The Weekly Squeak

This year’s ESUG International Smalltalk Conference ended last Friday, though some attendees are still travelling homewards,  slowly recovering from jet lag, or waiting for lost baggage. Nevertheless, for most of us it’s an appropriate time to look back on the conference.

The conference had a great buzz about it this year. As usual Camp Smalltalk gave early arrivals the chance to get their hands dirty and start hacking on code. Among other activities, Seaside 3.0 was finalised and announced.

A packed official schedule kicked off with a great presentation (mp4) of a gorgeous web-based event planning tool based on Seaside. Following presentations covered topics as diverse as the challenges of development in commercial environments, using native widgets from Squeak on the iPhone, next steps for source management systems, a live workshop introduction to Wolf Pack Programming, controlling robots, a panel discussion of the complex issues of licencing and warranties, vendor roadmaps and much, much more. You can see the conference programme for more information.

There were two events which really lifted the energy levels of the whole conference. The “Show Us Your Projects” session gave each speaker a strict ten minutes to present their pet project. These talks were crammed with too many great ideas and implementations to list – you really must keep an eye out for the video of the session. The Innovation Technology Awards had 15 entrants this year, each of whom was asked to provide a video and present their projects for voting. All the entries were very impressive, but the winners (announced during the social event at the Museo de la Ciencia) were Physical Etoys from the Universidad Abierta Interamericana team, Eliot Miranda’s Cog VM, and Mars (native widgets on OS X) by Esteban Lorenzano.

Some other impressions of the conference can be found at the following sites (please add a comment below if you know of any other interesting posts about the conference):

• Bert Freudenberg’s write-up
• Adriaan van Os’ photographs
• Photographs by CitiLab
• Twitter #esug2010 hashtag

The conference was hosted by CitiLab Cornellà, who did a great job of making us feel welcome. All the sessions were live-streamed by CitiLab, and videos are being uploaded and hosted by Cincom. On-the-day support was provided by the student volunteers, who were easily identifiable by their stylish red caps!

Thanks to everyone involved in the sponsoring, hosting and organising of the conference, and here’s looking forward to next year’s conference which is to be held in the UK.