Personal Events

I was invited to present the XWiki project at the GlassFish TV yesterday. 

That was fun: I was at home with a headset on a conf call (I was using skype), presenting a presentation I had sent earlier on to my host (Jacob Kessler from Sun). Jacob was recording live the audio and the presentation slides. I'm now eager to see the result and I hope the voice quality isn't too bad.

I presented quickly what XWiki is and moved to show XWiki's growth in 2008 and then moved on to the meat of the talk which were the new features the XWiki project is releasing with XWiki Enterprise 1.8.

Here are the slides (note that Slideshare didn't do such a good job of converting my ODP presentation so you might want to download the slides):

Yesterday I have presented the OSSGTP Group at a Sun Open Source evening event.

Here are the slides:

If you're in Paris, France and you're an open source addict and developer come and join us. It's fun! Our mantra is Open Source from the source. The group is only composed of open source actors/developers. We meet every month (or we try to) and we have a diner together afterwards in pure French tradition...

At long last I'm resurrecting my old blog and moving it to the XWiki platform (I've left the old blog posts there since I didn't want to loose comments and create broken links for people referring to the posts). 

Funnily I stopped blogging when I joined the XWiki open source project in December 2006. I think the main reason is that I have been busy understanding the existing code base, refactoring it, managing the development team and unconsciously I wanted to become an XWiki expert before I could start talking about it and evangelizing it in a more open manner. Since I'm reading "Outliers" from Malcolm Gladwell I think I now understand how everything fits together:

• I've been working on the XWiki project for 2 years. Since I spend 70+ hours per week on it, that's close to 8000 hours since I joined the project.
• Malcolm Gladwell says that you need roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert in a given field

So I'm now close to becoming an XWiki expert and this makes me understand the project pretty well and as a consequence I now feel entitled and mature to blog about it! Okay this is a bit contrived and there's probably more to it but it feels good to relate these concepts together.

So starting today you'll see lots of posts about the XWiki platform in general or the lessons I learn while developing it.