In March I attended the annual UKUUG Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference, this year held in Leeds.
As is usual for this conference UKUUG also ran a tutorial workshop on the day before the conference proper. This year the workshop was on Haskell given by Edwin Brady from the University of St Andrews School of Computer Science.
Given that the conference is for systems administrators the intent of the workshop was to present Haskell as another tool to be considered for practical problem solving. This was more or less achieved in that by the end of the workshop we were working though a standard sort of problem involving parsing a text file containing stats about players of Go. Exactly the sort of problem where one, if of the perlish persuasion one instinctively reaches for while(<>) { chomp; split; /* ... */ }
What was most gratifying, however, was the rather different approach taken by the tutor. Presumably this approach represents the idiomatic approach anyone sufficiently skilled in the art of Haskell would take. Naturally much of the early material was about Haskell basics. I’ll not say more about the workshop since I think other members of Sysdev will write in more detail about the content. Suffice it to say I found the workshop most stimulating; there was substantive material presented at a decent pace by a clearly knowledgeable speaker. I shall almost certainly be picking up on Haskell in the future, if not as part of my job then as hobby time activity. The language has a great appeal to my base mathematical instincts.
The conference itself was split into two parallel tracks and even after careful consideration of the programme and track-switching between talks one is never able to shake the feeling that sometimes one simply plumps for the “wrong” talk :-)
I’m not sure it would be especially profitable for me to tediously enumerate the talks that I attended nor indeed to comment where there is nothing to say. Suffice it to say that sometimes one gets more out of a talk for which one had minimal expectations and sometimes one is bitterly disappointed by a talk for which one had high expectations. Fortunately there were far more pleasant than unpleasant surprises.
Personally I found I derived most benefit from attending the conference not from direct knowledge transfer via the talks (the workshop being a notable exception) but more from generally hanging out with like-minded people and absorbing a sense of what’s “going on” out there at other institutions of all flavours be they academic, commercial, charitable, government etc. It is not uncommon to be surprised at just how similar are the issues that everyone faces and how each approach resolution.
Thus, quite how it happened I’m sure I don’t know, after the conference dinner I found myself at a bar in the centre of Leeds in the wee small hours with a diverse (though as it turns out all, at least tangentially, related) group of people profitably discussing amongst other things, AFS tuning, Kerberos, authentication and authorisation in general, system and service monitoring, intrusion detection, support staff outreach, etc. This and the conference only half way through.
I can only thank the UKUUG for putting on another value-for-money Spring Conference and to thank OUCS for allowing me to attend.