5 Oct 2009

CITCON Paris 2009: Goodies

This year I went to CITCON Europe 2009 in Paris, a conference about continuous integration, held at ISEP. It was a quite interesting event. Since everybody as already blogged about it, I will start with a subject I think was not yet covered: the goodies.

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 2 GB USB flash drive from MSDN. As I already told before, 2 GB 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.