One of the best ways to procrastinate if one has to study for a coming midterm exam for a Computability & Logic course, is to check Google Reader feeds. More often than not, something interesting pops up. This time, it was a bunch of blog posts by Ed Merks, leader of the Eclipse Modeling Project and the head of the Eclipse Modeling Framework subproject.

In a series of posts, Merks talks about the ongoing (ends tomorrow) Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, that is taking place in Ludwigsburg in Germany. Here are the posts, so far:

• The Members Meeting
• The Symposiums
• [Day 3] (title-less post, actually)

I suppose, he will be posting at least one more account, of the fourth and final day of the Summit.

What really strikes me about these posts is that they offer a great summary of what went on at the conference. For each of the people who gave a talk or a presentation, he recounts their name, what they talked about, a small summary and sometimes a photo (yay for us who cant remember names!). This way he shares with the rest of us a concise view of what went on at the summit, in other words a very good summary.

For a person like me, who is in the critical academic phase of trying to sort out what I want to end up doing in grad school, this information is invaluable! It offers me names of researchers, interesting ideas, areas of interest and -of course- a glimpse of the state of the art. Apart from this, it is really cool to be able to put a face on names that one sees in papers, on projects one stumbles upon on the net, etc.

Well, I made a promise to myself: next time I happen to be in such a gathering (conference, summit, whatever), I’ll keep notes on my laptop, and then post a similar summary! 🙂

PS. He also got me interested in DSLs.