embargo, he or she will end up being out of date (“scooped” is apparently not really a term-of-art any more). In general, journalists do not like them, and will not honor any that is more than one week out. They worry that someone else will discover the news and not have agreed to the embargo, or the news will leak some other way, or someone will just ignore the embargo. Also, some journalists now consider them just too problematic and too much trouble and ignore embargoed press releases entirely.

So, take this into account if you were thinking of doing an embargo’ed press release.

The panel session was called “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR”. It was at last night’s Web Innovator’s Group meeting, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. The panelists were excellent.

The European Common Lisp Meeting will be in Hamburg, on the weekend of September 12 and 13, 2009.  I greatly enjoyed last year’s ECLM, in Amsterdam. It’s relaxed and gives you a lot of opportunity to meet great Lisp experts from all over the world. Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz did a superb job arranging for entertainment and space, and making sure everyone was happy.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Hamburg; I’ve never been there, and it sounds great.

I’m giving a talk entitled A Highly-Available Large-Scale Transaction Processing System in Common Lisp. It’s about the airline reservation system that we’re building at ITA Software, specifically about the issues involved in using Common Lisp, which is not widely thought of as being a language for writing large-scale transaction processing.

The lightning talks at the International Lisp Conference last March went so well that Edi and Arthur are trying out this format at the ECLM.  After the ILC, someone told me that at another sofware-related conference he had been to, the lightning talks fell flat: few people signed up to give talks, and they weren’t very good.  At the ILC, I thought they were nearly all great.  We learned about new tools, stories, and so on.  There was a great one about using Lisp in a Lisp-unfriendly world.  In a nutshell: if they force you to program in PERL, then run a PERL-coded Scheme interpreter and write in Scheme!  I anticipate more fun lightning talks in Hamburg!

So, I encourage you to join the fun!

XSITE 2009 is a one-day conference that will showcase innovative business in New England.  It’s at the Boston University School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009.

High-tech, life-sciences, and energy innovation may well hold the key to the nation’s economic health and long-term competitiveness. And as a hotbed of American innovation, New England is poised to become a key driver of economic recovery in the U.S.

There are many presentations by CEO’s of innovative companies, including many startups.  There’s a panel session on “Investing in Innovation”.  And there’s time for networking: you can chat with and ask questions of the presenters, or just meet the other attendees.  Here’s the preliminary agenda.

I’ve been to meetings like this before, and always find them valuable and interesting.  The Nantucket Conference is like this, but it’s by invitation only. XSITE is open to anyone.

XSITE is run by Xconomy.com. I attended their one-day conferences on cloud computing and on mobile applications, and both were excellent.  So I have high hopes for XSITE as well.  (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Xconomy.)

If you plan to register, the sooner the better, since the price goes up on June 1 and again on June 15.