We had our first SPA Cambridge pub trip last night and I think it’s fair to say we had a quality rather than a quantity turnout

Aside from being a chance to sample the Fort St. George’s beer offerings and update each other on what we were up to we did do some work on future sessions for SPA Cambridge and had some general discussion on software. We’ve invited a number of people to speak over the next few months but here we were looking a bit longer term and thinking a bit more creatively - possibly because of the surroundings.

Subjects that came up included:

• Program verification - probably too heavy a topic for SPA
• Robot Lawnmowers - one of the group has acquired such a device and was keen to (have a) talk about it. Sadly these things are not programmable which severely limits their desirability in my view.
• Embedded systems development - a session on this for non-embedded developers or conversely a session on non-embedded development for embedded developers
• Microsoft research - some sort of overview of the activities at MS Research in Cambridge, or some specific piece of research e.g. something on F#

Here is a flavour of the general software topics that were discussed:

• Why does government keep planning massive IT projects that seem doomed to failure. Is it because of the need to be seen to be doing something? To generate headlines?
• What is an enterprise architecture? Is it sensible to have a single such architecture for a federated organisation where each sub-organisation does things differently?
• In the US, companies seem to hire-in contract process improvement specialists but the trend in the UK is to employ them directly. Why should this be the case?

The next SPA Cambridge meeting will be on Wednesday September 13th. Eoin Woods will run a session entitled The Past, Present and Future of Software Architecture. Visit the SPA Cambridge website for more details and to preregister.