ACCU Conference News

So the ACCU 2018 call for session proposals ended 2017-11-17T23:59+00:00 exactly as anticipated. The committee then went through all the proposals and scored them and, if appropriate, added a comment or two. Also a number of irritants and glitches with the system were noted and added as issues to the source repository^[1].

The committee met, some physically, some via video call, a couple of people had to send their apologies for absence, in Reading Saturday 2017-12-02 to review the situation, and make decisions. Some of the decisions were very hard to make since we had many more excellent session proposals than we have space for in the conference schedule.

It is now necessary to transfer the decisions made into data in the database, make all the consistency and correctness checks, and then we can begin the process of informing people of the results, and doing the sub-editing on scheduled proposals so the session data can be published. Despite the improvements made to the system compared to last year, this remains a non-trivial activity. The question is whether things are ready to send out notifications of acceptance before the Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hogmanay, New Year holiday period. Just at the moment it is not possible to tell.

Archer Yates Associates, who are the people who collaborate with ACCU to put on ACCU conferences, have opened up registration for ACCU 2018. Thus are people able to get tickets for ACCU 2018 as Winter Solstice / Christmas / whatever-your-end-of-calendar-year-holiday-is-labelled presents for themselves and/or others.

True, the schedule is yet to be decided, but we do know Gen Ashley, Hadi Hariri, Seb Rose, and Lisa Lippincott will be presenting keynotes. We also know there will be full day pre-conference tutorials, and lots of great sessions. And social stuff.

Buy now, enjoy later. Register here.

We are very pleased to be able to announce that the keynote speakers for ACCU 2018 will be: Gen Ashley, Hadi Hariri, Seb Rose, and Lisa Lippincott. We’re collecting titles, blurbs, and bios and will have a webpage with the details very soon now.

A number of people at ACCU 2017 suggested that it would have been much better to have had the Conference Dinner on the Thursday and the Bloomberg Party on the Friday, instead of the other way around. The ACCU Conference Committee couldn’t see any reason why not try doing this as an experiment. However, we have no idea how many people prefer the way it is as we had no feedback that it was right the way it was. We are currently organising with the new format, unless enough people think it is a bad idea. You know who to email if you have a view.

The previous post was to let people know about the mechanics of session proposals and their submission. It did not though set out the scope of ACCU conference content – hence this post.

ACCU the organisation (https://accu.org) is a membership organisation of software developers, software engineers, programmers, coders, choose your preferred label for someone that creates software. The members are interested in programming, programming languages, testing, the tools of developing software, the process of developing software, and all related things. The tag line for the organisation is Professionalism in Programming. ACCU produces two journals, CVu and Overload, published every other month.

ACCU the conference is put on by ACCU the organisation, but is open to anyone who wishes to attend, not just members of the organisation. Obviously ACCU the organisation hopes that anyone not a member that attends ACCU the conference joins ACCU the organisation – and there is a stand at the conference for people to do exactly that.

So for content, ACCU the conference is looking for any material that is interesting to people who create software. Historically, ACCU has a lot of C++ and C content, and is proud of that: ACCU is the foremost annual conference for people interested in C++ and C, at least in and around the UK. But it is not just a C++ and C conference, ACCU is about programming in whatever language people are using, with whatever tools and processes people are using: D, Chapel, Java, Kotlin, C#, F#, Groovy, Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, Lisp, to name just a few programming languages about which there have been sessions at ACCU conferences.

The call for session proposals opens tomorrow, if you have an idea for a session do submit it. If you want to chat an idea over with someone before submitting, please email the conference chair conference@accu.org