I called it an early night yesterday (which explains why I’m blogging this today instead of last night) but I did go to the OOPSLA welcome reception. Ran into Martin again who pointed me in Gregor’s direction. Gregor presented at TechEd last year and was one of the top five speakers in the architecture track so we chatted about doing it again at next year’s TechEd. (I also got a chance to meet EIP’s co-author Bobby Woolf). Then Martin introduced several other attendees:

• Joshua Kerievsky, author of Refactoring to Patterns
• Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Gerard Meszaros, who runs XUnitPatterns.com
• Mark Striebeck, Director of SourceForge Engineering

We all stood around chatting for a good while. I learned quite a bit and now have to add a few books to my very long reading list. I hadn’t realized that SourceForge is a product in addition to being an OSS code repository. Actually, their aren’t exactly the same – for example SF.net is built on PHP/Perl/Python while SF Enterprise Edition is built on J2EE. As we all started to drift off, Mark mentioned that he appreciated talking with me since didn’t always talk in “glowing terms” about MSFT. Hey, we do a lot right, but that means there’s always areas we can improve on and I always err on the side of honesty and transparency.

Day 0 is almost done. Like yesterday, it’s been quiet, but the foot traffic by the booth is improving. I missed the afternoon of the DSL Tutorial tracking down a shipment of JOURNALs that we are handing out at the conference. Martin Fowler stopped by to say hi and we chatted a while about the Architecture Advisory Board. He missed the meeting a couple weeks ago because of a communication screwup (i.e. I didn’t call him) but he’s looking forward to working with us going forward. Some one ribbed him for sitting in the Microsoft booth, so he pulled out his PowerBook (or maybe it was an iBook). I told him that since he like UNIX so much, we should install Services for UNIX on his Windows laptop. 😄

This is a very different crowd from TechEd – not better or worse, just different. Very heavy academic presence. I got a very interesting code visualization demo from an MIT grad student. Flipping thru the conference program, the vast majority of the speakers are from universities. The majority of the remaining speakers are from IBM and to a lesser extent Sun. There’s a small Microsoft presence among the speakers – primarily related to Software Factories. It’s interesting, however, that three of the six of the invited speakers this year are from Microsoft.