From Wednesday 29th February to Friday 2nd March 2012, took place Confoo 2012, a major conference in Montréal, mainly focused on web technologies; but I could also attend some real cool sessions about Java / JVM, Android, (J)Ruby, TDD, Continuous Integration, software architecture, and Agile/ Scrum / Lean ; talks were given mainly in English and some in French too.

Here are some extensive notes I took while attending those talks :

• Continuous delivery at speed
• Implanter l’AOP… comment partir du bon pied ?
• TDD and getting paid
• Regular Expressions
• JRuby
• JVM internals for dummies

And below, some quicker notes (really too busy listening !) on some other talks :

• I presented a session on Android Continuous Integration
• Virtualize your environment by Sean Coates was an interactive session where the speaker would poll the audience about which virtualization environment they are familiar with, on which system (he introduced some tools such as Vagrant to administer Virtual Box VMs with the command line, puppet to centrally configure your system configurations, and OpenVPN for a robust VPN solution, accessible from even poor internet connections)
• Propulsez votre architecture grâce aux mocks : Félix Antoine a présenté au public un TDD basé sur les mock objects : comment le fait d’écrire nos classes en partant des couches supérieures (en mockant les couches en dessous) fait émerger un TDD qu’il a qualifié de « London style » , dû au fait que ces techniques ont été documentées en premier par Steve Freeman auteur du livre Growing Object Oriented Dotware, guided by tests

You may now be interested in :

• getting the slides from joindin (with some comments from the audience)
• having a look at the schedule

I really enjoyed speaking and attending sessions at Confoo (thanks to my employer who let me get there !) : the organization was really professional and friendly: some sponsor booths would organize some games and give gifts, sessions were on time and cancelled sessions were twitted in real time, 8 10 tracks in parallel, a very interesting keynote, some very good local and international speakers, talks in French and in English (mostly in English since most of the audience was from outside the province of Québec : 600 people from the US/Europe mainly); as a speaker I also could enjoy a very nice dinner with all the other speakers ( I could meet and re connect with developers and trainers I knew from Paris ! and connect with some local software developers) ; and finally this event took place in downtown Montreal, I am so proud I can attend such quality events from here !

I can’t wait for Confoo 2013 !