Tag Archives: fosdem

FOSDEM 2010

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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.

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Road to FOSDEM 2010

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As most of you already know (if you don’t, never mind, I will forgive you :D ), I’m going to give a lightning talk in the Free Java Dev room at FOSDEM about Groovy. The title will be “Groovy: the cool side of java” and basically it will be an hand-on speech. No slide, just code. I will start from a simple Java code and I will rewrite it in Groovy. During the demo/live I will give some basics explanation about how is groovy working and we will see the power and the value that Groovy add at the top of JVM compared with a static language like Java.

Here the code that I wrote:

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Collections;

class TestJava{
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      new DoStuffs().doIt();
   }
}

class DoStuffs{

   public void doIt(){

   List al = new ArrayList();

   System.out.println("* Initial size of"+al.getClass()+" :  " + al.size() + " with elements "+al);

   al.add("this");
   al.add("is");
   al.add("just");
   al.add("test");

   System.out.println("* Final size of"+al.getClass()+" :  " + al.size() + " with elements "+al);
   System.out.println("* Let's add some stuffs");

   al.add(2,"a");
   al.add(3,"cool");

   System.out.println("* Done "+al);
   System.out.println("");

   System.out.println("- Before ordering"+al);
   Collections.sort(al);
   System.out.println("- After ordering "+al);
   System.out.println("");

   List al2 = al.subList(2,4);

   System.out.println("- Sublisting "+al2);
   System.out.println("");

   if(al.size() > 0){
      for (int i=0; i< al.size(); i++) {
         al.set(i, al.get(i)+" \\o/ ");
      }

      System.out.println("Let's show the element in the reverse order: ");
      for (int i=al.size()-1; i>=0; i--){
         System.out.println("<"+i+"> "+al.get(i));
      }
   }

   if(al != null){
      List sub = new ArrayList();

      for (int i=0; i< al.size(); i++) {
         String el = (String) al.get(i);
         if(el.contains("t")) {
            sub.add(al.get(i));
         }
      }
      System.out.println("- After grep "+ sub);
    }
  }
}

FOSDEM – What a cool event!

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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 :P

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 :)