Post EuroPLoP

I was at EuroPLoP in Bavaria most of last week. I returned mentally fired up with lots of ideas and new thoughts but physically shattered - too many late nights and beer. That makes it sound unhealthy but EuroPLoP is kind of healthy for me because I go lake swimming and take lots of saunas.

My paper, Patters for Technology Companies was reviewed in a workshop were I got a lot of very positive comments. The main thing is I need to split this one paper into two, one with the pattern theory and one patterns. I knew I should do this before hand but for some reason I didn’t....

I’ve been thinking that this would draw a line under my business patterns but right now I’m not sure. Part of me feels I’ve taken it about as far as I can, other people need to continue the work but there are still a couple of loose ends, a few requests for more patterns and theory from the workshop. Then this morning I spotted another pattern in the FT....

I also ran a focus group at EuroPLoP on the “Social Economic forces effecting software architecture”. This was a follow up to Conway’s Law group I ran last year - also with Lise Hvatum. This group wasn’t as deep as the previous one but I still got some insights and I’ll write them up before too long.

Finally at EuroPLoP I did face-to-face, one-on-one shepherding for a paper. This is the best type of shepherding. Practicalities mean that most shepherding is done over e-mail but when you get to do it face-to-face it is great. Its also were I see the greatest similarities to business coaching. Trouble is, you just don’t have enough time.

I had some really great conversations at EuroPLoP too. Particularly with James Noble (who an interesting take on Extreme Programming and problems with customer role, and his theories on PostModern Programing.).

The big surprise at the conference was the news from Indian. Some people from the patterns community have been out there and have been talking to Indian academics and practitioners about creating an Indian patterns conference. It seems likely that this will happen next year. To start with it won’t be a PLoP conference because a) it sounds like there are too many people and b) we first need to seed pattern writing.

That, in a nutshell, was EuroPLoP. Already I can’t wait till next year!