O'ReillyGMT - Tech News from 4 timezones either side of the Greenwich Meridian

UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon - 12th-14th May, 2010

Bruno Figueiredo writes:

UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon is a 3 day international event, gathering world renowned speakers in the fields of Interaction Design, Information Architecture and Usability. From 12 to 14 May, in the beautiful city of Lisbon (Portugal), more than 300 attendees will have the chance to attend 16 workshops and 28 talks, with speakers such as Steve Krug, Jared Spool, Luke Wroblewski, Peter Merholz (author of Subject to Change), Dan Saffer, (author Designing Gestural Interfaces), Donna Spencer, Bill Scott, (author of Designing Web Interfaces), Brian Fling, (author of Mobile Design and Development), Eric Reiss and many more.

Apart from talks and workshops, there will be a series of networking events and a book fair, with all the industry's greatest titles featuring discounts of up to 35% off.

Tickets start at 295 Euros.

*** Book now and get 10% discount when quoting "OREILLY2010" ***

 

7th French Perl Workshop - 11th/12th June, 2010 - Calais

The French Perl Mongers write:

The 7th French Perl Workshop will be held on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of June at Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale in Calais.

From beginners to experts, many Perl users will meet to share experience, improve knowledge and have fun!

We would like to gather a wide audience with talks for beginner as well as for professional Perl users (or about to be).

Call for papers

To make this event a success we need talks and speakers.

Although French is the preferred language, we will accept talks in English too.

Some subjects we would like to have (a kind of wish list): « success stories » of Perl in production, tutorials for beginners or programmers of other languages...

This list is open. Feel free to sumbit any kind of subject on Perl.

Talks can last 20, 40 or 80 minutes. We will have lightning talks: 5 minutes max for each talk.

Call for sponsors

Sponsors are a key to a successful event.

Sponsor contributions make it possible to improve the welcoming process of attendees, by providing breaks, etc.

We will publish your logo on the web site of the conference, we will present you (or let you introduce yourself) at the opening of the conference, and we will thank you at the end.

Share the info!

French Perl Workshop needs speakers, sponsors, and of course audience Please share the info with your colleagues, friends, communication or HR department...

We hope to see you mid-June in Calais!

The French Perl Mongers

SparkUp 2010 - Poznan, Poland - 25th May 2010

Robert Podgorski writes:

SparkUp 2010 is the Poland's first conference, bringing together widely known experts from the web industry.

The conference’s main target is to deliver the most recent knowledge related to modern solutions in developing internet applications as well as the current techniques and trends in ux and usability.

Web designers interested in usability and ux are welcomed especially at presentations from the first track, which are going to tell stories about web design and current user experience solutions.

People specializing in web development, are invited for the presentations from the second track, which are going to cover useful issues of development and introduce hottest news about making use of internet applications.

Speakers lined up so far include Andy Budd, Bruce Lawson, Remy Sharp, Bartłomiej Zass, Antony Ribot and Matt Biddulph.

There's an Early Bird price of 244 PLN (70 Euro) until 16th April.

Linux Open Administration Days, April 10-11, Antwerp, Belgium, Europe, Earth

Kris Buytaert writes:

On the weekend of April 10 and 11 the first Linux Open Administration days will take place in Antwerp, Belgium. Load days grew out of the common feeling with some of the system level Open Source guys that there was no real event for them in Belgium - yes there is Fosdem, which is the most awesome Open Source event around, but a real get-together of local Open Source minded System Administrators and System Engineers was something that surely could complement.

In a shortish 3 months, a core team of organizers found a location, a bunch of sponsors and created a pretty interesting schedule for it's first edition. With a mixture of international speakers from neighbouring countries and local speakers the Loadays schedule list topics ranging from System Monitoring, Backups, System Deployments (including both CFengine, Puppet and Chef speakers), on top of that there's some groupware, some identity management etc. In, short a mixture of everything important to Linux Open Administration, Loadays will have both regular talks, tutorials and open space discussions.

If you are around, drop in to say hi, to listen to some talks or even hang around for the pizza party and the pub later ...

YAPC::Europe - Pisa, Italy, August 2010

Michelle Beltrame writes:

YAPC::Europe (Yet Another Perl Conference, Europe) is the biggest annual Perl conference in Europe.

Since 2000, local Perl user groups organize this non-profit event in different European cities. This time, the Venue Committee of the YAPC Europe Foundation has selected Pisa, Italy, to host the conference.

The Conference provides an international forum for practitioners and researchers from industry, academia and government. It is mainly aimed at Perl users, professionals and hobbyists alike, but also at those who are just starting out in this language and want to learn its characteristics and culture.

YAPC conferences are usually attended by more than 300 developers from all over the world. Approximately 60 speakers offer a multitude of talks to various Perl-related themes in 4 parallel sessions over three days.

During the whole conference there is a constant, intense and often informal exchange of ideas and experience between the attendees. Besides Perl, a lot of general software development topics like software engineering, agile methods, testing, project management, object-oriented programming, UI design and much more are discussed.

At YAPC::Europe 2010 we also plan to host hackathons, which are moderated workshops focused on a specific topic, where experienced users and newbies can get together and share ideas, improve parts of the featured project or step through some project internals.

YAPC::Europe 2010 will take place from 4 to 6 August 2010 at the My One Hotel Pisa Conference Centre.

It's an even not to be missed!

Codebits - Lisbon, Portugal, December 2009

Josette Garcia writes:

Codebits - the fun event for all techies.

Inspired by Hackday, London, Celso Marthino and Pedro Custodio, both then from Sapo.pt, decided two years ago to create Codebits in Lisbon. This year Pedro was not with us but Jose Castro did a super job. Almost 700 techies lined up on Thursday 3rd December for the opening of the third Codebits which shows no sign of fatigue.

Codebits is held in a huge old darkened building - it takes 5 mins to walk from one end to the other and the place is buzzing with activities. The place is a techie's dream - cables, internet connection, cameras, tables, chairs, flipcharts, bean bags, game consoles - everything is there to make it a 3 day and night memorable event. Yes, the idea is to spend the nights there - food and drinks are provided non stop. This huge open-plan barn-style building is divided into areas for small conferences, 100 of tables on which techies can work on their team project, an area for Mitch Altham and his soldering maker table and tools, television screens everywhere, (live feed and TV for friends at home). 

 The programme is brilliant. It includes talks (Portuguese and English), Quiz Show, Rock Band Contest, and the 24 hours programming/hacking competition. Around 50 teams worked on projects which had to be presented to the audience and judging panel at the end of the third day. Each team had 90 seconds to present their project - my heart went out to them, they had not slept for 3 days, did not get any fresh air (except for the draft) - as you will see from the pictures that life of a techie is not all glamour.

I did not compete, I went to sleep every night - not a lot, but I did go to bed!

YAPC::EU::2009

Josette Garcia writes:

It is with some apprehension that I went to Lisbon for YAPC::EU::2009. I kept hearing that Perl is too old and that it is now superceded by better, more funky languages. Rest assured Perl is still here and the Perl community is well aware of the problems and is now fighting back. Over 300 attendees from all over Europe and further afield, gathered in sunny Lisbon to hear the masters of Perl and Larry Wall’s keynote.

O’Reilly was well represented with so many authors giving a talk or just attending the conference:
- Larry Wall
- Damian Conway
- Dave Cross
- brian d foy
- Curtis Poe
- Andrew Ford
- Philip Bruhat, this year's White Camel Award winner with Tim Bunce and Michael Schwern.
(Philip translated some of our books in French.)

I was very sorry that Chromatic had to cancel.

The conference was divided into 4 tracks:
- Corporate
- Everyday
- Beginning
- Workshops

Larry Wall on Perl 6 – “Next year, we will be launching a solid working subset of Perl 6 which will be fully supported. This of course will not be the final version of Perl 6 as we all know that open source software is evolving every day.”

Lots of thanks to the Portuguese team: Alberto, Joanna, Jose for putting such a great conference together.

O'ReillyGMT on Flickr.com

DevopsDays 09 - Gent, Belgium, October 30th, 31st 2009

The stupendous Kris Buytaert writes:

Over the past couple of years operations and deployment have become more and more important to the applications that you folks write. Sometimes people call the new trend Devops, others call it Agile System Administration or Devministration, but one thing is sure, today's Linux guy is different from the Unix admin 10 years ago. In the US, O'Reilly already started with Velocity, this year already in it's second edition, but in Europe we didn't really have an event catering for the much needed interaction between developers and system administration.

DevOpsDays 09, will try to change that, DevOpsDays 09 will take place in the lovely city of Gent in Belgium on 30th and 31th October. It will be a 2 day event hosted by IBBT where the first day will be a more formal conference featuring speakers such as Teyo Tyree from Reductive Labs of Puppet fame, Lindsay Holmwood of Cucumber Nagios fame, Chris Read, Matthas Skarin and different others. The second day of the event will be an OpenSpace event where the participants will determine the actual program.

Follow as DevOpsDay develops at @devopsdays

YAPC::Europe - Lisbon, 3rd-5th August 2009

The YAPC::Europe conference will take place in Lisbon from the 3rd to the 5th August 2009. A fine array of speakers are scheduled for 4 tracks over the three days, with a sizeable handful of O'Reilly authors on the bill: Dave Cross, brian d foy, Damian Conway and, of course, Larry Wall.

If three days isn't enough for you, there are training courses before and after you can attend.

On the Thursday and Friday after the conference, Damian Conway, brian d foy and Mark Keating are hosting courses on New Features of Perl/Perl Best Practices, Mastering Perl and EPO Workshop, respectively.

And Dave Cross is running a two-day Introduction to Perl course for the two days prior to the conference. Newbies can start the weekend with no understanding of Perl and exit on Sunday evening with enough knowledge to enjoy the rest of the conference.

Indeed, Dave's course isn't the only conference feature to caters for Perl Rookies. Says Dave:

Send a Newbie.
"Another interesting experiment this year is Edmund von der Burg's 'Send-a-Newbie' programme. Edmund was concerned that there are usually very few young people at YAPC, so he decided to do something about it. People can donate money and Edmund (with a committee of trusted advisors) will allocate that money as grants which can be used by young people to pay to get to the conference. See http://www.send-a-newbie.com/ for more details."

What is this?
We want to cover the costs for young Perl programmers to attend the 2009 European conference in Portugal, funded by donations from individuals in the Perl community. Attending YAPC::EU is a great way to get to know others in the Perl community and we don't want anyone to be excluded.

On top of that, O'Reilly's very own Josette Garcia will be attending the conference, which is enough to make any event complete.

Brucon - a new Security conference in Brussels

The Splendid Kris Buytaert writes:

BruCON is the first annual security and hacker(*) conference providing two days of an interesting atmosphere for open discussions of critical infosec issues, privacy, information technology and its cultural/technical implications on society.

Organized in Brussels on 18th and 19th September 2009, BruCON offers a high quality line-up of speakers, such as CloudSec guru Christoffer Hoff  and encryption expert Vincent Rymen with different talks about security challenges and interesting workshops. It's affordable, accessible and entertaining.

BruCON is a conference by and for the security and hacker (*) community. The 2-day conference wil be preceeded by a 2-day Security Training on topics such as Pen Testing, Web 2.0 hacking and Social Engineering for IT Security professionals.

Early bird registration is valid till July 1st with prices starting from €50 for students.

_{(*)Hackers are "persons who delight in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." People who engage in illegal activities like unauthorized entry into computer systems are called crackers and don't have anything to do with hacking. BruCON doesn't promote any illegal activities or behavior. Many hackers today are employed by the security industry and test security software and systems to improve the security of our networks and applications. In addition, for the younger generations.}