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I had the chance to participate to Softshake (2017 edition)  for the first time. It's a small but very nice conference held in Geneva, Switzerland.

From what I gathered, this year there were less attendees than in the previous years (About 150 vs 300 before). However, the organization was very nice:

• Located inside the Hepia school with plenty of rooms available
• 6 tracks in parallel, which is incredible for a small conference
• Breakfast, lunch and snacks organized with good food
• Speaker dinner with Fondue and all

I got to present 2 talks:

• XWiki: The Web's Swiss Army Knife. This is my usual "XWiki: A web development platform" talk that I've given a few times already but with a more Swiss-related title
  XWiki: The web's Swiss Army Knife from Vincent Massol
• Creating your own project's Quality Dashboard. This one was brand new and was a big love demo of how to use XWiki to create a custom Quality Dashboard by aggregating metrics from other sites (Jenkins, SonarQube, JIRA and GitHub), saving them locally to draw history graphs and sending emails when combined metric thresholds are crossed. A lot more people attended this one and I like this new angle of defining a real-life use case and using XWiki just as a tool to achieve it. I'll continue exploring this new way of presenting XWiki since people liked it a lot more and it feels more natural.
  Creating your own project's Quality Dashboard from Vincent Massol

I was also very happy to see my friend and ex-OCTO Technology colleague Philippe Kernevez, and to meet new OCTO consultants. Reminded me of the good times at OCTO

This year the XWiki project had 5 4 GSOC students (we lost one to FOSSASIA who clicked faster than us!). This is way cool and we're glad that Google is organizing this every year. XWiki has been participating since the beginning (2005 AFAIR).

Every year the XWiki project sends 2 mentors to participate to eh GSOC summit. This year it was Thomas Mortagne and me who got the honor to go.

Quiz: find us on the group picture:

This conference is organized as an unconference. These are the key highlights I gout out of it:

• Google will continue organizing GSOC in the future. Yeah!
• Lots of discussions about Google Code In (for students aged 12-17) and to handle it to the best for organizations. This convinced us to register the XWiki project to participate and... we just got selected 2 days ago. If you're interested to participate, see the XWiki Code-In page. I'm really curious to see how it'll go.
• I proposed a session on "Wikis: what's next", which turned into a "What is XWiki and why is it different from other wikis"  Incidentally this got me thinking about how to best express what XWiki is in one sentence. So far I've found the following:
  • View 1: Bring the concepts of wiki (collaboration on same content, edit+save, history+rollback, links) to application development.
  • View 2: A runtime web development platform. The default wiki you get is just one example (Similar to Eclipse IDE vs eclipse platform).
  • View3: Provide ability to add semantics to content: from free form data to structured data. Pages can contain free form or structured data / metadata, and control how it's displayed.
  • View 4: A web application server for content-related applications i.e. Provides all components / building blocks to easily create web applications.
• Extremely well organized by Google. And good food and lots of choice (I'm vegetarian). I'm vegetarian but I love chocolate and this was heaven (all attendees brought chocolate!):

  

Thanks Google. Till next time!