This meeting is really open source developer oriented, several communities are meeting there (debian, mozilla, kde, enlightenment…) and I’m unfortunately not involved in any of this, so lots of tracks are too specific for me. Nonetheless some of them are more “general” and sound interesting.

Last year I was wondering how to contribute a bit to the open source community, the only thing I did was small piece of software (called pwad) to download picasa albums sent by friends. I can do better than that.

Anyway, FOSDEM is a great event, if you are in Brussels at that time, you should definitely go there and at least have a look of what’s happening. Last year I learned very interesting stuff and ideas that I hope will be nicely integrated in mainstream software/operating systems.

It’s a very interesting presentation, it’s quite amazing to see that most of programming languages principles where designed 30-40 years ago. If you are a developer, I recommend you to watch Barbara Liskov’s presentation: “The Power of Abstraction”.

As usual with conferences, goodies review. What do we get: – conference program (on paper) – a bag (made from biodegradable material)

That’s all good to me. Quite eco-friendy and nothing is unnecessary.

Here is the list of sessions I attended:

Welcome (FOSDEM Staff)

Quick history of the FOSDEM and of course the FOSDEM dance.

Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company (Brooks Davis)

Brooks Davis told us how they managed to bring some of the open source way of working in a big aerospace company. I find incredible that in a company working for aerospace (and even any company doing software) some developers are still not using any version control system.

Evil on the Internet (Richard Clayton)

Quick presentation of what “bad people” are doing on the internet and how it works, with live examples of phishing/fake banks/fake escrow websites.

Visit the AA419 website for more information.

Mozilla Europe/Mozilla Foundation (Tristan Nitot/Gervase Markham)

Some info on current status and future stuff at Mozilla. Some discussion about the ballot screen.

Personal note: the ballot screen will appear for every Windows XP/Vista/7 users how do not have installed any other web browser. This is a decision of the European Commission imposed to Microsoft. But what about people working at the European Commission? Are they going to see the ballot screen on their computers? Obviously, like in any company managing their computers, this is going to be blocked in order to keep the “homogeneity” and ease of system administration. Guess what? I am working at the EC (as external contractor). Since I’m a developer, I can install whatever I want^H^H^H^Hneed on my work computer so I don’t have the problem (and in fact since I’m doing a bit of web development I’ve all major web browsers installed). Anyway, I will see if my colleagues get some choice for their web browser.

FLOSS: a key to self-determination in Internet life (Mitchell Baker)

OK, I can’t really summarize but it was interesting. Free and open source software have values, freedom related ones (at least). To some extent we can see those values in how the internet has been built and we need to be sure that those values are still going to drive the future of the internet and even take a more predominant place.

Hackability (Tristan Nitot/Paul Rouget)

Do you want the internet to be a place only for for-profit companies to sell you their products? I hope not (if you do, what the hell are you doing here?). An important thing that will prevent that is to be sure that the internet is hackable. That mean we can do what we want with it, event if it was not designed for.

I would like to give an example of a hackable product by design: a Lego box. When you buy a Lego box, it’s shipped with a manual with one or two (sometimes more) patterns to build what Lego thinks you might want to build with. But obviously, it’s for fun, and Lego does not forbid you to do anything else with it, on the contrary, they encourage you to do stuff they didn’t think you could do with it… and it’s quite normal since Lego bricks are done to build whatever you want.

On the internet it’s quite the same. You have bricks. Different kind of bricks, versatile ones (bits and bytes) on top of which people have created more complex bricks (HTML, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, XMPP, XML, CSS, JavaScript…) allowing you to do any kind of things. But there are some stuff that are not following that concept. Take Flash for instance, here you have the Logo box already mounted and you can’t unmount it, you can play a bit with it but not that much.

Paul did a demo showing that the web is hackable (changing the UI of a website and with the help of Firefox/Greasemonkey change how to interact with the website), that Firefox is hackable (switching from a tab to an other by shaking his wiimote!).

HTML 5 (Paul Rouget)

The “theorical” part of the presentation was done by someone else but I don’t have his name (sorry). Anyway, since most of the stuff I developed so far were web applications, I was quite interested in this presentation (and of course because I have been too lazy to check by myself what’s new in HTML 5).

HTML 5 syntax, very pragmatic. HTML has been slaughtered on so many web pages that web browsers are now very good at understanding the understandable. So of course, instead of imposing a drastic syntax (like XML based stuff requires usually) that nobody is going to apply, HTML 5 is quite “user friendly” (in the way that you can type whatever you want, it’s going to work (uppercase, lowercase, it doesn’t care, you don’t close your tags? not a problem…)). I think web browsers (except IE of course ) are the perfect example of “be strict in what you send, but generous in what you receive”.

Anyway, lots of new tags like header, footer, aside, of course video, canvas…

Paul did an amazing demo with a “simple webpage” turning out to be an interactive presentation with CSS transitions, video playing, 2D transformations, 3D ones… impressive.

Amarok 2.2 Rocking (Sven Krohlas)

I was an Amarok user for a long time but since I switched to the Mac it’s not the case anymore (even though Amarok runs on Mac). Anyway, the moodbar is back!

I haven’t played a lot with Amarok 2.x, but I don’t feel very comfortable with the UI. In 2.2 it’s a bit better. Maybe a part of the problem is that I don’t like KDE’s default theme.

It was a conference on free (as in free speech) softwares, but there are not only softwares that are free, there is also music. Go to Jamendo and listen/download a bit of music, you might discover good music under Creative Commons licenses (I recommend: Diablo Swing Orchestra and David TMX)

NoSQL for Fun & Profit (Tim Anglade)

A quick overview of what is NoSQL, no technical details, more a presentation for managers. Anyway, like lots of people I have suffered of SQL. For several reasons, first, it’s hard to find a project where a relational database is not badly used, a RDBMS can be very good at what it does (like PostgreSQL), it still needs to be used correctly, and secondly, because it was almost the only way “managers” did know about storing data. Who have never seen that kind of situation:

The manager: “On our new software we are going to use this programming language and that relational database.”

The developer: “I can understand that we need a programming language since we are going to write a software, but we don’t need a relational database for it.”

The manager: “Of course we need a relational database, every software use a relational database.”

The developer: “Well… no.”

The manager: “I’m the one deciding, you are only the mindless developer coding the stuff I ask so shut up.” (OK, maybe not that part)

Well anyway, NoSQL is a good idea to make sure that people know that we have choices on how we store data and that there are some ways better for some kind of tasks and others ways better for other kind of tasks.

Mozmill (Henrik Skupin)

A quick presentation of Mozmill, a tool used to do automated functional tests on Mozilla products (Firefox, Thunderbird…). Each version of Firefox in fact 225 versions of Firefox (75 languages on 3 platforms) and all of them should/need to be tested. It looks like at Mozilla they are not really in the test driven mindset (yet), and they are lacking of tests. Wait… sorry, when I say tests, I always think “automated tests”, it’s inhuman to make a person run a test suite manually, unfortunately to many people are paid for that. From what I understood they have some manual test suites for Firefox and fortunately they are trying to automate them.

You can see the mozmill generated reports for Firefox here: http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/couchdb/mozmill/_design/reports/_list/summary/summary

Towards GNUstep GUI 1.0 (Fred Kiefer)

GNUstep has been in development for ages and there is still no 1.0 version. So the question was “do we need to do one and if yes, what needs to be in”. Obviously, the answer for the first part is “yes” (so it will attract more developers, *BSD and Linux distributions will update their packages…). The second part of the question was not really solved. One proposition was to name the version 10.2 and has complete support of Cocoa 10.2.

L20n (Axel Hecht)

I’m not a specialist of internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n), I know some issues regarding that but quite frankly, I didn’t really understood the presentation. It’s a bit more clear after a look on the l20n wiki. Sounds interesting to me since I think that the current way of doing (key/value) sucks a lot as soon as you have some non ultra-trivial stuff to do.

Étoilé: Where it is, where it’s going, why it isn’t there yet (Quentin Mathé/David Chisnall)

What have they done since the beginning in 2004? This is a project with few people but lots of ideas. One thing I find interesting is the CoreObject framework. Well in fact not the framework, but the ideas behind. From a user point of view, having to save your documents sucks. Why the default state is “in case of problem you are going to lose all your unsaved work” and not “in case of problem all your work is saved”? So here the idea is everything you change on your document is recorded, so you can do/undo/redo modification, close your document, open it again, ask to undo stuff you have done before… the history of your changes on the document have been saved all along.

Such ideas are not new, we have been talking about that for decades (well, not me, I’m talking about it only for years, I’m not that old ), but mainstream operating systems are still not implementing it.

Women and Mozilla (Delphine Lebédel)

Quick presentation of WoMoz.

Nepomuk (Sebastian Trüg)

Recent operating systems are now indexing datas so it’s fast and easy to search for stuff on your computer. Nepomuk is a “semantic” way of doing so (using RDF and so on).

Several functionalities are similar between Nepomuk and what I think Étoilé’s CoreObject do. But Nepomuk is based on “standards” like RDF and SPARQL.

Mozilla Panel Discussion (Mitchell Baker/Tristan Nitot/Mark Surman)

A discussion on Mozilla’s mission. Lots of questions about privacy. I confirm, Mozilla’s people have the right mindset (at least the mindset I like) and I’m glad that they are caring about the Internet.

Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch (Greg Kroah-Hartman)

A live example on what you need to do and how to do a patch for the Linux kernel.

That’s all

There are several presentations I would like to went to but we still have not invented a device giving us ubiquity.

I now have a lot more thinks to thing about, I may write down some of my thoughts here soon.

Anyway, a big thank you to the FOSDEM staff for organizing all that, to all the speakers and finally to all the people attending the event.

I never had the opportunity to assist FOSDEM before, so this time I’m not going to miss it.

I haven’t look at the planning seriously yet, there is a huge amount of stuff going on there, it’s going hard to make choices. At least I have seen that Mozilla is presenting some stuff, I hope I will be able to see Tristan at last (though I’m not sure it’s really fulfilling to listen to someone I always agree with (well, I’ve been reading his blog for several years now and I don’t really remember not agreeing on something)).

This reminds me I should find a way to start sharing with the community. I have been using open source softwares for years, on my day to day work, what frustrates me the most is each time I’m struggling with proprietary softwares (which I tend to avoid) while I know that the same problem with an open source software would have been solved much more easier (because of the help of the community and the availability of the source code).

So, are you coming?

In November I went to XP Day BeNeLux as expected. First time in Benelux, second time this year (after XP Day France 2009) and the fourth time in total.

The thing that I have seen already in France is the shift to Lean and in fact at XP Day Benelux, there was no sessions about eXtreme Programming!

If you read this blog quite often you know that I don’t really like goodies, and XP Day Benelux is now a reference to me. When you get there they give you a small time table with all the sessions and some cards to take notes. That’s all I need when going to a conference, nothing more, nothing less. But in fact there was also a amazingly wonderful gift , a small white board with a pen to write on it (and since it took me several months to get real white board at work, I used the one given at XP Day in the meantime).

A space for programmers’ training: lessons from the coding dōjō experiment

Emmanuel did a quick history on how the coding dōjō idea came to life, what is the purpose of it, rules to respect, etc.

What I remember from that session:

• It’s like kata in martial arts, a way to learn how to resolve automatically and elegantly a problem by doing it over and over again. So when you face a similar problem in real life you can tackle it right away with a proper solution instead of doing a quick and dirty hack.
• It matters that things are done the right way, and coding dōjō help learning to recognize and understand why something is beautiful or not. I think, unlike what people usually say, that beauty is not subjective only (see this post on theory of centers for instance).
• Lots of ideas on how to organize and maintain a coding dōjō.

You can find if there is a coding dōjō near you on the coding dōjō website.

I never went to a coding dōjō but it’s really something I would like. I spent 3 years in Paris knowing there was a coding dōjō and never went to any session, and now I’m in Brussels and there is no coding dōjō (I also still have to visit the Eiffel Tower and the catacombs). I think Emmanuel did one on Monday evening but I had to leave quite early so I was not able to attend it.

The Toyota way management principles for sustained lean and agile

All the information shown in this session are available.

I already went to a presentation of the Toyota way by Pascal but this session was more dense, so I can’t say that I remember something in particular. The first time I didn’t get that all the practices/values/etc. were linked together so Lean works better as a whole (see the first page of the Toyota Way handout).

What I learned from burning down my house

This session was about how a crisis can be a good thing and help moving to a more agile/lean way of working. What I learned from it: I need a crisis at work!

User stories and estimating for enterprise agile

Not really what I was expecting, a bit of it was a presentation of their product. Anyway, there was still some interesting stuff to listen to.

Agile politics

This one was a game showing that we all are playing politics in a way or an other. Helps understanding why and when politics are happening.

Solve conflicts without compromise

In that session I learn (and already forgot ) a “tool” to help solving conflicts by asking simple questions in a specific way. Very interesting and it surely requires a lot of practice (the “coaches” were amazingly better than me at asking the good questions the right way).

The yellow brick road – agile adoption through peer coaching

This one was an agile fairy tale by Portia. This game simply reveals to yourself that you already know how to solve the problems you encounter and it’s very powerful.

Misc

• good
  • Lots of interesting things to learn.
  • New ideas to think about.
  • Saw amazing people.
  • Beer.
• not so good
  • There was some Aikido sessions but I didn’t attend any of them.
  • I was not able to stay after the dinner.
  • It was raining.
  • I did not spoke/share with a lot of people.
  • Some sessions were not that good.

If you want to register, be quick, there are only 8% places left.

Here are the sessions I think I will try to attend:

• Setting up and running a space for programmers’ training. I never went to any Coding Dojo, it might be interesting to learn a bit about it. The session is presented by Emmanuel Gaillot, I remember seeing him several times (in previous XP Day France I think) but I never went to any of his sessions.
• The Toyota way management principles for sustained lean and agile. I think the title is quite self explaining about why the session might be interesting. That session is presented by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Portia Tung. People are usually very satisfied by their sessions, I have seen only one presentation by Pascal, it was about Lean (presentation organized by Zenika).
• The quadrants of effectiveness game. I already know a bit the subject, it will at least refresh my memory.
• Writing user stories and estimating techniques for enterprise agile. I don’t feel very comfortable when writing user stories, I’ve a lack of experience in that domain.
• Flying horses – cleaner code in other languages. I have been using mostly only Java for the last 5 years, except a year using Erlang, so having a look to some other languages might be insightful.
• Solve conflicts without compromise. Who can not be interested by that?
• The yellow brick road. Sounds interesting.

As I was talking about it before, I love goodies :-/. Like any conference, I got a bag with some goodies. I apologize for the crappy pictures.

The bag containing all the goodies was in plastic… I liked the recycled paper bags used at XP Day France 2009. A bit more eco-friendly.

The mandatory CITCON Paris 2009 T-Shirt. I Think I probably have more T-Shirts than anything else in my closet, enough to wear a different one for each casual Friday of the year .

A JetBrains TeamCity T-Shirt. This one is kind of “home made”, don’t put it in your washing machine. JetBrains people are very good at making incredible softwares like IntelliJ IDEA and they definitely should stay in the software business, not in the T-Shirt business .

A note pad, useful for taking notes during sessions. Sponsored by Zutubi for their Pulse continuous integration system.

A ball!!! From Valtech. I don’t know why, but in every XP teams I’ve worked in, we always had some balls. I’m not sure that “useful” is an appropriate term for this device, but clearly a “must have” in a working team .

A 2GB USB flash drive from MSDN. As I already told before, 2GB is the minimum size we can get nowadays and since I don’t have bought any USB flash drive for years, this one is now the biggest one I have. I like the credit card format, it fit very well in a wallet but I don’t really like the way it’s done, it’s not really easy to use. I think the fictional one created by Marshall in Alias is more user friendly:

An evaluation CD from ThoughtWorks.

Some stuff to read, I trashed it all after fast-reading it (except the list of CITCON volunteers).

And of course, pens. A black one from Microsoft Hardware and a blue one from Open Information Foundation.

Conclusion

• The bag: since there are goodies, we need something to hold them, but it should be done with more eco-friendly materials.
• T-shirts: no really useful since we all already have tons of them and I think most of us can’t wear them very often.
• Note pad and pens: Useful to take notes during sessions, but I think most of us bring our own ones.
• Ball: that’s just for fun, actually it’s the goodies I use the most.
• USB flash drive: the same bigger and more user friendly should be great (for me).
• CD: come on, we can download your softwares from your website, we don’t need to have soon-outdated versions on a physical media.
• Stuff to read: most of it was quite useless, at least it can be recycled.

It was not so bad this time, compared to some conferences where everything had to go to the trash directly.

La conférence s’est tenue au Chalet de la Porte Jaune, près du bois de Vincennes. Le cadre était donc agréable, entouré par la nature, ça change de la FIAP des années précédentes.

Bien que la conférence s’appelle XP Day, elle n’est pas consacrée uniquement à l’eXtreme Programming. Il y a eu plusieurs conférences relatives à Scrum et comme l’année dernière on peut voir que l’engouement pour Lean est de plus en plus important, avec maintenant des retours d’expériences de tentatives d’applications de concepts Lean dans des équipes de développement logiciel.

Je n’ai pas assisté à beaucoup de présentations, mais celles que j’ai vu étaient de très bonne qualité. Je retiendrais particulièrement la présentation de Régis sur la Théorie des Centres de Christopher Alexander. Pour moi du code “beau” était quelque chose d’assez subjectif, bien que souvent beaucoup de personnes soient d’accord pour dire que tel morceau de code est beau et tel autre ne l’est pas. Maintenant je sais qu’il y a un certain nombre de propriétés qui participent à faire que le code (mais pas uniquement) soit beau, vivant, agréable. Nous autres développeurs passons une grande partie de nos journées dans du code, autant en faire un endroit agréable où il fait bon vivre… ce qui m’amène à la présentation de Dominic sur le “développement hédoniste”, la recherche du plaisir et l’évitement du déplaisir. Le parallèle, entre idéalisme et cycle en V, RUP d’une part et hédonisme et méthodes agiles d’autre part, est assez frappant.

Mais XP Day n’est pas qu’une série de conférences, c’est aussi un bon moment pour faire des rencontres enrichissantes avec des acteurs des méthodes agiles, de pouvoir partager son point de vue de manière informelle avec d’autres participants.

J’ai le sentiment que les personnes attirées par les méthodes agiles ont un penchant pour l’hédonisme (cf. la présentation de Dominic) et c’est certainement ce qui fait que l’ambiance est toujours bonne. Il doit bien y avoir des conférences sur le cycle en V, ça pourrait être intéressant d’y assister pour voir si on s’y ennuie .

XP Day est la conférence annuelle sur les méthodes agiles à ne pas manquer si vous êtes sur Paris. C’est l’occasion de rencontrer des personnes intéressantes ayant un long cursus sur la mise en place et l’utilisation d’eXtreme Programming et autres méthodes agiles dans diverses sociétés, cherchant constamment à améliorer leurs méthodes de travail.

Il y a des sessions pour tous les goûts et pour tout le monde, que ce soit les développeurs, chefs de projets, clients, les novices, les agilistes confirmés…

Quelques sessions sont présentées par d’anciens collègues, de qui j’ai beaucoup appris :

• Offshoring avec intégrité. Retour d’expérience sur un projet (sur lequel j’ai travaillé d’ailleurs) dont une partie de l’équipe était en France et une partie en Inde. Présenté par Pascal et Sandrine (qui fait partie de l’équipe organisatrice d’XP Day France cette année).

• XP 2.0 : améliorer l’amélioration continue avec Lean. Régis travaille activement depuis quelques temps à comprendre les concepts de Lean. Dans cette session, Régis et Antoine vont présenter différents éléments pouvant compléter certaines lacunes de l’eXtreme Programming. Les présentations de Régis et Antoine sont toujours très intéressantes et agréables, ils ont tous les deux de vrais talents d’orateurs (je ne m’y endors pas et pourtant je suis fort pour ça ).

• Le développement hédoniste. J’ai eu l’occasion de discuter, très rapidement, avec Dominic sur ce sujet et j’espère que je pourrais assister à sa présentation. Dominic aborde l’eXtreme Programming dans sa dimension philosophique, côté indispensable à la maîtrise de la méthode et malheureusement souvent oublié lors de la mise en pratique.

• La théorie des centres, une nouvelle façon de voir la conception incrémentale des logiciels. Deuxième session présentée par Régis. Il a déjà abordé le sujet de la théorie des centres sur son blog, théorie de Christopher Alexander, et de ce qu’elle apporte au développement logiciel.

• My language is more agile than yours – a LISP presentation. Session, certainement en anglais, présentée par Conan (qui m’a fait découvrir XP et les méthodes agiles) où il montrera certaines spécificités de LISP qui en font un bon langage de programmation pour les agilistes.

• Binômage 2.0. Session présentée par Charpi et Sylvain, deux experts du pair programming. J’ai réellement apprécié binômer avec eux, je sais que c’est un sujet qui les intéressent vraiment car ils ont vu la puissance que cette pratique (qui peut être assez difficile à mettre en place) apporte quand elle fonctionne à plein régime. Je pense que leur retour d’expérience sera très intéressant pour ceux qui se posent des questions sur le binômage.

Bien évidemment il n’y a pas que mes anciens collègues qui font de bonnes présentations, il y en a plein d’autres, vous pouvez consulter le programme d’XP Day. Comme d’habitude il y a pleins de sessions intéressantes… en même temps. Ils vous faudra faire des choix.