I continue with the exercise of building a mobl application for this blog.

Today's exercise: build an application in mobl for this blog, which supports offline reading of blog posts. I'll record my progress here.

It was quite the semester. I taught a new course on concepts of programming languages, and a new edition of a course on model-driven software development. I wrote several research proposals (with more to write in the pipeline), and was involved in quite a few new papers. The collaboration with Markus Voelter had a good start with two nice papers. I am program chair of WIR 2011, ICMT 2011, and Onward! 2011 and served on the PCs of LDTA 2011, SLE 2011, OOPSLA 2011, and MODELS 2011. And there was probably a lot more that I have blocked out. When summing it up like this it does not sound too bad, but this was one of the most hectic semesters in my career so far.

To compensate, I'm spending the first two weeks of June in the California Bay Area for a series of language design events. Starting today I'm attending the first meeting of the Working Group on Language Design hosted by Mark S. Miller at Google in Mountainview. We're going to have the in-depth discussions on language design that we're rarely having in conferences these days. Next week I'm attending the Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference. On June 8th I'm scheduled to give a TechTalk at Google Mountainview about WebDSL and Mobl. The trip ends with the OOPSLA 2011 PC meeting. In the fringes, I expect to meet many interesting people, including breakfast with Robert Hirshfeld and lunch with Terence Parr in San Francisco. And there should be time left in between for some recreational programming.

At the Google EMEA Faculty Summit 2011 I gave a talk about our research on software language design and engineering, with Mobl as example. The slides are on slideshare.

Much of the recent research on domain-specific language engineering that we conduct at TU Delft, which has produced Spoofax, WebDSL, and Mobl, has been funded by the Jacquard Software Engineering Research program of NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. To given an overview of the research program and stress its importance for society, Jacquard has produced a number of short movies about the projects it has funded, including an introduction and one about our Model-Driven Software Evolution (ModSE) project.