Yesterday was the first official day of this year’s SPA conference.

08:45 saw me arrive at Homerton College to continue helping with the conference set up - a rather early start for me, particularly given the advance of the hour last night.

Andy’s check lists came to the fore again but by 10:30 we’d done most of the set-up and had processed our first delegate - me. A steady trickle of people dropped by to register and by 13:00 we’d probably processed around 70 participants. Most of these were headed for the afternoon’s workshops which traditionally start the conference.

This was also an opportunity to meet Marina Haase in person. I shepherded Marina’s ‘Creativity in Practice’ session for this year’s conference - a first-time experience for both of us - and consequently have been in touch with Marina for the past few months guiding her through the SPA conference quality control process and helping her pitch her session for the SPA audience.

Throughout the day a few people spoke to me about the Code Generation 2007 event I am organising. However, enthusiasts for model-driven methods are a little thin on the ground at SPA 2007 although many people use code generation to some extent.

A frequent concern was that several of them had grown sceptical due to hype in this space in the past. However, my own impression is that Code Generation tools and technologies have matured significantly in the past two or three years and as you can see from the CG2007 event programme most of the sessions are led by people who have applied the technology successfuly for real benefit.

Predictions are dangerous but from my own perspective we’re on the verge of of something significant in this area. Microsoft’s work with Domain-Specific Languages has raised the profile of this area - although Metacase have been working in the area for much longer - and I get the impression that there is a real buzz growing around some of the open source tools such as openArchitectureWare.

A quiet afternoon at the computer saw me making the finishing touches* to my ‘Scoping Game’ session which will run on Wednesday and chatting with Peter Marks about the state of play w.r.t. code generation tools and technologies - Peter and David Harvey had run a workshop on Intentional Programming at SPA 2005 which I enjoyed immensely.

The evening began with dinner and drinks courtesy of Google. Apparently they have a big recruitment drive at the moment going on all across Europe and see SPA as fertile ground. Homerton had laid on a hog roast, which had been cooking most of the day, and apparently this was pretty good - although I stuck to the veggie chilli and chocolate crepes.

I spent the evening chatting variously about:

• Why a one-man VB project in Excel was significantly more productive than a team of 35 C programmers and several orders of magnitude cheaper.
• How people had migrated to Software Engineering from Classics, Music and Physics.
• and of course, why Lisp (and Smalltalk) are languages of choice

Although I headed for bed early the discussions went on into the small hours so there were a few sleepy heads for Day 2…

* I will be making more finishing touches on the session tomorrow.