SPA2008 runs next week and it is one of the highlights in my conference calendar.

I’ll be heading over to the event on Saturday to help with the setting up and to have dinner with the early arrivals.

Sunday I’ll also be helping out with the initial registrations - there’s a couple of tutorials and workshops running that day including an in-depth Introduction to Smalltalk with James Robertson.

Keynotes this year are John Daniels, L Peter Deutsch and Michael Feathers. Mike’s talk Big Ball of Money, Big Ball of Mud: Economics and Legacy Code looks as if it could be closely related to some of the themes of my own session When Good Architecture Goeas Bad (described below).

On Monday I plan to attend two sessions on Domain-Specific Languages. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen of MetaCase will be leading a session on Domain-Specific Modelling for Full Code Generation which I shepherded and Peter Bell will be leading a shorter session on Domain Specific Languages: Design and Evolution. I know both Juha-Pekka and Peter and think they will be presenting some good stuff. (If you miss them at SPA they will also be presenting at our Code Generation 2008 conference in June.)

I’m also planning to run a Birds-of-a-feather session with them on Domain-Specific Development (probably on Monday) and if you are interested in DSLs you should definitely come along and get the benefit of their experience.

On Tuesday I’m planning to attend Ivan Moore’s session on project management (or How to lose friends and alienate people - on becoming a project manager as he puts it.) Ivan went over the the dark-side a few years ago and is loving it so I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say.

My workshop When good architecture goes bad runs on Tuesday afternoon. We’ll be looking at a small number of case studies of good architecture gone bad and will be considering what could have been done about it and the broader question of the value of preventative work to maintain architectural integrity.

Wednesday I’ll probably go along to Keith Braithwaite’s session Automatic for the People — process implications of automated testing before helping in the clean-up process and heading home…

At the time of writing there are still a few places left. If you want to take part in a high-energy learning experience covering the software life cycle then SPA is the place to be. The conference is residential - hence the price tag - but the facilities are excellent and part of the value of attendance comes in the after hours interaction…