It’s April once again and that can only
mean one thing – apart from the school holidays and Easter eggs – it’s the ACCU
Conference. This year saw one of the biggest changes to the conference – a new
venue. And not just a new hotel but in a
Once again I didn’t get to partake in one of the tutorial days on the Tuesday which was a shame as they looked excellent as usual. Instead I made my way down on the Wednesday and arrived in the early afternoon. That meant I missed lunch, but also more importantly the keynote from Eben Upton about the Raspberry Pi and a talk from Jonathan Wakely about SFINAE. The comments coming through on Twitter about these, and the other parallel talks, generated much gnashing of teeth as I cursed my late arrival.
Not wanting to take things lightly I dived head-first into Johan Herland’s session about Git. I’ve done a little messing around with Git and have read the older 1st edition O’Reilly book but I wasn’t sure whether I’d really understood it. Luckily Johan walked us slowly through how Git works in theory, and then in practice. I’m glad I saw this as it seems I was on the right track but he explained some things much better than the book. I also got to quiz him in the bar later about how some Subversion concepts might translate to Git, or not as it seems, which was priceless.
Next up, was
Once the main sessions have finished for the
day the floor is opened up to everyone in the guise of Lightning Talks. These
are short 5 minute affairs where anyone can let off steam, share a tip or plug
something (non-commercial). Even though it was only the first evening there was
a full program with talks about such topics as Design Sins (
Although not directly part of the ACCU conference, the Bristol & Bath Scrum Group held an evening event afterwards where James Grenning talked about TDD. Although it had been a long day already I couldn’t resist squeezing one more talk in, especially from someone like this. Being aimed at a wider audience than just developers meant there were an interesting assortment of questions afterwards which was useful. One in particular was the common question of writing the test first versus immediately after which always causes a interesting debate.
A full English breakfast and plenty coffee set me up for the day and I was greeted with my first 2013 keynote, courtesy of Brian Marick. He started with an interesting tangent about crickets and how they tune into a mate and eventually got onto the topic of how to cope with the inevitable natural decay older programmers will suffer from. The thing that has stuck with me most is the advice of converting “goal attainment” to “maintaining invariants”. This he explained by showing how a baseball fielder might try to catch a ball by moving himself so he sees a linear trajectory rather than trying to anticipate a parabolic path. This was one of the most enjoyable keynotes I’ve seen.
I didn’t have much choice in what I went to after Brian as it was might turn to step up to the plate. This was my third year of speaking and I’d like to say I might finally be getting the hang of it. At least, I don’t think anyone fell asleep.
Unbeknownst to me until I checked my Twitter feed afterwards but there was a small bug in the code on one of my slides. This made my next choice easy – The Art of Reviewing Code with Arjan van Leeuwen. There was plenty of sound advice here, particularly around the area of getting started in code reviews where it’s important to make both parties comfortable to avoid a sense of personal attack. As Ajan pointed out, time is often the perceived barrier to doing reviews, but it’s reminded me how valuable it can be.
That was only a short session and the other
45 minutes I spent with
My final session for the day was to be spent with Michel Grootjans. With a title of Ruby and Rails for n00bs I felt that suited my knowledge of Ruby right down to the ground and hoped I would get to see what some of the fuss is about. It actually turned out to be way more useful than I expected because Michel developed a simple web app using a full-on TDD approach too. Not only did I get a small taste for what Ruby and Rails is about but I also saw someone develop a different sort of application using different tools in a more enterprise-y way.
Once more, after the main sessions had completed, most of us convened to the main hall to listen to another round of lightning talks. This time there was a total of 13 topics with an even wider range than the day before. Notably for me, given my attendance at an earlier session on Git, was a rant from Charles Bailey about Git being evil. There were also complaints about poor variable naming (Simon Sebright) and why anyone would use C++ when D exists (Russel Winder, naturally). On the more useful front we saw Dmitry Kandalov implement an Eclipse plug-in in 5 minutes and a C++ technique that seems close to C#’s async/await mechanism (Stig Sandnes). The abusive C++ award though goes to Phil Nash with his <- operator for implementing extension methods. Oh, and Anders Schau Knatten used “Science” to help us decide that C# is in fact the best programming language.
What better start to the day than a keynote from the very person we have to thank for C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup. It’s been some years since he graced the ACCU conference with his presence and so like many I was looking forward to what he had to say about the modern state of C++. His presentation was generally about the new features we now have in C++ 11 as he had a separate session planned for C++ 14. However there was as much about how the established practices (e.g. RAII) are still the dominant force and critical to its effectiveness. Naturally there were plenty of questions and he pulled no punches when airing his opinion on the relationship between C and C++.
With my C++ side ignited I felt it was only right that I attend Nico Josuttis’ talk about move semantics and how that plays with the exception safety guarantee of a function like push_back(). He entered the murkier depths of C++ to show how complex this issue is for those who produce C++ libraries. When someone like Nico says C++ is getting “a little scary” you know you need to pay attention. My “moment of the conference” happened here when, in response to a question for Nico about the std::pair class, Jonathon Wakely instantly rattled off the C++ standard section number to help him find the right page…
We all love writing fresh, new code, but many of us spend our lives wallowing in the source code left to us by others. Cleaning Code by Mike Long was a session that showed you why refactoring is important and what some of the tools and techniques you can use to help in the fight against entropy. This was a very well attended talk and rightly so with a good mix of the theoretical and practical. One tool in particular for finding duplicate code certainly looked sexy and will definitely be getting a spin.
After another round of coffee I decided to
close the day off by listening to the C Vu editor (
The final set of lightning talks took their
cue from the volcano fiasco a few years ago. Back then, due to speaker problems
caused by a lack of air transport, a set of 15 minute lightning keynotes were put
together instead and that’s the length these ones adopted. Seb Rose opened the
proceedings with a response to an earlier lightning talk about whether the term
“passionate” is a useful one for describing the kind of people we want to work
with, given its dictionary definition. Much nodding of heads suggested he was probably
right. He was followed by me trying to show how many of the old texts, such as
the papers by David Parnas, are still largely relevant today. And, more
importantly they’re often cheap. Tom Gilb was next up to answer a question I
had posed in my talk about quantifying robustness. Let’s face it, we knew he
would. Finally Didier Verna got to extend his earlier slot on The
The Friday evening always plays host to The Conference Dinner, which is a sort of banquet where we get to spend a little more time mingling with the various speakers and attendees. This is a perfect opportunity to corner a speaker and ask some questions you didn’t get a chance to earlier. Jon made sure the tables regularly got mixed up to keep the flow of people moving between courses which helps you mix with people you might not normally know. After the dinner there was the Bloomberg Lounge to keep us entertained through the night, if you fancied staying up until silly o’clock.
There was another change to the session structure this year as the Saturday keynote was moved to the end of the day; instead the normal sessions started earlier. Sadly I overdid the conference dinner again and so an early start was never really on the cards.
How to Program Your Way Out of a Paper Bag
seemed like the ideal eventual start to the day.
My final session of the conference was to be with Hubert Matthews - A History of a Cache. This was a case study of some work he been involved in. The session had a wonderful narrative as he started by explaining how the system was originally designed, and then went on to drop the bomb on how he needed to find a huge performance boost with the usual array of “impossible” constraints. Each suggested improvement brought about a small win, but not enough by itself and that’s what made it entertaining. It also goes to show what can be achieved sometimes without going through a rewrite.
I keep expecting the magic of this conference to wear off, but so far it seems to be holding fast. I have looked around at some of the other conferences but I’m just not as impressed by the content or the price for that matter. I thought the new venue worked well and even though it was a little further to travel it wasn’t exactly onerous. More of the talks were filmed this year and so hopefully I should be able to catch up on some of those I missed. With 5 concurrent sessions running in each time slot you’re never going to get to see everything you want to, but that’s just another reason to keep coming back year-after-year – to try and catch up on everything you’ve missed in previous years. Of course in the meantime the world has moved on and there’s another load of new stuff to see and learn!
Chris Oldwood
19 April 2013
Bio
Chris started out as a bedroom coder in the 80s, writing assembler on 8-bit micros. These days it’s C++ and C# on Windows in big plush corporate offices. He is also the commentator for the Godmanchester Gala Day Duck Race and can be contacted via gort@cix.co.uk or @chrisoldwood.