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Thanks to all of the organisers at the ACCU 2013 and to the people I met at the conference in Bristol. I only spent two days over in the West Country, and they were very enjoyable. Actually, I found the Marriott Bristol City Hotel as a great location, as it was nice to walk [at night] to the restaurants and see more the sites. There is also the river and a small park area opposite the hotel, where one can grab some fresh air. Of course, Bristol is much further away from London than Oxford is and WIFI in an individual hotel room, for a speaker is not free.

The biggest benefit I have from ACCU this year is talking to people about Agile, the industry, the prospects of software development and getting a uniquely British perspective on where we all could be going in the year. I was surprised by the interest of ACCU conference goers into the functional programming movement. Lots of the attendee are well informed about C++ initiatives of Lambdas  in the next upcoming standard. The ACCU audience tends to be knowledgeable about the lower levels of abstraction, which are most of time closer to the metal [the hardware]. A few delegate will definitely written assembler code from the ground up once upon time.

I also have to mention the Bloomberg Game Zone; I had great fun playing Defender, Galaga and Donkey Kong. After 25 years, it was embarrassing to see how bad I have become with Defender, especially. When I was fourteen or so, I spent my youth and multitudes of ten piece coins “getting good”, the planet exploded many times, regularly I clocked over 100,000 points per game, kill scores of Mutants and Baiters. Now I was paltry, I struggled to get over 20,000 points.  Hot Tip: Mr. John Lakos please bring over Mr. Do, Gorf and PacMan arcade consoles to 2014.

Find the slide-deck to my talk on Wednesday 10th April, here:

I must come back to ACCU and do it special on intermediate Scala and Play Framework, something that stretches way beyond the beginner and introduction. We will see in 2014 and beyond.

Special shout-out, in no particular order: Astrid Byro, Phil Nash, Ewan Milne, Brian Marick, Martin Waplington, Schalke Cronje, Russel Winder, Roger Orr, Kevlin Henney, Michel Grootjans, Steve Love, Frances Buontempo, Detlef Vollman, Beth McKenzie, Ann-Jayne Metcalfe, James Slaughter,  Jon Jagger and Kjersti Sendeberg; and finally Julie Archer and Belinda Wiacek.

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