Learning Smalltalk driving a tank

Soermirno Kartosoewito first announced his slot at the Devnology Community Day as an introduction to Smalltalk. Later on he morphed it into a workshop that would give the participants the chance of a first hand experience with Smalltalk. Ernest Micklei provided his game server and the participants were invited to write a client to that game server. The goal of the game was to control a tank in a battlefield. The battlefield was projected with a beamer as shown in the photo.

The squares that look like bricks are bricks and the other ones depict the tanks. The participants all got a prepared Pharo installation that had already parts of the client implemented and a handout with the task to complete. The Smalltalk first-timers were supported by a number of experienced Smalltalkers, including myself, to overcome any difficulty they might run into. One gave up, others did very well.

Some 80 people attended the Devnology Community Day. It had 4 tracks and the workshop got a fair share of attendees. It was really cool to get people to know (more) about Smalltalk like this. The only downer is that the game server is not available on-line, so people can't continue to work on their client if they want to.

More photos of the workshop here.

Introduction to Smalltalk at Devnology in the Netherlands

Soermirno Kartosoewito will give an introductory workshop to Smalltalk at the Devnology Cummunity Day on Saturday, the 7th November. Devnology is a community driven organisation (geek-to-geek) that aims to exchange knowledge and experience.

The workshop will be in Dutch. Registration for the Community Day is required but free.

VAStGoodies.com (Tools) updated

During the Camp Smalltalk at the ESUG Conference Soemirno Kartosoewito and I have been working on a list of updates for VAStGoodies.com, which are now deployed.

The list includes:

• VAStGoodies.com (server)
  • Migration from VA Smaltalk 8.0.0 beta1 to VA Smalltalk 8.0.0.
  • The statistics page now includes the last 5 downloads and uploads.
  • Tags are now links and effectively functioning as a filter on the projects page.
  • Possible existing exports are deleted from the server cache on every upload.
  • Replaced the wiki renderer and put the syntax on the help page.
  • The help page now includes an explanation of how to use the annotations.
  • A list of best practices for using VAStGoodies.com (Tools) is now on the help page.
  • The developer description, if any, is now rendered on developers page.
• VAStGoodies.com Tools (client)
  • Some enhancements in the UI.
  • Annotation fields are more logically ordered.

ESUG 2009 photos

The Camp Smalltalk preceding the 17th ESUG Conference in Brest is slowly getting more and more crowded. Besides the socializing, there is some serious work getting done too. I've just put a small batch of photos online, more to come.

Hear me talking about VAStGoodies.com at the VA Smalltalk Summit 2009

I'll be talking about VAStGoodies.com and more at the VA Smalltalk Summit 2009. The event is a series of webcasts on April 21-22 and intended to fill the gap Smalltalk Solutions leaves by not being held this year.

Creating VAStGoodies.com - a VA Smalltalk Seaside User Experience
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
12:00 pm, Pacific Daylight Time
9:00 pm, European Daylight Time

Looks like we'll have a pizza that day ;-).

Registration is open.