ESUG 2009 wrap up – Best Ever?
8 September, 2009
All the participants should now have safely returned home after a hugely successful ESUG conference. Participants from around the world (including an Argentinian football team) shrugged off the economic climate to spend a week in Brest and share their experiences and aspirations with fellow Smalltalkers.
Highlights included:
- Presentations from a range of speakers from industry and research backgrounds, including Cloudfork, DeltaStreams, WebVelocity.
- Tutorials for Seaside, Aida, SqueakNOS, and many, many, more.
- The Innovation Technology Awards, awarded to Retrobjects which is a great C64 emulator, PhidgetLab which uses eToys to interact with real world objects, SqueakNOS: a lightning-fast bootable Squeak image, and Glamour which is a flexible engine for scripting Smalltalk browsers.
- Updates on various Smalltalk platforms: VisualWorks, VA Smalltalk, Object Studio, Gemstone and Pharo.
- And lots of great opportunities to network and socialise, including the inaugural ESUG Blind Date!
Check out the photos for a flavour of the conference: Adriaan, Hernan, James, Yuri. and many more.
Comments on the web have been very positive too:
- “ESUG was a blast, totally.”
- “Definitely the best Smalltalk conference I’ve ever been to.”
- “a great conference”
- “a pleasure to attend every year”
- “fascinating, inspiring and enjoyable”
- “it’s been intense”
With reviews like that, next year’s conference in Barcelona is bound to be a sell-out, so remember to book early!
(Photo from Yuri’s collection)
ESUG 2009 kicks off, VAST goes free, Technology Awards break records
1 September, 2009
ESUG 2009 has got off to a successful start, with a packed programme of events lined up for the next few days.
After an introduction from Stefan Ducasse for ESUG and local organisers Alain Plantec and Loic Lagadec, Georg Heeg looked at Smalltalk’s history and future direction and James Foster ran through news from the Gemstone world, including brief discussions of Metacello and Scaffolding.
After lunch there were a series of shorter presentations including the “academic strand” of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies.
In the evening, Instantiations sponsored the reception event in the evening, and took the opportunity to announce free editions of Visual Age Smalltalk for academic and open source usage, which was very well received!
Attendees also had the opportunity to see the entries for the ESUG 2009 Innovation Technology Awards. A record-breaking 21 applications were entered this year, and the results of the voting will be announced at the conference social event on Thursday.
(Photo from Adrian van Os’ site)
