FISL 9.0
The 9th edition of the International Free Software Forum (FISL) conference just took place here in my city - Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil - between April 17 and 19. There were more than 7000 people in the event.
Also, there were many interesting talks going on, distributed across 8 rooms. The subject ranged from philosophical and point-of-views to the most technical ones and, of course, RubyOnRails.
Fabio Akita, a very talented and famous RoR developer and a co-worker of mine, gave a great talk about Rails Deployment. He lost the scheduled time due some weather problems in the airport but was able to give it in the day after although to a very smaller public. Anyhow, it was a great presentation and i believe everyone agrees. For those who didn’t see it, he published a screencast of the presentation (It is in brazilian portuguese).
There were other two Rails talks in the event. Sylvestre Mergulhão gave a talk about Rails 2 and Fabricio de Sousa Nascimento gave a introduction to Rails. Both had the room full.
The last talk was a really inspiring and funny one gave by no one less than Jon Maddog Hall. He talked about why having fun developing software is so important, specially for the open source community. The majority of important open source projects has been created by bored people who decided to have fun writing software. Linux is a great example of that. He thinks that open source got too serious and people should be having more fun. I think i agree with him.
Many other big figures were around, including Randal L. Schwartz who gave a talk about Seaside. Sadly, i lost it but heard really good things about it.
Other than the talks, it was great to meet many people who are involved in the community. Some of them i already knew from the internet but others i met for the first time: Vinicius Manhaes Telles, Fabio Akita, Lucas Hungaro, Luiz Vitor Martinez, Jony dos Santos, Julio Monteiro, Carlos Eduardo, and many other people who i won’t recall their names. We talked a lot about Ruby, Rails, Agile Methodologies and other interesting subjects.
It was fun.
