Skip to main content

ACCU Conference 2012

Image
By
This year’s ACCU Conference, in Oxford as usual, was superb. I enjoyed it immensely and I was only there for two sessions, one of which was my own! There was a huge amount of twitter activity which actually made all the sessions very interesting even though I wasn’t there. My wife enjoyed it too, I had huge difficulty getting her out of the bar! I learnt that I featured in Allan Kelly’s presentation minutes after my picture flashed up on one of his slides. Next year the children will be older and I should be able to go to the entire event.  

The Congruent Programmer
Phil Nash

 Phil Nash is simply Phil Nash. I’d be lying if the fact that he was giving the ACCU member keynote didn’t fill (no pun intended) me with envy. Phil was suffering from throat problems, but he’s so softly spoken anyway that you I didn’t really notice. I could hear everything he was saying at every point. In usual Phil Nash style his Mac toys were also giving him trouble. It appeared he was using his iPhone to move his presentation between slides and it was being more than a little temperamental. The keynote was highly amusing, as usual with lots of subtle references. Hopefully this is the first of many keynotes for Phil.  

Walking Skeleton
Paul Grenyer

I hate putting presentations together and I hate practicing them. However when I get to the conference I really enjoy giving them and this one was no different to the last time (over two years ago). I had a great audience which nearly filled the room. The problem with ACCU audiences is that they’re pretty clued up already and I was acutely aware of this all the way through and felt I was only really filling in the gaps. And of course at the end they found all the holes that other audiences had failed to find! Roll on next year.

 
My Audience

Comments

  1. Phil Nash8 May 2012 at 22:05

    Hehe, thanks for the write-up Paul.
    In my defence the wi-fi connection between iPhone and Mac held up pretty well considering the room was packed with developers! ;-)

    I really enjoyed your talk, btw. Even though I'm familiar with the material on the walking skeleton from the GOOS coverage, it was really useful to see it built up from scratch in just over an hour instead of the weeks that it usually takes in practice! Gives you a different perspective.
    So don't let the "preaching to the converted" feeling get in the way of knowing you did a good job on a worthy topic,

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

I, Robot

By
The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more