Last and best day of FISL

The third and last day of FISL was, for me, the best day of all. Not only could I enjoy my previous night but I could sleep and come to the conference without problems. The day started at 9 am as usual, but the first interesting talk was Randal L. Schwartz about Smalltalk and Seaside. Let me repeat: Randal Schwartz about Smalltalk. Not Perl, Smalltalk! He still loves Perl and is still very important in the Perl world but he said Smalltalk is being an amazing experience.
Sadly, he ran a bit out of time during the talk so the audience could only see very little things about Seaside but the lonely fact of having him spreading Seaside is great.
After the talk, I talked to him about the screencasts and the squeakcasts website idea and guess what? He already knew about the screencasts, saw them and liked it. That scared the hell out of me! :) I will have to think much more to make better screencasts next time.
Already had a small critic about my block explanation that I hope to handle in future screencasts.
Anyway, it seems we might work together to get Squeakcasts under the squeak.org domain. I'll do my best to have the site ready as fast as I can and get more screencasts going.

Next episode was a talk about Scrum and eXtreme Programming by Guilherme Chapiewski. His justification to present this in a Free Software conference was that people need to work in some way, to work and those methodologies get as close as programmers as we can. His talk was pretty basic showing the default scrum and xp definition with a few examples of his experience. I was amazed that he got the talk accepted because people from Agilcoop tried in the last conference and revisors said that it was an already discussed matter. I didn't like a couple things he said although the presentation was good for a general audience. The part when he spoke about eXtreme Programming practices like if it was a sin to use them upset me a little. He also said that XP is scary for manager and Scrum is better because you can present it as a simple method and working in a team, etc... The argument sounded amazingly biased since you can present XP in the same way. I don't think managers are so stupid that a name would scare them more than another but anyway. The room was overloaded, people were sitting in the floor and I suppose it will help convert a few more programmers to agile methods so that is good.

And this was the end for me. Mariana got sick and I left the event earlier to get her into a bed and ensure she didn't get worse. In a short summary, I liked FISL 9 and it was very good but mostly because of the people I can meet there and not so much because of the talks. I hope next year they will have the Smalltalk track running and I can present something nice there. I also expect them to go to a bigger place (maybe FIERGS, which I complained about last year but that can fit the 7500 attendees) and have a more stable wireless connection.

That's it about FISL. See you soon with the next screencast.

FISL 9: First and second day

Hello,
This is my first time to breath since we left São Paulo on Wednesday by 16:00h. Since then, our bus was stopped by the Police, we had to drop a girl in a hotel because she didn't had any papers and we were around 6 hours late.
Since then, I've found a couple of friends, met some people and suffered from an overloaded wi-fi. First day was only to meet people, find friends, chat a bit and no time for talk. In the evening, Google organized a speacher's dinner and, being a presenter, I could enjoy an overloaded restaurant (i.e. they ran out of food and the waiters couldn't reach me) with everything (including drinks) payed. Too bad I didn't know about it since the beginning and couldn't enjoy more of it.

The second day is about to end and the news were:

• I gave my talk with Mariana and Fabricio about the Coding Dojo which was partially successful. It was completly full for the first hour. We started loosing people when the actual coding started. It seems people wanted to learn more about the philosophy behind the dojo and not to see one working. Those who stayed said they liked it thought. Let's hope more Dojos start around Brazil.
• I went to a talk about the economics around floss by Rishab Ghosh. Interesting but I prefered the one he gave at IME/USP about copyrights and patents. The idea that we always feel we are contributing less than we receive is very reasonable once well explained.
• After that, Fabricio gave a talk about Rails teaching people to start without using scaffold. It looks like people loved it because there was no place in the room 3 minutes after it started and people stayed until the end.
• The next talk was about the CCSL (Free Software Competence Center) and partially my masters so I was involved in it. It was much emptier and I only had to talk about my own research so we are good.
• Finally, about 1 hour ago, when that talk ended, the whole bunch of people from college were buzzing the Google stand to earn t-shirts and mugs by solving 3x3x3 rubik's cube. Since a lot of people know the algorithm already, we got almost banned from it and never got any price for solving the 4x4x4 cube (Yoshi did it). They (Yoshi and Mari) are now trying a cube that is not separated into smaller cubes but in weird forms.

I now just lost my last talk by writing this post but I guess it wasn't that important anyway. I'll write another post in the bus back so I should post it back in São Paulo. Have fun.