Personal Events

Last modified by Vincent Massol on 2008/12/19 09:44

23 posts

Apr 23 2018

Devoxx France 2018

Another Devoxx France and another huge success emoticon_smile

This time I had 2 talks.

New Generation of Tests

Title: Advanced testing in action on a Java project
Subtitle: Demonstrating testing practices using Java, Maven, Docker and Jenkins.
Abstract: This talk will demonstrate advanced testing practices used by the XWiki open source project, and using Java, Maven, Docker and Jenkins:

This is a talk I also did at FOSDEM 2018 (In English). The part about Mutation testing and configuration testing concerns results from the STAMP research project I'm participating to.

I got lucky to get a lot of votes for the talk and thus I was in the big amphitheater (capacity of 800-850 people) and it was almost full!

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LCC Podcast Recording

As usual we did a live recording of the LCC Podcast.

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Misc

What I enjoy the most of technical conferences is the ability my friends and get some news from them about the fun stuff they're doing.

I also sent to the speaker dinner organized by Devoxx and we got a nice sight-seeing bus tour of Paris.

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I also got some ideas to try out on the XWiki project:

Mar 21 2018

Dagstuhl 2018

I had the honor of being invited to a seminar on "Automatic Quality Assurance and Release" at Dagstuhl by Benoit Baudry (we collaborate together on the STAMP research project).

Dagstuhl is in the middle of nowhere but it was worth it emoticon_wink The venue is very nice. It's basically a seminar factory. Every year there are calls for seminars and you can propose research seminars.

It's subsidized by the German government and as such, the price is very low: you pay 50 euros per day and that includes everything: room, 3 meals, seminar rooms, etc. I don't know if something similar exists in France. That seems like a great idea to attract researchers from all over the world.

The seminars are generally organized as unconferences. In our case we had some talks planned every 1/2 day and that kicked of various discussion groups. Each group had a leader in charge of making sure that each session got an output in the form of a blog post (with you'll be able to find when they're published on the seminar page. I led a session on Onboarding developers.

At Dagstuhl they also have a huge and amazing book library (physical books, tens of thousands!). And they do a fun thing which I find was a nice touch: when a seminar is organized they gather all the books they have that have been written by the participants and they display them on shelf so that the authors can sign them. I got to sign the JUnit in Action book emoticon_wink

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It was a very nice experience and the first time I was participating to a research seminar organized by academia. I'm looking forward for my next seminar at Dagstuhl!

Feb 05 2018

FOSDEM 2018

Once more I was happy to go to FOSDEM. This year XWiki SAS, the company I work for, had 12 employees going there and we had about 8 talks accepted + we had a stand for the XWiki open source project that we shared with our friends @ Tiki and Foswiki.

Here were the highlights for me:

  • I talked about what's next on Java testing and covered test coverage, backward compatibility enforcement, mutation testing and environment testing. My experience on the last two types of tests are directly issued from my participation the STAMP research project where we develop and use tools to amplify existing tests.
  • I did another talk about "Addressing the Long Tail of (web) applications", explaining how an advanced structured wiki such as XWiki can be used to quickly create ad-hoc application in wiki pages.
  • Since we had a stand shared between 3 wiki communities (Tiki, Foswiki and XWiki), I was also interested in comparing our features, and how our communities work.
    • I met the nice folks of Tiki at their TikiHouse and had long discussions about how similar and differently we do things. Maybe the topic for a future blog post? emoticon_smile
    • Then I had Michael Daum do a demo to me of the nice features of Foswiki. I was quite impressed and found a lot of similarities in features. 
    • Funnily our 3 wiki solutions are written in 3 different technologies: Tiki in PHP, Foswiki in Perl and XWiki in Java. Nice diversity!
  • I met a lot of people of course (Fosdem is really THE place to be to meet people from the FOSS communities) but I'd like to thank especially Damien Duportal who took the time to sit with me and go over several questions I had about Jenkins pipelines and Docker. I'll most likely blog about some of those solutions in the near future.

All in all, an excellent FOSDEM again, with lots of talks and waffles emoticon_wink

Dec 15 2017

POSS 2017

My company (XWiki SAS) had a booth at the Paris Open Source Summit 2017 (POSS) and we also organized a track about "One job, one solution!", promoting open source solutions.

I was asked to talk about using XWiki as an alternative to Confluence or Sharepoint.

Here are the slides of the talk:

There were about 30 persons in the room. I focused on showing what I believe are the major differences, especially with Confluence that I know better than SharePoint.

If you're interested by more details you can find a comparison between XWiki and Confluence on xwiki.org.

Oct 29 2017

Softshake 2017

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 emoticon_wink

I got to present 2 talks:

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 emoticon_smile

Oct 28 2017

Google Summer of Code Summit 2017

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:

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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" emoticon_wink 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!):

    chocolat.jpg

Thanks Google. Till next time!

Jun 28 2017

Voxxed Luxembourg 2017

Last week I've participated to Voxxed Luxembourg. It was a nice event, very well organized, with about 450 participants. Well done PAG!.

I presented a session on Leading a community-driven open source project.

Would love to hear feedback.

May 15 2014

Internals of an open source company: XWiki SAS

I had the pleasure to present at Human Talks. I presented how an open source company works internally and the challenges of handling potentially conflicting interests between business interests and open source interests. My experience is based on the XWiki SAS company and the XWiki open source project.

It was a fun event, held at Mozilla Paris in a very nice room (fun fact: on this picture, which was taken on the day Mozilla opened the office, you can see Ludovic Dubost - with the blue polo -, creator of the XWiki open source project and founder of the XWiki SAS company emoticon_wink).

Thanks Human Talks for the invite!

Feb 04 2014

FOSDEM 2014

Another year @ FOSDEM with the XWiki gang: Ludovic, Marius, Anca, Oana and Fabio!

This year though we succeeded in getting dev room (yeah!), a wiki dev room, that I co-organized with Quim Gil from Wikimedia and Jean-Macr Libs from tiki.org.

The XWiki project was lucky to have 6 talks:

It was a nice FOSDEM. We enjoyed Belgian waffles and French fries as usual (although I heard some enjoyed it a bit less than usual since they were on a low-carb diet emoticon_wink).

At the content level, the conference was slightly too low-tech for me, a Java developer. Lots of C/C++ guys and lots of stuff close to the hardware emoticon_wink Not that I don't think it's nice to do that, but rather that I can't participate much. There were some other tracks more of interest to me like the Java dev room (but I was stuck in the wiki dev room at the same time so couldn't join) and the Javascript dev room but this one was so full that it was near impossible to get in...

I'd personally love to see some more room/space given to open source in businesses for the future editions of FOSDEM.

With over 8000 participants it seems it was, once again, a very successful FOSDEM.

See you next year maybe!

Apr 20 2013

CodeCamp Iasi 2013

I'm in Iasi, Romania for 1 week visiting the XWiki SAS Romanian office and I was invited to talk at CodeCamp 2013. It was my first time I spoke in Romania and it was fun!

The conference is nice (about 300 participants I'd say); the only issue for me being that all sessions are in ... Romanian... emoticon_smile

I gave the talk I did at Devoxx France 2013 last month. It's a technical talk and I wasn't sure how it would get appreciated since it requires some prerequisite knowledge of Maven, Jenkins and Software factories in general... Seems people like it overall.

Here are the slides:

Created by Vincent Massol on 2008/12/19 09:44