I was invited to speak about XWiki at the Alpes JUG and the Mars JUG on 10th and 11th of October 2012. I gave 3 presentations at each JUG:

• Presentation of XWiki from a user point of view (sorry, no slides since this was done purely as a demo) (30 mn)
• Explain how XWiki can be used to develop web applications quickly and why it can be considered a development platform (1.5 hours)
• Present how the XWiki open source development is performed (1 hour)

I had a great time at both JUGs. The Mars JUG was a bit more active than the Alpes one with over 30 persons present vs 15 (come on guys, now you need to beat the Mars JUG next time! ). 

OTOH my stay at Grenoble was a bit safer than the Marseille trip... Indeed, I got to witness a murder in Marseille a few minutes after it happened...

On the food topic, I had some great sushis with Julien Viet in Marseille (seems the murder we witnessed didn't make us loose our appetite... ).

Ok so here are the slides (I also did lots of demo during the talk and unfortunately you won't be able to see them - I also spoke a lot more than on the slides, sorry about that - But then you should haven been there! ).

Thanks to Emmanuel Hugonnet and Julien Viet for inviting me.

The OSSGTP and Les CastCodeurs have organized a 2 days Snow Camp in France at Les 2 Alpes 3 weeks ago (April 2011). I was there with 20 or so other geeks and we had a great time skiing and discussing of technology and of our open source projects.

I was lucky to have Emmanuel Bernard as a private Git coach  He's a good teacher who makes you learn fast. Just try to make a mistake and you'll see what happens...  XWiki was just moving to Git (and GitHub) and I was in need of a quick training session to get me started. I got help from the other geeks too and that's when I discovered that Git wasn't an exact science... everyone has his own way of using it and there are lots of ways of doing the same thing... 

I had some fun coding a quick GitHub integration in XWiki too using Groovy.

On the second day we recorded a special LesCastCodeurs podcast; we arranged 15 geeks around a table and launched some tech topics at random to get a discussion started. The result is available here (in French).

Let's do this again next year!

I've attended the 3rd anniversary of the Paris JUG and it was a great event that attracted over 500 developers (not bad for a user group that is 3 years old!). Antonio and his team had chosen an interesting theme this year which was "Siffler en travaillant" (which can be translated as "whistling to work"). He said he got the idea while watching Snow White and the seven dwarfs who are whistling while going to work in the mines. He wondered whether some of us are doing this or rather why don't we all whistle while going to work. There were several lightning talks on this theme, such as: "Tele working" - The speaker asked the audience who had a contract for working from a distance and only 3 people raised their hands. I was one of them. Apparently lots of developers do work from home a few days per week but very few have it in their contract. France is lagging behind other countries, especially wrt the law, "Independence" (being an Independent), ..., "GTD" by Emmanuel, "About being a Developer" by Didier Girard - Didier's presentation was very neat with a lot of energy and punch (Didier is really good at that), and more. The last talk was a very refreshing talk by 2 young men just out of school who started developing Android apps. They started one night as a challenge: "let's see what we can do" and they had their first working app  a few hours later. They published it and quickly had hundreds or thousands of downloads and they did their second app, then third and finally they got 10 apps, all doing.... nothing (a candle, a lighter, etc) ....  At some point they decided to monetize their work since they had so many downloads and put an ad banner in all their apps. They're now making around 12K euros per month (they're 2) which is pretty good money and their download numbers are still increasing. Several of us looked at each other and wondered why we were developing complex apps such as an Enterprise Wiki, a CMS, etc when apparently it's enough to develop an app that does nothing to make a living!

The venue was very nice, at the Cité Internationale Universitaire (I didn't know the place and was pleasantly surprised by the nice architecture - lucky sutdents!).  The organisation was superb with booths available for companies (that's a big part of how this free event is sponsored). I got the chance to get a massage by Fred Do Couto (from Vitalizen - Fred was an excellent java developer I met while working on the Vizzavi Europe project around 2001-2002 - At the time we used to get free massage while at work, this is how Fred got the idea to start Vitalizen later on).

I met all the usual suspects: Didier Girard, Emmanuel Bernard, Antonio of course (hey 3 castcodeurs out of 4 not bad), Julien Dubois, Charles Gay, Tugduall Grall, Jean-Laurent, and a lot more. It's always nice to find known heads and to catch up on what we're all doing (we don't see each other enough - I'm partly to blame since I haven't been active at all in organizing the OSSGTP meetings for the past few years....).

Then 80 of us had booked for a surprise evening at 22:30: we got embarked in 2 special night buses where we drank champagne and danced while crossing paris till we reached the Eiffel Tower where we took a group picture (insert link here). Then we were driven to a nice restaurant (Le Vavin) and finished around 3AM... I stopped there since I had to work the next morning but others carried on at the bar next door till 6AM...

A very good evening where I was happy to meet old friends and talk about XWiki.

Waiting for the 4th anniversary of the Paris JUG now!