It was a gloriously sunny day in Glasgow today. The Golden Jubilee Hotel overlooks the River Clyde and this was the view at sunrise:
Mist on the River Clyde at dawn
The day began with delegate registration, with Karen and Fiona manning the registration desk throughout the day. To mark Dyalog at 50, Geoff also presented a desk loaded with memorabilia from the last 50 years and earlier – a copy of Iverson’s original book, conference proceedings and papers, vendor documentation, and so on.
Registration
APL at 50 memorabilia
The main part of the day consisted of workshops both morning and afternoon – seven different sessions (one full day and six half day) led by a variety of Dyalog staff and users, covering topics such as core APL skills through to the full lifecycle of commercial applications; from web applications to statistical packages to artificial neural networks.
Roger Hui – Compiler and Performance Features workshop
Adám Brudzewsky – Threading and Synchronisation workshop
Preparations in the run-up to the user meeting
The annual user meeting involves just about all of Team Dyalog. Preparations for this year’s event started as soon as last year’s finished; the venue was confirmed and booked before Christmas. Serious planning of the programme of events started with the workshops around June and the presentations shortly after. This year, of course, we are also working with the BAA to celebrate 50 years of APL;this has been in planning for much of the last year. Last week the whole of Team Dyalog was in the UK putting the finishing touches to presentations and workshops and frantically preparing all the materials.
Preparing the programmes
Boxes to take by car
Behind the scenes
As ever, whilst the presenters are taking centre stage, it is our IT manager Jason who will be working in the background to make sure everyone is seen and heard as they should be. Today some of the workshops were recorded and the main auditorium was set up ready for the main presentations starting tomorrow.
Over the last year Dyalog has invested in new equipment – a new high resolution camera and full professional production kit – in order to make higher quality recordings and to significantly reduce the time it takes to produce the edited recordings for the Dyalog website – indeed, much of the production will now be done live, making it possible to stream live over the internet.
Behind the scenes
Behind the scenes
Staying up to date and getting involved
Throughout the week the Dyalog website will be updated with the latest news. Apart from these daily blog posts it will contain the very latest programme details and presentation materials. We will also be tweeting throughout the week using the hashtag #dyalog16 and encourage everyone tweeting from or about the user meeting to do likewise.
For those that are not in Glasgow we will now be streaming parts of the user meeting live: the contest winners’ presentations, and the APL at 50 events. The live stream can be viewed at dyalog.tv at the following times (BST / UTC+1):
- Monday, 11:00 – 11:30
- Tuesday, 11:45 – 12:15
- Wednesday, 08:30 – 18:00
- Thursday, 09:15 – 12:30
The programme, listing the presentations taking place at those times, is here.
Coming up…
This evening is an informal get-together for all delegates and guests. There will be several “Birds of a Feather” groups in the bar where Dyalog staff will be on-hand and primed to discuss Functional Programming, Native File Functions and Web Applications – it will be a great time to get help or raise issues directly with the Dyalog team.
Tomorrow the presentations begin – opening, as is traditional, with a welcome from Gitte. It will be a very full day, with Dyalog showcasing what’s available now and what’s in the pipeline, and with several Dyalog users set to inspire us with the things they use Dyalog for. Then, after dinner, there’ll be whisky and chocolate tasting. Hopefully, tomorrow’s report will be written before the whisky tasting!
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