The Weekly Squeak

Category: Conferences

  • Google Summer of Code – work begins!

    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

    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

    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

    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

  • Cincom Smalltalk World Tour under way

    Cincom are starting 2010 with their Smalltalk Technology Conference 2010 World Tour. This is a chance to learn more about how Smalltalk helps companies around the world reduce costs, improve efficiency, and get to market faster.

    The Cincom team of Suzanne Fortman, James Robertson, Arden Thomas and Andreas Hiltner will be joined at the venues by Georg Heeg, giving a customer perspective on how Smalltalk can help your organisation, and Gartner analyst Tom Murphy, talking about the value of dynamic languages in general, and of Smalltalk in particular.

    The schedule of events is:
    • Seattle, 21 January
    • Toronto, 26 January
    • D.C. Metro Area, 28 January
    • London, 2 March
    • Paris, 4 March
    Find out more about each session on the events page of Cincom’s glossy new website, and keep an eye on James Robertson’s blog for updates as they happen.

  • Smalltalks 2009 videos and photos available

    Hernan Wilkinson wrote to the squeak -dev mailing list that the Smalltalks 2009 presentations are available now at the Smalltalks Conference site under the “Talks” tab. Given that the speakers included such well-known figures as Dan Ingalls, Stephane Ducasse, Alex Warth, Tim Mackinnon, James Foster and Travis Griggs, there should be some fascinating viewing to be had.

    Hernan added: “You can watch also the video used during the presentation that summarizes the previous two years of the conference, it is a very nice video. It is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekRhvg7W6AQ“.

    There are also links to other videos and pictures from the conference home page.

  • Smalltalk Party in Paris

    Noury Bouraqadi wrote to the squeak-dev mailing list with news that French Smalltalk users are holding their eighth annual SmalltalkParty in Paris on Saturday 28th November 2009.

    The empahsis is on short presentations, so there promises to be plenty of interesting presentations. Items already planned for discussion include:

    • Speed dating with Smalltalk—Smalltalk in 15 min
    • Pharo: a Smalltalk vision
    • Profiler in Smalltalk
    • Mondrian  visualisations
    • Seaside by example
    • Small Parser—an executable grammar-based parser
    • Helvetia: A framework for DSLs
    • Coral: a Smalltalk scripting Langage
    • F-Script 2.0 news

    The session will be held at Ecole des Mines de Paris, Boulevard Saint Michel – Paris and runs from 09:00 to 17:00.

    For more information (in French) see the SmalltalkParty webpage.

  • Smalltalks 2009

    smalltalks

    Following on from their high-profile presence at ESUG this year, the Argentinian Smalltalk community are preparing to host their third annual domestic Smalltalk conference, Smalltalks 2009.

    Running from 19th to 21st November in Buenos Aires, the conference’s goal is to “gather both the Argentine and International Smalltalk community to get connected sharing our work and experience with regards to Smalltalk or related topics”.

    The conference will have two streams: “Research and Education” for research and education work done with Smalltalk in universities and public or private
    entities; and “Industry and Development” for presentations related to Smalltalk software developed by companies or individuals, both public and private.

    In addition, the event will host a Smalltalk programming contest.  As in previous years, well known personalities from the international community will attend the conference.

    All those connected with Smalltalk, be it faculty, students, researchers, developers or entrepreneurs, are invited to participate, free of charge, as presenters and members of the audience.

    In addition, early registrants get a great-looking T-shirt for free, so get your bookings in now!

  • ESUG 2009 wrap up – Best Ever?

    DSC_5243-1

    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:

    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

    ESUG 2009 UBO

    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)