Meeting Neil Armstrong and speaking of Groovy and Grails

I had the pleasure to participate in OCTO’s IT University (Université du SI in French) a couple weeks ago. The conference was really great, and I think France really needed such a high-quality IT event as there was no real good event like that until now. So big kudos to the organizers.

Apart from great food, excellent speakers covering interesting topics, I had the pleasure of spending time with my friends from the OSSGTP community (Vincent, Guillaume, Patrick, Mag, Didier, Fabrice, Erwan), with my former colleagues, and with some great guys like Ross Mason, Erik Meijer (with great tshirts as usual), and more. But perhaps the most impressive, interesting and emotional-heavy moment of the conference was the closing keynote by astronaut Neil Armstrong, as featured on the picture on the side. This man is so humble, interesting, funny, elegant, that everybody really enjoyed listening to him speaking about the space conquest, distilling some nice and funny anecdotes and making parallels with IT, the story of computers, etc. Awesome! It was such a big honnor to have him there!

Back on my presence at the show: I’ve given two talks at the conference. The first one on Grails, and how you can innovate without constraints, while being able to properly integrate your innovations back in your IT infrastructure, using Grails. My friend and former colleague Fabrice Robini was the key driver behind this very well attended and appreciated talk.

And I also spoke about Domain-Specific Languages and how Groovy can help you create your own.