I just came back from OSDC.fr (Open Source Developers Conference, France). This was the first edition of the conference, organized jointly by Les Mongueurs de Perl, AFPy (Association Francophone Python) and Ruby France.
There were a lot more people on the Saturday than on the Friday, probably because many people were at work and it was hard for them to get work to let them go on company time. Or something.
In my view, as an attendee and an organizer (I had a tiny tiny role in the organizing team), it was a great success. I saw presentations about:
The Seaside presentation was really an eye-opener showing how clean web development can be (and how exciting Smalltalk is), even though I'll probably never use it.
I keep hearing about Moose and Catalyst, but am too lazy and busy to really start investing and learning about those. So going to the Moose talk at least kept me informed.
I realized Acmeism is the religion of OSDC.fr. ;-)
Dancer is a new lightweight web framework (ported from Ruby's Sinatra) and I really want to try it now. Maybe some of the websites' idea I have will finally see the light!
In the hallway track, I spent some time talking about gender issues with a woman (not a developer, but having been involved in a few projects with geeks) that was passing by and stopped to talk with us. I also spent a lot of time showing the power of Git to other Perl Mongers. In the end, I took over an empty slot to tour the Git object database and reply questions from the audience... I really should work on the Git tutorial I have in mind. (By the way, O'Reilly Media's Version Control with Git contains everything I would like to find in a Git tutorial, and more.)
All in all, excellent conference; I got to meet the people from over the fences and you won't believe how much they look like us. ;-)
