OOPSLA 2008 Around the corner.

OOPSLA 2008 The Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications or more commonly referred to OOPSLA, annual conference is right around the corner. Oct 19th through the 23rd in Nashville, TN. I am trying to get my company to pay for me to go, but on such short notice, doubt it will happen, even so, I should be able to get paid time off to attend. This years conference is looking to be a great one. As always they have a ton of workshops and tutorials and the keynotes this year look decent. I am particularly interested in the "Building Service-Oriented Architectures with Web Services" and "Test-Driven Hands On" tutorials. Those fall in to my line of work and I am always interested in seeing how others approach the same problems. As for the keynotes,  Rebecca's "What Drives Design" and Mark Dominus' "Atypical Types" both spark my interest.

Renewing my roots.

I recently renewed my ACCU and ACM memberships after letting them go for a couple years. I feel like I've done myself a disservice by letting these lapse. Both of these organizations provided me with countless hours of information and insight as a younger developer and I attribute their journals and usergroups to helping me become the programmer I am today. These organizations promote growth and learning and both have the goal of making people do what they do better. Easier, smarter, more efficient. I think any programmer who cares about their craft and improving their abilities should seriously look at joining one or both of these organizations. If you're a past member who has let their subscription lapse it might be time to look in to renewing it, it will pay for itself many times over.

• ACM - http://www.acm.org (a Plone site! Yes, seriously)
• ACCU - http://www.accu.org (member count seems thin, but content is still great)

First!

The traditional first post. Should it have content? Should it just say welcome to my blog I plan to only update for the next 2 weeks, then try to revive it after a couple months without an update by doing some posting foo and slamming out 10 updates in 1 week. Then after burning myself out in the revival week, I end up closing the blog after 3 more months without an update and try starting another one. We'll see if this one will be any different.