Thursday, November 8, 2012

Going to a conference …

You never know who you're going to meet when you go to a conference. My colleague Peter Rodgers works on information display using Euler diagrams - intelligent Venn diagrams, if you like - and conferences often remind me of this. Contacts and colleagues inhabit overlapping circles (or ellipses?), and today was no exception. I talked to people at the Erlang Factory in London whose overlap is

  • Haskell: enthusiasts who have also come to an Erlang meeting;
  • Student placements: from a company who used to take placement students from Kent;
  • Research: can we do some work together? can they provide a case study?
  • Intern: Purdue engineering student visiting the UK as an intern;
  • Colleagues: Roberto Aloi, who worked on the E-learning KTP and now is working on the RELEASE project, and Francesco, co-author …
  • Friends: I've been around the functional programming community for a while
While we can maintain existing relationships online, there's nothing yet to replace meeting someone face to face, though it may well happen, through global warming if nothing else.

No comments:

Post a Comment