Google Summer of Code – work begins!
27 May, 2010
Good news from Mariano Martinez Peck, one of the key organisers of the joint Smalltalk entry into this year’s Google Summer of Code: the students started work on their projects this week!
Following Google’s decision to focus on fewer organisations last year, ESUG co-ordinated a joint application for projects across all Smalltalk dialects this year, and were so successful in this venture that they got approval for 6 projects. You can find out more about the selected projects at the projects page.
For the last two weeks or so, students have been talking and discussing with their mentors, reading and investigating about the projects, and perhaps getting an early start on their development work. This was in line with the GSoC deadlines that you can read at the ESUG GSoC site and at the GSoC blog.
The organisers have told students to ask in case of problems or questions to their mentors but also to the community through the mailing list, so be prepared to help out with questions and issues that the students may have.
Mariano says “Good luck to all students and enjoy this wonderful opportunity you have. Now we are in the best part of the program!”
Squeakfest 2010 – University of North Carolina
20 May, 2010
Rita Freudenberg has announced that “The official Squeakfest website is now live and ready for you to propose a presentation, workshop, or panel.”
Squeakfest is an annual conference where developers and users of the Etoys media-rich authoring and experimentation environment (based on Squeak) get together to share ideas, experiences, and their enthusiasms with colleagues from around the world.
This year’s conference will be held at University of North Carolina in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the USA from 26th—28th July, and the theme for will be “Etoys in the STEM classroom.”
The conference will offer an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of the NSF-funded project “Using Squeak to Infuse Technology (USeIT)” which is now reaching its 3rd year.
The team are keen to hear from individuals and groups with experience teaching with Etoys, as well as non-classroom Etoys use, particularly as it relates to OLPC pilots or homeschooling. More information will be added to the website as it becomes available, but the organisers ask presenters to get presentation information to them by completing and submitting the online form no later than 11th June, 2010.
To get a flavour of what to expect at the conference, have a look at our report from last year’s Squeakfest.
Workshop on Self-Sustaining Systems 2010
14 May, 2010
The Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) is a forum for discussion of topics relating to computer systems and languages that are able to bootstrap, implement, modify, and maintain themselves. One property of these systems is that their implementation is based on small but powerful abstractions; examples include (amongst others) Squeak/Smalltalk, COLA, Klein/Self, PyPy/Python, Rubinius/Ruby, and Lisp. Such systems are the engines of their own replacement, giving researchers and developers great power to experiment with, and explore future directions from within, their own small language kernels.
S3 will take place September 27-28, 2010 at The University of Tokyo, Japan. It is an exciting opportunity for researchers and practitioners interested in self-sustaining systems to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.
See the conference website for details and deadlines.
ESUG 2010 Conference – in Barcelona
6 May, 2010
For the past 18 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
This year’s conference will be held at Citilab-Cornellà in Cornellà, Barcelona, on 13th—17th September. As in previous years, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, and a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions.
This year will also see:
- the 6th annual Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects
- an international workshop on Smalltalk and dynamic languages
- for the first time there will be a business day on Thursday 16th September 2010 with a focus on “Agile Development Processes and Smalltalk”
ESUG is sponsoring 10 free entrance tickets. To get a free ticket you should send a mail to the esug board (board@esug.org) with a subject of [ESUG 2010 Free entrance] + your name, with an small statement putting your case. Note that students can get free registration and hosting if they enrol into the the Student Volunteers program (see below).
You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:
- Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
- Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
- Attend the conference! We’d like to beat the previous record of attendance (156 participants at Brest and 170 people at Amsterdam)!
Developers Forum: International Smalltalk Developers Conference
This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. In addition, we are looking for tutorials. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:
- XP practices
- Development tools
- Experience reports
- Model driven development
- Web development
- Team management
- Meta-Modeling
- Security
- New libraries & frameworks
- Educational material
- Embedded systems and robotics
- SOA and Web services
- Interaction with other programming languages
Submissions due on 1 July 2010
Notification of acceptance on 15 of July 2010
More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2010
Innovation Technology Award
We are proud to announce the 6th Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete. This year you are asked to provide 3-5min videos explaining your entry. More information can be found at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Innovation+Technology+Awards
Student Volunteer Program
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered
being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the
conference running smoothly; in return, they have free
accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference. More information at http://www.esug.org/Conferences/2010/Student+Volunteers+program
