I attended the first international conference on postmodern programming in London a couple of weeks ago.
I was going to Hamburg and London for the XP Day conferences right before and after the weekend, anyway staying in London over the weekend so it was a nice coincidence to hear about the PoMoPro conference taking place.
Due to coming directly from Hamburg, I arrived late but managed to catch some of James Noble's and Robert Biddle's keynote titled "Notes on notes on post-modern programming". I have to say they're a pretty theatrical duo.
After the keynote, the rest of the conference program was a series of three Scrapheap Challenges but for software geeks. In short, the idea of a Scrapheap Challenge is for competing teams (programming pairs in our case) to develop a good enough solution as fast as possible to a given problem. I'll briefly describe the three challenges we were given at the PoMoPro:
Code Sloppiness Analysis
The first challenge was to develop a program that analyses the contents of a given Subversion repository and produces a report of the code base's sloppiness over time.
Online Horoscope Aggregator
The second challenge was to develop a sort of an aggregator for online horoscopes. The software was supposed to produce a single "good day vs. bad day" analysis based on multiple online sources for a daily horoscope.
Top Trumps Card Generator
The third and final challenge was to generate a deck of Top Trumps cards for the list of conference participants with the card content derived somehow from the participants' names. Hilarious fun. Oh, the cards were of course supposed to include a picture of the participant so many pairs ended up pulling the first hit for a given name from Google's image search. You might want to check out what's the first hit for pretty much anyone named "Andrew"...
It was a lot of fun and I got a chance to program in Ruby all day, which is always nice. Even though I was severely sleep-deprivated (and we really had to hunt for our lunch in the Covent Garden area with Michael Feathers, Emmanuel Gaillot, Willem van den Ende and someone whose name I unfortunately forgot already) my energy level stayed in the roof throughout the day.
What an excellent workshop! Big thanks to Nat and Ivan for organizing it.