Personal Events

I was very happy to present at Devoxx France again! Big kudo to the organizers, it was a great event. As usual it was great to meet all my Java friends.

This year I was happy to be on 4 events:

• Implement Quality on Java projects
• L'open source au quotidien
• LesCastCodeurs live podcast
• Hackergarten

Here are the slides and video of my quality on Java projects:

In the slides I mention some Scriptler script to automated modifying all jobs to prevent false positive emails.

A big thank you to Frédéric Bouquet who volunteered during the Hackergarten to work on participating to XWiki. We ended up coding a new CRaSH integration. It's still in progress but I hope we can release a 1.0 version real soon.

See you next year!

It was a long since I last attended Devoxx Belgium. It was a pleasure to be there again and meet all my friends. I was also happy to be able to present XWiki even though it was only for a quickie (15 minutes).

I presented the ability to quickly create applications within a wiki with the "Application Within Minute" feature of XWiki.

Here's the video:

 ...

I was invited to speak about XWiki at the Alpes JUG and the Mars JUG on 10th and 11th of October 2012. I gave 3 presentations at each JUG:

• Presentation of XWiki from a user point of view (sorry, no slides since this was done purely as a demo) (30 mn)
• Explain how XWiki can be used to develop web applications quickly and why it can be considered a development platform (1.5 hours)
• Present how the XWiki open source development is performed (1 hour)

I had a great time at both JUGs. The Mars JUG was a bit more active than the Alpes one with over 30 persons present vs 15 (come on guys, now you need to beat the Mars JUG next time! ). 

OTOH my stay at Grenoble was a bit safer than the Marseille trip... Indeed, I got to witness a murder in Marseille a few minutes after it happened...

On the food topic, I had some great sushis with Julien Viet in Marseille (seems the murder we witnessed didn't make us loose our appetite... ).

Ok so here are the slides (I also did lots of demo during the talk and unfortunately you won't be able to see them - I also spoke a lot more than on the slides, sorry about that - But then you should haven been there! ).

Thanks to Emmanuel Hugonnet and Julien Viet for inviting me.

Breizhcamp 2012 was a very nice conference (200 attendees roughly) organized by Nicolas DeLoof and friends.

I had the opportunity to present XWiki and more specifically I did a demonstration of XWiki used as a web development platform to construct a possible Breizhcamp 2013 web site, featuring the ability to register talks and speakers, and automatically generate a session calendar based on the entered talks. Ability to see all speaker avatars and to search for sessions. Also demonstrated how to apply a Boostrap-based skin to make the site look like a web site.

I also had some fun showing how to import Gravatars automatically using a Groovy Script.

In addition I also got to record a live LesCastCodeurs episode.

Well done to Nicolas and all who helped organize this event. It was very nice and I'll happily come back next year (especially if the website is done using XWiki ).

Here are some screenshots of the result.

Conference home page demo with default XWiki Skin

Creation of the application to register Talks

Registration of Talks

Edition of a Talk

Conference home page demo with the Lyrebird Skin (bootstrap-based)

Calendar generated automatically by the registered Talks
(Technically a wiki page is created to generate JSON with some Groovy scripting on the XWiki Model, this JSON is then used as input for the Javascript Calendar)

Ability to search for Talks with a Livetable
(Note: The Lyrebird Skin used was missing some CSS for a nice Livetable styling)

Dynamic list of all speaker avatars

I was happy to be invited to talk about the job of Developer at the Paris JUG along with Jean-Laurent De Morlhon, Regis Medina, Didier Girard  and Gregory Weinbach.

The idea was to give a glimpse about how we became developers through our personal experience so that younger developers or developers-to-be could understand what it means to be a developer.

We then tried to answer questions from the room.

The pictures of the even have now been put online:

It was a great event and as you can see from the pictures I enjoyed it a lot!

Thanks Nicolas for organizing this.

Last week I've presented 2 sessions at the Lausanne JUG (organized by Philippe Kernevez from OCTO Technology:

• XWiki: A web development runtime platform
• Developing XWiki

There were 20-30 people attending and I've had a lot of fun presenting. The evening was followed by a dinner with several attendees. I've had a very nice time! 

The presentation slides are available with voiceover and videos of demos on Parleys.com.

I'm just back from the What's Next Paris conference (26/27th May 2011) organized by Zenika. I was able to get a free entry as an OSSGTP member and a CastCodeurs. Thanks guys!

Zenika did a great job, especially for a first conference. It was located at the Grand Rex (a famous Theater in Paris, with a star-lit ceiling and where I remember seeing the first Stars Wars back in the 1970s...). Anyway very nice venue (imagine that it can fit more than 2700 people in the room!) even though the corridors were a bit cramped when everyone was out of the sessions.

The format of the event was risky with a single track which meant making compromises for choosing the talks. Must have been a nightmare for Zenika to choose the sessions...

I admit I didn't attend all sessions but he are some stuff that I liked and that resonated with me with what we're doing at XWiki:

• CloundFoundry. Seems to be a nice open PAAS: it's open source and you can plug stuff at all levels: new languages, services, and even plug your own infrastructure. Apparently it has this notion of Micro cloud which allows you to run it on your local computer which seems nice to try stuff out (I don't now how hard/easy it is to do that though, would need to research this a bit). In the XWiki project we've started some research exploration of running XWiki on PAAS (Google App Engine, etc). We're also lead on the Compatible ONE research project to create a PAAS that's a bridge to other existing PAAS, using a common API. As part of this we're also looking at running XWiki on a NoSQL storage.

• Orion. This is a Web IDE project lead by the Eclipse Foundation. Apparently it's quite recent and there's isn't much yet. The developers have focused on offering extension points/hooks so that the community can join and help out in offering services such as code analysis, code highlighting, etc. Right now a basic editor is provided with syntax highlighting for a few syntaxes and no autocompetion. They haven't tackled the issue of concurrent edition yet and are again waiting for community help on this. At XWiki, the concept of Web IDE is something dear to us since XWiki is a next generation wiki that lets you put script in wiki pages. Thus there's an important need to offer nice code editors. We also have another research project underway in which we're developing a realtime WYSIWYG solution. We had a first version of realtime editing done in the past (and using the WOOT algorithm - WithOut Operational Transformation, an algorithm close to the OT one used by Google Wave) in another research project but it didn't get into the product in the end because of some technical blocker. We hope this new research project will be integrated this time, allowing XWiki users to collaboratively edit the same wiki page at the same time and in WYSIWYG mode. Note that we also have a working integration with SkyWriter (was named Bespin before).

• HTML5 WebSockets. The presentation was great and clearly explained why it's a vastly superior implementation over polling (several HTTP requests to the server asking for news) or long polling (keep the HTTP connection open). With WebSockets you contact the server over HTTP but with a reduced header and in the header you ask for an "upgrade". The Server needs to be WebSocket-aware and respond to the "upgrade". From then one a dual-direction TCP socket is established and the server can send data to the client without the client having to do any polling. We really need to start adding HTML5 feature in XWiki and make them available only for HTML5-enabled browsers (i.e. degrade to what we're currently doing for older browsers).

As usual I enjoyed seeing again my IT and Open Source friends (too many to list!).

So what's next for 2012?

The OSSGTP and Les CastCodeurs have organized a 2 days Snow Camp in France at Les 2 Alpes 3 weeks ago (April 2011). I was there with 20 or so other geeks and we had a great time skiing and discussing of technology and of our open source projects.

I was lucky to have Emmanuel Bernard as a private Git coach  He's a good teacher who makes you learn fast. Just try to make a mistake and you'll see what happens...  XWiki was just moving to Git (and GitHub) and I was in need of a quick training session to get me started. I got help from the other geeks too and that's when I discovered that Git wasn't an exact science... everyone has his own way of using it and there are lots of ways of doing the same thing... 

I had some fun coding a quick GitHub integration in XWiki too using Groovy.

On the second day we recorded a special LesCastCodeurs podcast; we arranged 15 geeks around a table and launched some tech topics at random to get a discussion started. The result is available here (in French).

Let's do this again next year!

I've attended the 3rd anniversary of the Paris JUG and it was a great event that attracted over 500 developers (not bad for a user group that is 3 years old!). Antonio and his team had chosen an interesting theme this year which was "Siffler en travaillant" (which can be translated as "whistling to work"). He said he got the idea while watching Snow White and the seven dwarfs who are whistling while going to work in the mines. He wondered whether some of us are doing this or rather why don't we all whistle while going to work. There were several lightning talks on this theme, such as: "Tele working" - The speaker asked the audience who had a contract for working from a distance and only 3 people raised their hands. I was one of them. Apparently lots of developers do work from home a few days per week but very few have it in their contract. France is lagging behind other countries, especially wrt the law, "Independence" (being an Independent), ..., "GTD" by Emmanuel, "About being a Developer" by Didier Girard - Didier's presentation was very neat with a lot of energy and punch (Didier is really good at that), and more. The last talk was a very refreshing talk by 2 young men just out of school who started developing Android apps. They started one night as a challenge: "let's see what we can do" and they had their first working app  a few hours later. They published it and quickly had hundreds or thousands of downloads and they did their second app, then third and finally they got 10 apps, all doing.... nothing (a candle, a lighter, etc) ....  At some point they decided to monetize their work since they had so many downloads and put an ad banner in all their apps. They're now making around 12K euros per month (they're 2) which is pretty good money and their download numbers are still increasing. Several of us looked at each other and wondered why we were developing complex apps such as an Enterprise Wiki, a CMS, etc when apparently it's enough to develop an app that does nothing to make a living!

The venue was very nice, at the Cité Internationale Universitaire (I didn't know the place and was pleasantly surprised by the nice architecture - lucky sutdents!).  The organisation was superb with booths available for companies (that's a big part of how this free event is sponsored). I got the chance to get a massage by Fred Do Couto (from Vitalizen - Fred was an excellent java developer I met while working on the Vizzavi Europe project around 2001-2002 - At the time we used to get free massage while at work, this is how Fred got the idea to start Vitalizen later on).

I met all the usual suspects: Didier Girard, Emmanuel Bernard, Antonio of course (hey 3 castcodeurs out of 4 not bad), Julien Dubois, Charles Gay, Tugduall Grall, Jean-Laurent, and a lot more. It's always nice to find known heads and to catch up on what we're all doing (we don't see each other enough - I'm partly to blame since I haven't been active at all in organizing the OSSGTP meetings for the past few years....).

Then 80 of us had booked for a surprise evening at 22:30: we got embarked in 2 special night buses where we drank champagne and danced while crossing paris till we reached the Eiffel Tower where we took a group picture (insert link here). Then we were driven to a nice restaurant (Le Vavin) and finished around 3AM... I stopped there since I had to work the next morning but others carried on at the bar next door till 6AM...

A very good evening where I was happy to meet old friends and talk about XWiki.

Waiting for the 4th anniversary of the Paris JUG now!

I was very excited to attend the third edition of USI (the conference organised by OCTO Technology). The first year was awesome with guest speakers such as Michel Serres, Neil Armstrong, Eliyahu Goldratt (physicist and father of the theory of constraints) and a lot more. I was honored to present a talk on XWiki that year. The second year was no less exceptional with other wonderful speakers such as Joël de Rosnay, Albert Jacquard, Daniel Cohen and a wonderful jazzman named Eric Lewis. That time I did a session with Tugdual Grall from eXo Platform on Wiki vs CMS. 

So it was with trepidation that I was waiting for this third edition. And I wasn't disappointed! The new venue in the Bois de Boulogne was great with excellent food and a chic setting. I did a live podcast recording with the other CastCodeurs (Emmanuel and Guillaume since Antonio decided to go biking instead, shame on him ). It was our first live recording so I guess we have things to fine tune for the future but it was good and the room was packed. Thanks everyone for showing up. I attended several excellent talks, starting with Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail concept which I've reused at XWiki to explain how XWiki is a second generation wiki). Chris spoke about the economy of Free and how it changes the game (I recommend his book). 

However the best talk for me was without question the one from Juan Enriquez. Juan was part of the team that sequenced the Human Genome and more recently he participated in creating the first artificial life. They were able to take an existing cell, remove all its nuclear material (DNA, etc) and inject some DNA constructed from a computer program. Once the cell was booted with this code, it started executing it, producing proteins as defined in the new DNA! At some point, Juan looked at the audience, filled with developers, and told us that we were the future, that we were going to be the kings of the future since we have the knowledge required. He said that his team had opened up a new playground for us, basically transforming a domain that was that of biology to information technology. Imagine the possibilities that this opens up! It's mindblowing. I think we also got out of this session completely jazzed up, full of energy, thinking about this potential future that we're not fully grasping yet. Personally this was a strong moment for me since I've always secretly dreamed of going back to the school benches to learn bioinformatic. I've never followed up on that dream but it tempts me even more now. I wish I could summon the courage to jump in the rabbit hole one day!

All in all, a great conference as usual where I was again happy to meet all the usual suspects: all my friends from OCTO and my open source friends. The conference ended with Fabrice Luchini, reading some extracts from Murray from his Theatre show and dazzling us with his verbal flow!