Monday 7 September 2009

ESUG 2009 wrapup

Well, as I recover from another busy but very fruitful ESUG, it's interesting to look at what made it such an enjoyable conference. There is a real sense of community there that makes it a pleasure to attend every year.

There were some interesting presentations but, for me anyway, the true value was in the networking and personal conversations. I made some interesting new contacts, renewed some old ones, and rounded up some consulting work that will keep me in Europe for a little bit longer. The organizers made some last minute changes this year to help encourage these sorts of meetings and I hope we will see more of this sort of thing next year.

My overall impression is that these are interesting times for the world of Smalltalk. There seems to be a sense of common purpose and renewed life at the moment and it's satisfying to think that Seaside has played at least a small role in making that happen. I'm not sure what lies ahead, but I think opportunities will arise that we need to take advantage of. I'm also not yet sure exactly what part I want to play but I'm starting to think seriously about it.

My tutorial with Lukas was well received. As usual, we didn't quite manage to get through all of our material, but it went pretty smoothly and I think the thirty-or-so participants all picked up some new tricks to use in their Seaside projects.

The Seaside sprint was very successful, even though we didn't quite meet our target of finishing a 3.0 beta release. Keep an eye out for an announcement when we do get it done.

I'll close with links to a few people's photos:
Hope to see you all next year in Barcelona!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did anyone record your tutorial given with Lukas?

Julian Fitzell said...

I think there was a camera running, yes, but I'm not sure what's happening to the footage. James Robertson was filming most stuff as well but I know he was filming the other sessions, not our tutorial.