Back from the OOP 2010

This year’s OOP conference in Munich has been a lot of fun. I met Markus Völter, Stefan Tilkov, Floyd Marinescu, Jan Bosch, Eric Evans, Philippe Kruchten, Roman Pichler, Peter Hruschka, Kersten Auel, Rene Schönfeldt,  Klaus Rohe, Matthias Bohlen, Gernot Starke, Jutta Eckstein, Nico Josuttis, Gregor Hohpe, Robert C. Martin, Matthias Bohlen, Kevlin Henney and my good ole friend Frank Buschmann. Especially the networking part was overwhelming. So many speakers and participants you can learn from.The talks and keynotes are definitely helpful to hear about new trends, perspectives and experiences. But the personal communication is the essence of such conferences. That’s the reason why I don’t believe in online events. Sure, it’s a nice add-on but it cannot substitute the “human” factor. In the middle of the week we had a meeting of the Siemens Senior Software Architects where I enjoyed meeting some of the aforementioned celebrities but also the smart senior architects within Siemens who do excellent work day by day. They might not be that much in the limelight, but those people are  the real heroes of software engineering among all those “nameless” other heroes such as development heads, team leads, testers or developers. As Jan mentioned: there are two types of architects. Those talking about software architecture and those practicing it. Fortunately, I am a hybrid belonging to both types.

This year’s keynotes  offered excellent quality. I’ll never forget Uncle Bob’s entertaining talk on the polyglot programmer where he dived into the history of programming languages in a very entertaining way. Or two speakers from Zühlke Engineering who presented a great keynote on functional programming. Not to forget Gernot Starke with his talk on software architects and stealing in your neighbor’s garden. Unfortunately, I could not make it to his keynote but from what I heard it was one of the highlights.

Most of the topics presented in talks and tutorials covered the typical topics you’d expect. Cloud Computing and Functional Programming as well as Agility represented the hot topics. What I liked most were all these more practice-oriented talks offering some insights for practioners and also revealing some real life show cases. For instance, I enjoyed Kurt Höpli’s talk on building and controlling environmental sensors in a project in Switzerland. And I also experienced a lot of fun in Markus Völter’s talk on how to apply Model-Driven-Software-Development  within an embedded systems context. Never I will forget how Eric Evans and Hans Dockter presented Domain-Driven-Design convincing some attendees to participate as actors. And I’ll remember also Lothar Mieske who presented the real look-and-feel of all those Cloud Computing platforms. I could add much more but this should give you an impression and suffice as a pars pro toto.

Personally, I have been very busy the week. First, I gave a full-day tutorial on Software Architecture – From Requirements to Architecture. It was the tutorial with the largest numbers of attendees. This makes interaction somewhat difficult but nonetheless worked much better than expected. My talk on Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cloud Computing had about 80-100 attendees. To my pleasure the Global Technology Field Cluster Lead of my organization also attended the talk. For me, it was the biggest surprise that the talk “Introduction to Scala” had attracted so many people. I was totally electrified and I mean this literally cos’ static charge hit me whenever I pressed the page-down key. When people are interested, I will record this talk with Camtasia and publish the video clip in YouTube and other media. All in all, I got really overwhelming feedback. Thank you to all attendees for their nice evaluation sheets :-)

Next year the OOP will celebrate its 20th anniversary. Hope that many of you will join the event. It is really an extraordinary experience.