Plopping, first day
PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) conference is really a weird one. We were already shocked by the paper ‘admission’ and paper review process and, the conference itself has started in the same weird/unusual way.
It’s nice to see a core of veteran people to meet each other so touched. It’s a family that joins once a year since 1994 and most of them are old workmates of the old smaltalker times. All the organization was all but formal what i really like. They also made us to play some games in order to break communication walls. Also the main purpose of the conference itself it is a major novelty for us. It is not about presenting your work and know what others are doing but about helping authors to improve our work by discussing the papers we submitted.
We have meet some big names on the Software Engineering field. We sitted just beside Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki among other things. We also meet Ralph Johnson, one of the GoF, which is the moderator of our discussion group.
About the discussion itself, we discussed two interesting papers. One about the Value Object pattern, that highlighted some insightfull consequences i even never had thought about. The other was really interesting and funny to read because it explained some patterns to have a successfull ‘standup meeting’ and some ‘bad smells’ to dectect when things are not working properly. It was very funny because it highlighted meeting situations we all have experienced and the solutions he proposed were very clever and pleasant to read.