VA track at ESUG 2009 ?

[marten]

After coming back from ESUG 2008 I ask myself, if there could be a special VA Smalltalk track located at the ESUG conference - perhaps starting with 2009 ?

ESUG 2008 was nearly full booked - which was really a success. Lots of new Smalltalkers attended the conference and looked there what was going on with a programming environment named "Smalltalk" and they got answers: Seaside, Squeak, Cincom and Gemstone. Without John holding its presentation there would be no visibility of VASmalltalk - neither in presentation nor in "official" persons. Cincom was there with lots of people, Gemstone with three (?) persons.

Visiting ESUG for getting more infos about VASmalltalk is difficult. VASmalltalk follows the other vendors products, but seems to be late at topics, which are really hot today: Seaside, GLORP.

I would like to see this changing - perhaps with a track specially targeted to VASmalltalk users. My ideas about the content are not totally new. Some ideas about possible presentations:

* Envy/QA - usage of this tool in daily life together with SUnit
* Using UML Designer in an own Source Code Creator (Application Creator)
* Overview about public or comercially available libraries
* Overview of persistency - relational and OO oriented

These ideas are just a start - but to make it right, one should start early these days to be ready in august 2009.

Any comments about this ?


Addition:
Comment from Joachim about this http://joachim-tuchel.de/2008/09/02/esug-nachschau/

[a3aan]

I'm also very much concerned about the lack of visibility of Instantiations and VASmalltalk (in the Smalltalk community) in general and at this ESUG conference in particular. I think that the organizers of the conference (I was one of them) are the last ones to be blamed for this. It is up to Instantiations and the VASmalltalk users to submit talks to the Conference. ESUG is certainly open for any kind of suggestion though. But I'm not sure that a VASmalltalk track within the conference is a good approach. This will easily result in isolation. This year ESUG tried to give certain days a theme. This year the themes were meta and web. It is much better to have VASmalltalk related talks fitting in these themes if your goal is exposure.
My hope is that availability of Seaside will bring VASmalltalk back in the limelight. See what it did for GemStone.
In my opinion next step must be a bridge to the bulk of open source software that is created in Squeak mostly. We really need to be able to read and write from Monticello 2.0 repositories. Like that VASmalltalk users can fully participate in the Smalltalk community.

Adriaan.

[marten]

I think that the organizers of the conference (I was one of them) are the last ones to be blamed for this.

Adriaan,

no one is blaming the organizer of the conference. It's up to the users of the product and Instantiations to make things happen.

The concentration to one or two days makes it perhaps (so I guess) easier for persons to come to ESUG and to have argumentation against management to visit the conference: "Hey boss, I'm visisting ESUG for a talk on monday and for one talk on thursday" is worse against "Hey boss, I'm visiting ESUG for a VA special track day on Wednesday", where lots of talks are concentrated.

But I also understand your point and this may be also true - I do not know. After all I just want to increase the number of talks specific or interested for VA users. It does not matter how this can be achieved.

Due to the fact, that I have to pay the visit from my own money I look for acceptable points to reduce the amount of money such a trip will cost.

Marten

[louis_andriese]

Marten, Adriaan,

I guess a discussion on ESUG tracks is, however interesting, only a part of the issue you're discussing:
Interest in smalltalk is growing, and you and I fear that VA Smalltalk will not be the dialect of choice for the newly interested, because VAST is not visible enough on conferences and in the blogosphere.

As you point out, it's a responsibility of both users and Instantiations to promote VAST. Only together we can prevent it from becoming obsolete.

• Users should give talks, blog, share code and be active on the forum.
• Instantiations should give talks, blog, provide us with a software repository on the internet, support the smalltalk community and (last but not least) keep VAST up to date with new and exciting developments.

Both Adriaan and I will be at the Frankfurt meeting, and I propose to somehow address this subject there, together with Instantiations


regards,

Louis

[marten]

Both Adriaan and I will be at the Frankfurt meeting, and I propose to somehow address this subject there, together with Instantiations

Good to hear - perhaps you give a feedback, how the reactions are ?

Marte

[jtuchel]

Hi there,

I think what we are discussing here are really two separate issues:

1. Is ESUG attracting enough attendees from the industry, and how can we probably improve on this area. This is not VA ST related, but instead VA ST is heavily used in Industry and there is not much open source / academic work happening in VAST. Solving issue 1 might help solve issue 2.
2. Why was there so little talk about VA ST? I think one of the reasons for this is that the VAST projects are long-running industry projects and users probably think their projects aren't hip enough to talk about them. I know a few projects who are long-running (around a decade) and yet are technically interesting in using today's hip technologies.

While both topics are related, non of the can be blamed on the ESUG organizers.

I agree that neither organizers nor Instantiations really can do much about this. It would be good if they sent a few more people to ESUG and probably give a few more presentations, but that alone wouldn't really make things better. It's the users who have to do something. Show your projects, show some cool code, report about porting or using open-source-frameworks in VAST.

I don't think we need a tool-specific track, but having an industry day or two would probably be a good idea for the next ESUG.

Joachim

[jtuchel]

Just a small addition:

The reason we started the VA Smalltalk Forum in 2007 was exactly the fact that it's hard for employees of, say, a major bank or insurance company to get an approval to travel to another country for four days just to attend a Smalltalk Conference. We wanted to give users the chance to learn what's new and to network with other users in a single day, at a place where they can travel to on their employer's cost. And I think we did a good job with this. We had more than 40 people attending and a lot of discussion going on. (Ah, by the way: have YOU registered for this year already???) I hope we'll have an even better event this year.

I am impressed by the number of people who have stayed in Amsterdam for 9 days, starting with Camp Smalltalk and working on the Seaside Sprint on the follwowing weekend. This proves that there sure are some enthusiasts around who invest a lot of their spare time in Smalltalk related topics.

I guess that's only a small percentage of Smalltalk users. Many people won't be able or allowed to stay away from home and their office for 5 or more days, not to mention that somebody would have to pay their travel and hotel costs.

I know quite some people who took holidays and went to several ESUG conferences as a holiday replacement. That's impressive, because these guys love to do Smalltalk and meet other Smalltalkers. But this also makes ESUG a very geeky event.

Another interesting question here is if the timing of the ESUG conference is good for attracting people from the industry. Most countries do have holidays in August, and if you have school children, you need to go on holiday at this time of the year. And if you have no children, you have to stay at the office because the colleagues with children want to go on holiday.

I am not suggesting to move ESUG to another month. I think the concept of ESUG is good and should stay as it is - as long as it is not so much an event for the industry

So I am a bit of a split personality here: I'd be happy to give up on the work and energy (and money) it takes to organize the VA Smalltalk Forum if there is another place for VA ST users to meet in Europe, and I doubt an ESUG of 5 days and at places in distant (yet attractive) places can replace it. I'd love to see VAST users talk with Squeakers and VisualWorkers at the bar and exchange interesting ideas for their projects. It might help some projects solve technical issues by using an open source framework as well as an open-source-author to understand the needs of an industry projects in a very informal and pleasant way.

I also think another vendor conference like the Cincom Smalltalk Conference is not the real solution. But what is?

Joachim

[wembley]

In my personal opinion, it is not a good idea to have a separate VA Smalltalk track (nor a separate VisualWorks or GemStone track) -- it would dilute the interaction and cross-pollination among the attendees.

There are interesting things being developed with VA Smalltalk that show well in a conference like ESUG. For example, Thomas Stalzer's entry in the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards contest -- VASERControl, a home automation system (see http://vst.ensm-douai.fr/Esug2008Media/ ... ds2008.pdf for further information).

[jtuchel]

John et al.

I think what we need is CONTENT for a conference, the rest will probably find its way, either through ESUG or another conference / event.

Instantiations could surely help in this by giving tutorials on new features or even long-existing features that are worth showing. I am going to present some RESTful Web services stuff based on Server Smalltalk at the VA Smalltalk Forum in Frankfurt. I must say I've learned a lot about SST and like it more and more There surely are other interesting topics to talk about, esp. in the area of integration and web development.

But still USERS have to provide content as well, so we need users to give presentations about what they do and have done in VA Smalltalk. Marten has named a few areas that are interesting.

The ORGANIZERS of ESUG can probably only do one thing: make a schedule that compresses topics relevant for the industry onto one or two days.

Best Regards

Joachim
--
visit my (German) blog at: www.joachim-tuchel.de