FOSDEM 2014 was another amazing experience, beside the interesting talks about Graph Processing I’ve attended, the main ingredient, that make it so unique are the people.
I’ve created also a nice comic with some nasty jokes, you can find it here.
After long times I finally have time to publish my impressions about FOSDEM 2010.
In advance I can say it was a beautiful experience.
I arrived on Friday afternoon and I met the other fedora ambassadors for the EMEA Ambassador meeting, let me say meeting face to face is worthy more thatn 1000 characters typed on IRC. It Was a pleasure to see a lot of new faces and meet again all the veterans after long time. A lot of Greeks and a lot of people coming from The Netherlands.
On Saturday afternoon I gave a speech on Groovy. It was a really base introduction starting from a Java code. The room was completely full of people, and let me say the java room were only from people really interested to, it was far from the whole event, so every person there was more interesting. At the end the talk went pretty well. I was so nervous and I made a lot of mistakes while typed my code live, I also broke it swapping missingMethodException and methodMissing().
Anyway the good news for me is that globally groovy is a technology that still gain a lot of people, considering is not anymore the hottest one (I mean the one under the reflectors, like Scala is right now).
I didn’t follow any talk, I spent all my time talking with a lot of people in particular Fedora ambassadors, to have improve my network with them. This time my english was much better and I could contribute more with my thoughts.
I stayed almost all Sunday at Fedora booth. I left it just to have help from sspeitzer to flash it with cynogemod. We dumped it and we were close to start the flash, but I needed to backup my data before so we didn’t go further. I still trying to syncronize my calendar but seems no calendar alternative applications are available on Android (and this sucks).
The social events were really amazing, we went twice to Delirium Cafe and I can say Belgian beers are amazing! I Love them!
What it will remains impress in my mind, from this FOSDEM, it will be the friendly spirit and the coperation we had. It was impressing how we managed the booth and the organization, in particular was terrific the cooperations cross-distribution we have with other guys from Debian, Centos… I believe the decision of the FOSDEM organization to mix the distributions rooms was a good choice.
It was worthy for my coming to this event, I went home with a lot of new ideas and motivations.
And I discovered that I love Brussels!
Other photos here.
“Step up or shut up!“, created by Jeroen Van Meewen (aka Kanarip) is THE most real opensouce motto. Every person who is going to write an email of complains/flames/request/whatever, should stop writing, read it, count until 1111 and then start thinking.
Yesterday I got the good news about fedora FAmSCo (Fedora Ambassador Sterling Committee) elections, I was running for: I got elected in the board!
I finally want to do something different for Fedora, writing less code and start getting some responsibility, in order to grow in some aspects I’ve seen before.
Many many compliments to who have been elected and also for who haven’t, I’m sure next time will go better 😉
The Groovy & Grails eXchange, organized by skillsmatter, was the first international conferences about software development I’ve attended in my career. Before I was more concentrated mostly on Linux and the Fedoraproject (FOSDEM, Linux TAG for instance).
The conference was headed in London from December 9th to 10th. The first day was focuses on Groovy and the second on Grails. I went there with Raffaele and Davide, friends and colleague of mine (we work together in Holland). As the conferences last Wednesday and Thursday, we decided to get Friday off and stay in London during the week end to visit the city (I already been there almost one year ago but London is always lovely).
At the conference there were about 150 people, mostly developers (heavy twitter users), in particular freelancers and really small companies from all over the world.
I really found all the speech really interesting. Guillaume Laforge spoke about the features of Groovy 1.7 and above (we even had a brief introduction about what are they considering to include in the 1.8 release) and Graeme Rocher introduced Grails 1.2.0 and the new plug-in development approach.
Based on my work in Holland, I really appreciated the ‘Groovy code kata’ talk from Dierk Koening and the DSL speech from Verkat Subramaniam. I had a really interesting chat with him about DSLs, in particular about what we should consider more important to balance the DSL we designed and are using in our project (I swear, I’ll post about it). I found Verkat really good to make examples in order to help you to understand better complexed concepts (DSL by examples might be a suggestion for next book ;-)).
You can find some photos about the conference itself here and here.
I’m really satisfied by this conference, I met a lot of people and exchange contact with them to keep in touch and, at the end I won Grails in Action book. 🙂 I also met also three guys from the NLGUG (Netherland Groovy User Group): Erik, Alex and Sebastien. They were really interested to my work with groovy and they invited me to give a speech, next year, to the Groovy User Group. I already accepted because it’s cool to meet new people on topics I like and I’ll get the opportunity to get more integrated into the local groups.
I met also Alberto Brandolini (ZioBrando for most of the people), who is a trainer for skillsmatter and a expert software architect in Italy. Before, he saw only a name and a photo but fortunately I had the opportunity to spoke with him to exchange some ideas and suggestion.
After the conferences we enjoy London for three days. I can say that I love London, and it’s strange because London is chaotic and I’m not use to it, but it has a fashion and a people integration level that is difficult(may be impossible) to find in any other cities (maybe in New York, but I’ve never been there, yet).
Maybe after my project in Holland will be finished, I’ll move there for a while, who knows. But we’ll see.
From London I can say that English people are really crazy, or they drink like sponges. I really would like to know how many drink they drink: I saw people with t-shirt in the middle of the night with around 0° or below, is it possible to survive? I would like to know how can they drink English beers: for me are too warm and they have a strange bitter after-taste.
Anyway London is fantastic and beautiful. Period.
I took some photos, you can find here.
This year the Linux Day in Lodi was a bit unusual, because was organized in part from abroad and in a really short time.
After 5 years of Linux Days, we are pretty handy on it, so most of the work was already done.
The agenda was a mix of techincal and divulgatives talks. We got two guests: Daniele Segato and Alessandro Palumbo that respectively spoke about “git for superheroes” and “Drupal: With a great CMS comes great possibility”. Good impression the first talks done by Leonardo about Openoffice and Raffaello about Gobby (a nice collaborative editor).
Despite the effort we put on it, we had low participation, probably we lack in communication: more spam and more conventional channels; Facebook (in Italy) remains a weak way to have more people participating to some events.
Anyway a big Thanks to anybody who came, who organized and set it up and all contributors we had. Thanks!
Photos (from Francesco Crippa) here.
Gents,
after months trying, wasted faxes to the sucker italian registry, I succesfull to register the fedoraproject.it domain.
Now finally the Italian community may have a cool website which will be the official italian place for fedora.
June is going to be a bit heavy. All weekends are taken:
“Document Freedom Day” is an event, promoted by the Free Software Foundation, whose aim is to spread free documents formats and the Free Software culture. Last Wednesday I attended the Italian DFD 2009 in Opera (near to Milan, where in 2008 was organized “Liberamente“).
Me and Gianluca Varisco proposed a talk about the core values of the Fedora project, whose aim is to spread the meaning of the 4 foundations in general, and Fedora’s policies around codecs and firmwares in particular – thus covering a wider subject matter, not only documents.
Fedora gadgets
However, I couldn’t stay there all the time because it was a workday. I came during my lunch break and brought an OLPC (the byte-code one), some Fedora stickers and gadgets with me. Stefano Frontori, my colleague at byte-code, accompanied me and he was the official photographer (you will find some photos attached to this post). He’s a very good photographer but he has only one defect: he’s a Canonist (yep, this is a neologism “A person who uses a Canon” 🙂 )
Fedora attenders
The initial plan was to do a two-people speech, but unfortunately Gianluca was unable to attend, due to last-minute-problems. I want to thank him: he took care all boring pre-event tasks: put together an abstract, contact the event owners and so on. There weren’t many people, but some interested students (better than 100 bored and inattentive people). I had only 30 minutes for my speech so I tried to do it in a more interactive way, people could interrupt me, ask questions and so on. At the end there was an important question about Fedora hardware support, about the community, and Fedora/Ubuntu comparison.
Me and my talk
I want also to point out the spirit of the FSF, in this case FSF Italy. Where the hell were they? FSF choose the most ugly day to organize this event (it was a workday, how can you expect a wide audience?), and didn’t send any FSF person.
Fedora ambassadors
Last but not least, many thanks to every voluntary people who organized this event. Special thanks to Alexjian Carraturo who allowed Fedora presence to this event.
This morning Francesco published his report so, right now I’m the last one…
This time was my first attendance to FOSDEM and I was really impressed how many geeks was participating.
I went to FOSDEM with some byte-code colleagues: Francesco, Davide and Marco.
We arrived on Friday at about 22:00 and we missed the social event (which was scheduled for 18:00 (!!!), a bit early for a beer event in a place where is not possible to eat – Delirium cafe).
We decided to eat something near hotel and then we had a beer in the nearest random place in Luxemburg square (near European parliament).
On Saturday we met other ambassadors for breakfast and went to University by cab.
We performed some ordinary set-up tasks: fixed posters on walls, distributed Fedora CDs on other booth’s tables (Jens rulez), prepared stickers, and so on.
I stayed to the booth until 11AM then I had a brainstorming about symbolic future, although we are colleagues in the same company, we usually don’t work in the same place and this meeting was a great opportunity to meet each other by person.
At 17:00, after my speech about Func and Symbolic I met a lot of people. From Italy I met Emanuele, who was my colleague in University, he is really interested in Fedora Electonic Lab and I will take care to give him technical support, gadget, availability for talk, to help him to spread about this fedora spin and bring it in some interested high schools. I met also Robert Lazzurs and Jasper Capel who are working on Func and Cobbler (and they did a really nice Cobbler speech), Stephane and Louis who are working with us on Symbolic.
On Saturday night was planned to go to Churchill’s pub but when we arrived, it was late and no Ambassadors was present inside. we followed again the “nearest-place-to-eat/drink” algorithm, and entered in a really sad and ugly old place. Fortunately the beer was good 😛
On Sunday I attended Drupal 7, IPA, Cobbler talks.
The most valuable and important thing in this day was a short experience and opinion exchange with some French ambassadors about community; in my opinion theirs community is the biggest and strongest Fedora community in Europe, so why don’t learn from them?
We Italian are growing but we need to change our infrastructure (I mean our website, which is *null* right now). I have in my TODO queue a post about this argument. Promise.
Francesco, Davide and Marco returned in Italy on Sunday afternoon, I stayed in Brussels until Monday afternoon. On Sunday night me and Lorenzo met Kostas and Pierros and some Greeks guys and went to Delirium cafe (I missed the social event on Friday but I knew it was a really cool place) and we had a really nice evening.
We drank a bit without eating anything, so my remembers was a bit confused 🙂
We left Delirium cafe and went to eat, on the way Me and Pierros had to “push out some liquids”. After hard searching (there wasn’t “safe” places) we decided to use the FCFS algorithm, so we pissed on a (small) tree in a square near the Bourse (and of course we did a contribution to their grow), then we reach the other in a kebab shop. What a crazy night! 🙂
On Monday I had a trip in Brussels and I visited the whole city. Some photos will be available on my flickr profile.
When I was in Brussels Airport, I got a coffee at Starbucks and I sat near two girls and I guy (sat in separated tables).
I heard that two girls spoke about “woman stuff”: girls, men, sex, and so on… They was Italian and, of course, I masquerade my nationality and continue to drink my coffee and listen 🙂 It was really interesting.
The funny thing was to saw their faces when discovered that me and the other guy were Italian: priceless.
I went home at 23:00 and I felt asleep in about few minutes.
PS: My english is not perfect, if you find “english error”, and you will, write a comment, I wont publish it but I use it to learn and fix my post 🙂
Thinking and inspiration 