Brief Impressions From OOPSLA (Part 2)
Posted by Skrud at Friday, October 26th 2007 at 6:51pm
Following the Fred Brooks keynote speech, I went to the coffee break room to caffeinate before going to the Kathy Sierra presentation. I was minding my own business, sipping some coffee, reading my RSS feeds, chatting with some friends from UVic; until they walked off to go their presentations. I noticed out of the corner of my eye two old guys putting their jackers on the chairs around my table and sitting down. Looking up, I was faced with Fred Brooks and David Parnas. Wow!. These two guys practically created software engineering as we know it. What do you say to them?
I told Dr. Parnas about the time I saw him speak at CUSEC 2004: That one presentation was an extremely influential moment of my life. I remember he was talking about the importance of software quality, and how it needs to be engineered as oppose to hacked together by a rogue band of coders. Most importantly, I remember looking up at Dr. Parnas giving that speech and thinking “that’s what I want to do”. As soon as I got back to school following that conference, I applied to transfer my major from Computer Science to Software Engineering. I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, and I thanked Dr. Parnas for that.
David Parnas replied to me: “Thanks for that! That actually just made my day.” And Fred Brooks added: “As well it should!”
And I got a picture with both of them.
