Topic: Conferences

This day started with some stress, Nicolas and I whipped up the last details of our co-presentation on Jtalk (Nicolas decided to skip Iliad) - and my Eris demo suddenly got b0rken. But I managed to fix it and our presentation was very well received - it was great fun!

Suddenly it is Wednesday and we are already on day three at ESUG - a superb software developer conference focused on Smalltalk. Time flies. Yesterday I mainly hacked together with Nicolas Petton on Jtalk, really fun, unfortunately I missed a few interesting presentations, like Fuel and Bifrost etc.

Each year I try to attend at least one developer conference. Earlier OOPSLA was a given but it lost its appeal quite a few years back and now it is not even called OOPSLA anymore. As a die hard Smalltalker I instead attended the ESUG conference in Brest 2009 and it was easily the most rewarding conference I ever have attended! Missed last year in Barcelona but this year I am going to Edinburgh for a week of Smalltalking.

…is what I did yesterday. It was the Stockholm GTUG group having a loose and laid back meetup in a rather special venue - R1, Sweden’s first nuclear reactor! 27 meters below ground, kinda… funky.

Hmmm, after seeing the Node.js presentation at Dyncon 2011 I couldn’t help installing Nginx and Blackfoot (SimpleCGI) in a Squeak 4.2 image running on the Cog VM to make some performance tests! In fact I started doing that during the presentation. :)

So it’s monday and I am getting started with work but thought I should try writing a retrospective of Dyncon 2011 during the day. In summary it was a nice and largish crowd (about 85), a spacious and good venue in the middle of the city (office of BWin/Ongame) with a great view from the 11th floor and a good lineup of speakers. Perhaps I am getting old though but having this many speakers doing 40 min presentations for two full days… well, I kinda like to have time to sit down and chat with people and show stuff and so on. Not much time for that, and 40 minutes means that most presentations got stressed for time even though flying on a rather high level. But still, a fun and interesting conference!

Day one must have ended with lots of beer because people were quite late for day two. 15 minutes late Carl Lerche finally started his Ruby presentation. One thing I found interesting was Ruby Modules vs Monticello extension methods (in some ways I presume this is how Modules are often used - to extend other classes with behavior). Evidently “method extensions” to the class side in Ruby doesn’t work like extensions to the instance side, it does in Smalltalk of course :). Then Carl described ways to still do this, but it looked complex, and also explaining there are lots of “hooks” when messing with the MOP. Is that a good thing? If Rubyists use this a lot, then I presume utter hopeless confusion might occur.

In place at Dyncon 2011 at Bwin/Ongame in Stockholm. Quite a nice crowd and the day was started with Joe Armstrong presenting Erlang. I had never seen Joe speak before and it was a fun and interesting presentation, although of course only “skimming” some areas. I found it fun that he referenced Alan Kay where he stressed that “it’s the messages”, given his earlier harsh view on OO. I couldn’t help starting to think about how some of Erlang’s concepts could easily be implemented in Smalltalk and what that could give.