Calendar

Author sightings, partner events, and other notable happenings.

Open and Clojure

May I, your humble editor, draw your attention to a couple of upcoming conferences?

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First, O’Reilly’s big open source bash, OSCON. Mostly because I will be there, rubbing elbows and bending them in my painstaking research into open source technology and Oregon craft beers.

To me, OSCON is proof that the concept of the big technology conference is not dead in the head. It would be easy to conclude otherwise. Regional conferences and online gatherings have sucked up a lot of the milkshake of the big shindigs. A lot of those big conferences have in fact gone away, and some of those that survive don’t seem very lively. Not mentioning any names. But OSCON always has a solid lineup of speakers who have something relevant to say, and the attendees always seem savvy to me. Maybe it’s because it’s an open source conference.

And Portland is a great town for a conference. It’s a town of neighborhoods. You can visit it for a couple of days and feel a sense of ownership, even though—or because—you’ve spent all your time in and around Powell’s World of Books in the Pearl district or hanging out on Alberta Street. And of course it’s the home to more excellent craft beers than anyplace else on the planet. I speak as a proud Oregonian since 1999.

Second, Clojure/conj. This November 10–12 Raleigh, NC, event falls outside the three-month window of our events calendar, but well inside our issue theme. Rich Hickey will be speaking. Michael Focus. Stuart Halloway. Chris Houser. Aaron Bedra. Do I really have to say more, if you’re into Clojure?

The fun actually starts on November 7 with classes taught by members of clojure/core and runs on through the conference. Class topics include: Functional programming, Lisp syntax, The sequence library, Concurrency, Java interop, Multimethods, Macros, OO Revisited, and The Clojure ecosystem.. Details of the conference will emerge on the website as the date grows closer.

Author Appearances

Who’s where, and what for.

O’Reilly Events

Upcoming events from our friends at O’Reilly.

  • July 12, Strata, online
    O’Reilly Strata Online Conference: “In this Strata OLC, we’ll look at the rapidly growing field of personal analytics. We’ll discuss tool stacks for recording lives, and hear surprising stories about what happens when introspection meets technology.”
  • July 25–29, OSCON, Portland, OR
    O’Reilly Open Source Convention: “Join today’s open source innovators, builders, and pioneers as they gather at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, to share their expertise and experience, explore new ideas, and inspire each other.”
  • July 30–31, Maker Faire Detrtoit, Dearborn, MI
    Maker Faire Detroit: “Our mission at Maker Media, a division of O’Reilly Media and home to MAKE Magazine, Maker Faire and the host of other inspirational and instructional Maker Media brands, is to unite, inspire, inform, and entertain a growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. We call these people ‘Makers.’”
  • Sept 17–18, World Maker Faire, New York, NY
    World Maker Faire
  • Sept 22–23, Strata NY, New York, NY
    O’Reilly Strata Conference: Making data work: “With hardcore technical sessions on parallel computing, machine learning, and interactive visualizations; case studies from finance, media, healthcare, and technology; and provocative reports from the leading edge, Strata Conference showcases the people, tools, and technologies that make data work.”

USENIX Events

What’s coming from our USENIX friends.

  • July 11–12, APSys 2011, Shanghai, China
    The 2nd ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems “will be a forum for systems researchers and practitioners across the world to present their work in computer systems (broadly defined) and for locals in Asian/Pacific region to meet, interact, and collaborate with top researchers in the field.”
  • Aug 8–12, USENIX Security ’11, San Francisco, CA
    The 20th USENIX Security Symposium. “USENIX Security ’11 brings together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks.” Not to mention a bunch of collocated conferences: 2011 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections, 4th Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test, USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet, 5th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies, 2nd USENIX Workshop on Health Security and Privacy, 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, and Sixth Workshop on Security Metrics.

Welcome to Your Next Decade, Pioneer

  • July 9
    Browser pioneer Marc Andreessen enters his 40s.
  • July 16
    VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin enters his 60s.
  • Aug 9
    Alfred Aho, co-creator of AWK language, enters his 70s.
  • Aug 10
    Jan Rajchman, inventor of the Selectron tube memory, would have turned 100 today.
  • Aug 11
    WWII British computer pioneer Tom Kilburn would have turned 90 today.
  • Aug 12
    The IBM PC was released 30 years ago today.
  • Sept 9
    C creator Dennis Ritchie enters his 70s.