Yesterday saw me spending a day behind the scenes helping set up for the SPA 2007 conference.

Andy Moorley, who looks after the event administration, runs the operation with military precision and has an impressive number of checklists to support him in this task. After unloading the van and opening all the boxes Andy, Louisa, Pete and I started the (lengthy) job of filling the delegate packs.

After this, while Louisa dealt with assembling the shared conference folders, Pete and I assembled the conference ‘Wall’. This is the place for random stuff left by participants and it consists of a large sticky surface to which various bits of paper, card, elastic bands etc. can be stuck. (Photo to follow).

Then we set up the various rooms and had a tour of the site. SPA 2007 is on a larger scale than Code Generation 2007 - the conference I’m organising with Andy’s help in May at the same venue Homerton College, Cambridge - and takes in pretty much every building at the college.

Later we met up for dinner with Giovanni Asproni at CB2 in Cambridge. The food here’s usually pretty good and we spent a couple of hours dissecting (and solving ;-)) the software industry’s problems - as one does at these types of event.