ACCU 2009 conference and my keynote

I know many readers of this blog already go to the ACCU conference each year because people at the conference tell me they read this blog. Still there are those who don’t.

The 2009 schedule for the conference and the registration system is now up and running and it is a stronger programme than every - and that’s saying something! I used to be on the programme committee for the conference and every year we used to reject a few submissions. This year I believe there were as many proposals rejected as accepted.

And I am one on the keynote speakers. To be honest, its a little bit daunting to give a keynote at such a strong conference. (Especially when one of the other keynote speakers is a Baroness.)

I’m still putting my ideas together for the talk but I know it will be something along the lines of “Considerations for successful management of software development.” In addition I have a regular session of my own and session with Kevlin Henney in which we intend to involve several other speakers.

The one problem with the ACCU conference is that many people think the ACCU is the Association of C and C++ Users and its NOT. It was once upon a time but hasn’t been for some years. ACCU has followed the examples of BP (once British Petroleum), BT (once British Telecom) and others and kept the letters and dropped the meaning.

Yes there is C and C++ on the programme but there is also Objective-C, D, Java, C#, AJAX, Python, SOA, Erlang, Agile, Lean and lots more. In fact last year there was less C++ on the schedule than functional languages (F#, Erlang, Haskell and Lisp) - I haven’t done the analysis for this year yet.