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ESUG 2010 in Barcelona

This year's conference logo was designed by my good friend Patty Gadegast.
I just returned from the European Smalltalk User Group conference in Barcelona, Spain. It was a really nice experience. There was too much going on to report everything here, so I will just pick some favorites.

Photo by Bert Freudenberg

The event was hosted by citilab Cornellà. It started off with a Camp Smalltalk over the weekend. I already met quite a few people there. I couldn't mingle as much as I hoped to because I had to get the first Etoys 4.1 release candidate out of the door:
Photo by Adriaan van Os
Close by was "Yokohama Wok", a Japanese/Spanish restaurant with the best all-you-can-eat buffet imaginable. You could have everything from freshly cut ham to sushi, grilled steak or seafood, bread, pasta, rice, fruits, cake, desserts.
Photo by Bert Freudenberg
I talked to Stef (president of ESUG) and gave him a Squeak Etoys button, which he ended up wearing the whole week:
Photo by Bert Freudenberg
We also played together in a 2-on-2 Magic game (which we promptly lost ...):

Photo by Bert Freudenberg
On Monday I gave my Squeak Community Update talk, outlining what has happened in the Squeak and Etoys communities lately. Got some nice comments afterwards, including the request to give an  Etoys demo the next time. I of course used Etoys to give the presentation, but did not really include an Etoys introduction for people who had not seen it before. But I got a slot in the "show us your projects" session on Tuesday where I made up for that with a 10 minute demo.
Photo by Adriaan van Os
Gonzalo Zabala and his students from Argentina presented Physical Etoys:
Photo by Adriaan van Os


I also liked the Xtreams presentation by Martin Kobetic:
Photo by Adriaan van Os

I was session chair on Wednesday morning, so I could see Travis' update on Pango text rendering from the first row. Would love to have that in Squeak, but it only builds easily on Linux:
Photo by Adriaan van Os

But the most exciting thing on Wednesday was of course that Physical Etoys won the ESUG Innovation Technology Award:
Photo by Adriaan van Os
On Thursday, I participated in a panel discussion about open-source licenses, organized by Julian Fitzell and Jason Ayers of Cincom.
Photo by Adriaan van Os

In the projects session, Ricardo demoed some of his Etoys work done during Google Summer of Code:
Photo by Adriaan van Os

Besides showing his graphing tools, the comic-like bubbles were a favorite with the audience:
Photo by Adriaan van Os

Dale showed the beginnings of Bibliocello, a repository for Monticello packages that can actually analyze them. You get to search implementors and senders across all packages, take statistics etc.
Photo by Adriaan van Os

And at the end of the day, an exciting demo was given by HwaJong Oh, a Smalltalker and iPhone developer from Korea. He demonstrated Drag-and-Drop for Squeak Tools, e.g. dragging the object held in an instance variable directly to another inspector.
Photo by Adriaan van Os

He also used cool animated mind-maps for his introduction:
Photo by Adriaan van Os

The highlight on Friday was Lukas' Helvetia presentation. I particularly liked the integration of PetitParser with the Smalltalk tools.
Photo by Adriaan van Os

All in all it was a rather refreshing conference at a great location with interesting people. Looking forward to next year's ESUG :)
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Comments

FLORCIT@ said…
Congratulations Argentina!!!!
September 24, 2010
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