Ivan

PoMoPro - the first international conference on postmodern programming

I ran a conference a couple of weekends ago - PoMoPro - the first international conference on postmodern programming. When I say "ran", what I mean is hired Andy Moorley to do the vast majority of the work. Nevertheless, it's still taken enough of my copious spare time to keep me from blogging or doing anything else work-related outside of work time. James Noble and Robert Biddle gave the keynote and Nat Pryce and I ran scrapheap challenge.

Postmodern programming

Lots of software is already written and can solve your problems, if you can only get it to do what you need. Postmodern programming is about using code that already exists, and not writing much code yourself. This is usually in the form of gluing together or configuring other people's code. This is the reality of "enterprise" software today. Postmodern programmers recognise this fact and work with it rather than pretend that it isn't the case and come up with, for example, a programming language or paradigm that would solve all programming problems once and for all if only everybody does everything properly - that way - the one true way. There is no "one true way".

The conference

The aim of the conference is for attendees to learn stuff that they can really use. There will be more hands on programming than most conferences. It's neither academic nor vendor specific. It's not language or technology specific. The keynote speech will be entertaining and thought provoking. The workshop will involve real work and learning.

How it went

From my point of view, I really enjoyed it. James Noble and Robert Biddle were entertaining and thought provoking as expected. The challenges seemed to be the right level of difficulty. For each challenge about half the participants got an acceptable solution. I think the participants enjoyed it and learnt something - at least that's what many said :-)

Other observations

I noticed more participants than in previous scrapheap challenges not really answering the challenge question - doing interesting stuff, but not what Nat and I asked for. Maybe it was because the number of participants was larger than previously, so there was less time per participant from me and Nat to explain what we wanted once the challenge had started.

I had the impression that pairs who split the work between them and then tried to integrate what they had done didn't do any better, and in many cases worse, than those pairs who worked on one laptop and didn't try to divide the work up between them. I also thought that those who split the work up weren't having as much fun. Comments from attendees are most welcome - these are quite subjective "observations".

Future scrapheap challenges

Nat and I are running scrapheap challenge again at SPA. I don't know when, or if, the second international conference on postmodern programming will be held.