Is trolling endemic between IT developers?

Last week, I went to the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) that is bridging the gap between the different communities and aim to bring together all  IT developers. The conference was held in Paris which is still one one of the most attractive cities I know – one of the world’s leading business and cultural centres – well known for fashion, arts etc. But what I prefer is the buzz – it is so alive! It seems like a 24/7 city that keeps running.

I keep being told that the French, mainly the Parisians are so rude and unfriendly to foreigners – I definitely disagree with that statement. Once again, I got caught trying to find my way to the George V Eurosite – map in hand, looking for street names, trying to find out where I was and where I should go.  For the third time, somebody came to my rescue without prompting. Ex-pat French is not written on my forehead and my French accent is as bad as my English one. So why are they nice to me and so rude to you?

I am sure you are not reading this to discuss French politeness – so I will talk about OSDC which is the reason for my stay in Paris. This year OSDC was part of Open World Forum. The list of sponsors for the forum was impressive. It included Bearstech, Red Hat, Suse, Microsoft, Oracle to name only a few.

What is OSDC?

The Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) aims to be a place for meetings and exchanges between developers from different communities, which too often ignore or distrust each other. The goal is to go beyond trolls and see what they can learn from each other.

This conference allowed me to meet developers in Python, Perl, Ruby etc. under one roof. Some of the talks seemed very interesting or so I was told and all the buzz words were used – QR, MySQL, Drupal, MariaDB, Redis and of course the above mentioned languages.

One of the talks that seemed to fit everybody is The state of the Acmeism by Ingy döt Net. Acmeism  is the commitment to furthering all good languages simultaneously. I have seen Ingy writing at the same time in Python and Perl – how did he do that? I don’t have a clue as I was rather busy eating a choucroute at the time.

Two talks were given by François Perrad on Lua.

•  LuaJIT
•  Lua and its ecosystem

The only time I heard about Lua was in an interview of the authors Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and Roberto Ierusalimschy in our Masterminds of Programming.

After some apprehension on having my book table set far away from the OSDC rooms, first in the bar and then opposite the “makers” room (more about the “makers” room in a forthcoming post), I will admit complete success and I hope to be there next year.

I have only one regret, tradition among the perl mongueurs is to drink together a glass of Chartreuse brought by BooK all the way from Lyon. Unfortunately, I had to run for my train and missed it. Yet another reason to be there next year!