On Smalltalk

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast and it's finally by chance in my part of the country. I don't get to travel much but I've made the time to catch this one. Looks like I'm going to my first ever Smalltalk conference, I'm looking forward to it. The things that have caught my eye so far...

• Any presentations/tutorials from Gemstone on the GLASS architecture, though I've had little time to play with the beta due to juggling too many side projects, I still see it as my future platform after I've pushed Squeak to its limits and buy a few new 64 bit servers that can run it. The limited amount of time I did play with it convinced me of one thing for sure, it's damn fast and is going to be a hell of a platform for Seaside apps.
• Randal Schwartz talk on persistence solutions for Seaside, mostly just to catch one of his talks, he's doing a great job evangelizing Seaside. If you read up the #squeak IRC chat logs, you'll find Randal in there continuously pitching in and helping people out.
• Michael Lucas-Smith's presentation on Web Velocity also catches my eye just to see what they've been up to with Seaside beyond the short screencast on his blog.
• Andres Valloud's talk on Quality Measurements for Hash Functions. Not sure what I'll get from the talk, but this guy's smart and I just have to catch it.
• Gilad Bracha's talk on Tampering with Perfection: From Smalltalk to Newspeak. Though I may never use it, I like language design so I'm very curious to see him speak on improving on Smalltalk, just for the ideas, always good to stretch the mind.
• Colin Putney's talk on Thinly Sliced: Versioning with Monticello 2. I use Monticello daily, have to see where it's headed.

Since I've never been to one of these, I don't really know what to expect, but I'm sure it'll be interesting. See you there!