Heading to CodeMash ’08

I’m really looking forward to CodeMash. The slate of speakers and topics looks fantastic; It’s really nice to look at a conference schedule and see a lot of topics that are totally new to me.

One thing I’m curious about is Scala. I’ve been working with a research group lately on a project using Intelligent Agents, and through that was introduced to the idea of Functional Programming. Somehow I missed seeing this in my undergraduate days, though I remember my peers complaining about Scheme in one of the senior-level computer science courses.

Some of the talks on Groovy and Grails seem interesting, too. The Ruby on Rails movement has certainly sparked some innovation in the Web Development community, and I like seeing those ideas cross-ported into the technologies I have more of an affinity for, such as Java and ColdFusion. Having recently built a somewhat painful full-scale Java application, there may be something useful here.

Web 2007 Conference Followup

I made it through another Penn State Web Conference! Each year I threaten to cut back on the number of presentations I’m involved in, but it never seems to happen… and in fact my total commitment increased this year by one Lightning Talk.

The main conference was bookended by two excellent keynotes: Jared Spool from UIE and Kimberly Blessing from PayPal and the Web Standards Project. They both hilighted aspects of the Read/Write Web from the podium — Jared by Photoblogging to Flickr and Kimberly by Podcasting. It’s nice to see people who get it.

I also had the pleasure of taking in an excellent presentation on Day 2 by Dan Frommelt on Universal Design. I’ve got some reading to do.