Thursday, May 2, 2002

Interactive Design Workshops in July and October

I have two unique workshops to announce:
- "Policy-Based Design and Patterns" with Bruce Eckel, July 18-19.
- "Policy-Based Design" with Andrei Alexandrescu, October 31.
Both are immersive, hands-on, and of limited enrollment. Details follow.

"Policy-based design" (PBD) is the term Andrei Alexandrescu uses to
describe the approach to systems building he describes in his book, "Modern
C++ Design." I've been intrigued by Andrei's ideas since before he
published them, as I was lucky enough to read several pre-pub drafts of his
manuscript.


JULY 18-19 WORKSHOP WITH BRUCE ECKEL

Within the C++ community, most attention has focused on Andrei's unique
implementation techniques (e.g., template templates) and their remarkable
ability to reduce compilers to rubble. I believe that Andrei's approach is
more general than the language in which it is implemented, however. I
believe it is a general approach to OOA and OOD, and that it can be
profitably applied to any OO language.

With that in mind, I approached my colleage and friend, Bruce Eckel (see
below for information on Bruce, if you are not already familiar with him),
and proposed that we jointly host a workshop on language-agnostic PBD. The
general idea is to get a bunch of software developers in a room, describe
PBD, then work through a series of real problems in small groups, applying
PBD to each of them, ultimately having participants develop an
implementation in whatever OO language they like. Unlike lectures and
seminars where the speakers speak and the attendees listen, this will be a
highly interactive event. This is not about listening to a description of
PBD and seeing how it is done, this is about doing PBD yourself, about
experiencing its strengths and weaknesses firsthand, about learning how to
map it to the implementation language of your choice.

It's also about discussing the relationship between PBD and patterns. One
of Andrei's original goals in developing PBD was to make it possible to use
C++ templates to generate implementations of GOF patterns, and his book
shows how to do that. But is it possible that PBD is itself a pattern?
Bruce leans towards the idea that it is. I'm a bit more conservative, but
there are clear relationships between PBD and the GOF's Strategy, Template
Method, and Abstract Factory patterns. One of the goals of the workshop
will be to ferret out how PBD and patterns relate, possibly concluding with
a PBD-as-pattern write-up. Who knows, participating in the workshop may
put you in on the ground floor of the identification of an important new
pattern.

Bruce and I are still working out the details of this workshop, but we know
this much: it'll be July 18-19 in Crested Butte, Colorado, and enrollment
will be limited to 30 people. For more information, take a gander at
http://www.mindview.net/Seminars/PolicyPattern/.

Here's some brief background on Bruce: Author of Thinking in C++, author of
Thinking in Java, author of Thinking in Python (available, but under
development), author of Thinking in Patterns (also under development). All
his books are freely downloadable; he has been a pioneer in electronic
publishing, too. For more on Bruce, visit his web site:
http://www.mindview.net/.


OCTOBER 31 WORKSHOP WITH ANDREI ALEXANDRESCU

But as a reader of this newsletter, there's a decent chance your primary
interest in Andrei's work is in applying it in all its templatized glory in
C++. Sure, reading Andrei's book and articles in CUJ is interesting, but
how do you go about taking the ideas behind PBD and actually putting them
into practice on real projects? I suggest you ask Andrei. Better yet,
watch Andrei. Better still, DO IT WITH ANDREI. Oh, I'll be there, too. I
like to think I know a thing or two about PBD, and by the time I'm done
with the seminar in July with Bruce, I know I will.

The workshop that Andrei and I will be hosting will be similar to the one
I'm doing with Bruce, but with two important differences. First, it's only
one day long. Second, it's for hard-core C++ developers. Namby-pamby
programmers in Java, C#, Python, etc., should attend the July workshop
unless they're prepared to jump feet-first into a thicket of angle
brackets. Like the seminar I'm doing with Bruce, this one will be based on
immersive, interactive problem-solving that results in real code. It's not
about us lecturing and you listening. It's about all of us working
together (sometimes in small groups) to take interesting high-level
problems, break them down via PBD, then implement them using your favorite
C++ compiler.

The workshop will have limited enrollment, probably around 25. (Andrei and
I haven't yet worked out the details.) Furthermore, we'll be running it as
an optional fourth day add-on for attendees of the next "THE C++ Seminar,"
(TCS3) which will be held near Portland, Oregon, on October 28-30. (It
will actually be held in Vancouver, Washington.) If you're interested,
pencil those dates in (October 28-31). Registration for this workshop
won't open until registration for TCS3 does, and that won't happen until
about July 15.

To be the first on your block to know when registration is available,
subscribe to the TCS mailing list
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cpp_seminar/). The opening of registration
will be announced there first, always a few days before it's announced to
my mailing list, Herb's mailing list, Steve's mailing list, etc.

I hope to see you in Crested Butte in July, in Vancouver in October, or
both!

Scott