JAOO 2006 is almost over..

My favourite conference is (almost) over. The tenth edition of the JAOO conference has passed by. It was once again an unbelievable cool week. There were really interesting talks about topics you'll hardly hear anywhere else: compile-time meta programming, the history of scheme, new abstractions and concepts for dealing with concurrency, and, of course, more "everyday" topics such as SOA or Web Development. However, it wasn't just the topics that were great. There was a whole bunch of speakers that you'll hardly see anywhere else, among them Guy Steele, Dave Thomas, Charles Simonyi or Bertrand Meyer (yes, he did talk about Eiffel :-)). All these things make JAOO already worth going to.

But that's not all. The organization is superb. You might consider this a detail, but throughout the conference, there was an unlimited supply of bottled water. This is essential, I think, if you want to stay awake over the day. And then there was the food. As usual, Chilli John took care of feeding and man, was this food great. Every afternoon there was a lunch with different salads, meat, fish etc. Really gret stuff. But the speakers dinner was even better, I think I never ate this good in my life! I think this really does distinguish JAOO from several other, especially US conferences.

From my personal perspective, the conference was a big success, too. My talks were well attended, and the DSL track as a whole (which I organized) got pretty good feedback. The talks were about compile-time meta programming (Laurence Tratt), Microsoft's DSL tools (which are pretty neat!), Intentional Software (by Charles Simonyi himself!), as well as some thoughts by Eric Evans on how DSLs go together with DDD. There was also a talk by Obie Fernandez on DSLs in Ruby (it was not in my track, technically, but who cares :-)).

So, next year, consider going to JAOO! Most everybody will agree that this is in many respects the best conference they have ever been to.  permalink