Last night, we (myself and several people from my company) flew into Portland for the OOPSLA 06 conference.

This is my first OOPSLA conference, and I have to say that there is a lot of information available here. So much so, that Im not really sure where to start. Drinking from the fire hose, if you will.

Today, I took part in the all day DesignFest. This was such a fantastic opportunity to look and hear other people’s thoughts on how to solve a problem. All too often, we come to a solution for a given design and think, you know what, it’s good enough. The particular group that I ended my day with came up with 4 very viable options for the same problem. Very cool!

I am signed up for a few tutorials later in the week, including Domain-Driven Design: Strategic Design and Modeling in Large Projects, Storytelling with FIT, and Agility for Managers, Programmers, and All. I’m looking forward to some of the workshops on Monday and Tuesday. For tomorrow, Im kind of torn between the Creating an Informative Workspace workshop, which is one of the new XP practices launched in the second edition of XP Explained. The practice is to build feedback mechanisms around an agile team that support them in their daily work. The other workshop Im interested in is the workshop on SOA and Web Services Best Practices. The rooms are close enough to each other that I suppose I could sample one and see how it goes.

Anyways, if any of my readers are in Portland this week, drop me a line at matt dot berther at gmail dot com. I’d love to get together and have a beer.