Pattie Maes gave a keynote talk at OOPSLA last week and she summarized a few of the cool projects going on in the Ambient Intelligence Group at MIT. The Relational Pillow (aka Pillow Talk) is so incredibly cute that I couldn't help but write about it. Imagine being far away from your significant [...] Read More…
I ran across a poster at OOPSLA about PARSEWeb, a tool that can provide software developers with documentation about how to construct the objects they need given examples of open source code available on the web. The central idea of this tool is that developers know the types of objects that they need to [...] Read More…
A lot of OOPSLA this year focused on metaphors of software development. Peter Turchi spoke of the creative process in terms of cartography, Mark Bernstein offered an idealized vision of software development as craft, and Frederick P. Brooks revisited the age-old comparison of software development and physical engineering disciplines. Read More…
One thing that has been sub-optimal about this week is the nasty coffee. The OOPSLA "coffee breaks" really should be called "mop water breaks." It's such awful stuff. Actually, it doesn't even taste like weak coffee. It might really be hot mop water. I didn't expect it to be good, [...] Read More…
I attended a practitioner's report yesterday that described experiences in integrating a number of static analysis tools into eBay's development process. In essence, it was a short presentation of the paper, "Understanding the Value of Program Analysis Tools." The valuation methodology was simple: did the cost of the tools find enough defects to [...] Read More…
Kathy Sierra's keynote, Creating Passionate Users, was really great yesterday. She's an extremely talented speaker and has an intimate understanding of what it takes to get people interested and listening. More technology presentations should be so exciting. In addition, more technical tutorial books should be like Sierra's Head First series. Read More…
Although Peter Turchi's keynote, Once Upon a Time, Like Never Before, wasn't directly related to developing software, it was a reminder that creation shares many commonalities across disciplines. He has a lovely looking book, Maps of the Imagination, that offers a geographical metaphor to explain the creative process. He explained how seeking out [...] Read More…
I'm running a small, very informal (read: mostly unscientific) survey for a school project. The goal is to collect a bit of information about what artifacts you use to guide your implementations when writing code and how you discover those artifacts. If you're a software developer and I haven't already sent you an [...] Read More…
I monitored a tutorial yesterday titled, "Java Concurrency Utilities in Practice", which was really a compressed version of the fine book, Java Concurrency in Practice. Since I've only picked at bits and pieces of the book and haven't applied a lot of it, the tutorial was actually a good review for me. The [...] Read More…
After staying up unnecessarily late this past weekend, I had to be at the le palais des congrès bright and early at 7am on Sunday for an OOPSLA volunteer meeting. I was super exhausted and I found a spot to curl up in for a quick nap before I had to go work the [...] Read More…