Haxe meet-up and promotion at FOSDEM (31 January & 1 February) 2015 in Brussels, Belgium ?

[Elliott Stoneham]

Just in case you've not heard of it before:

FOSDEM is a free event that offers open source communities a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

It is renowned for being highly developer-oriented and brings together 5000+ geeks from all over the world.

I went last year and made a presentation, but I was surprised that I seemed to be the only one talking about Haxe (and then only as a secondary topic).

This issue was discussed at the end of WWX2014 in Paris earlier in the year, and it was generally agreed that it would be really helpful if members of the Haxe community would speak at the event. The Haxe community will never have a cheaper way (it's free) to tell so many people about the joys of using Haxe and what a friendly group of people you all are.

So please reply to this post if you are interested in attending a Haxe-meetup at this event, or better yet are prepared to give a talk about using Haxe.

If enough people want to meet-up, we can put together a bid to have our own Haxe developer room at the event and geek-out talking about deep Haxe issues. But you'll need to say you are interested by the end of August, so that we can write the bid in early September.

If we can't get a Haxe developer room organised, there will still be many opportunities to speak at the event in one of the main tracks.

If only two people give talks on Haxe-related topics at the event, we will have done better than last year, and more developers will have heard of Haxe!

For those of us based in Europe, this is the best way to share our love of Haxe with the general open-source community.  

To borrow from JFK:

And so, my fellow Haxe lovers: ask not what Haxe can do for you, ask what you can do for Haxe.

Hit the reply button now - if you could speak or just might attend, be part of taking the Haxe community to the next level!

Elliott

[David Elahee]

I'll ask MT if I can be sponsored :)

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[Juraj Kirchheim]

Count me in ;)

[Elliott Stoneham]

Many thanks for your prompt replies David and Juraj, I look forward to seeing you there!

Elliott

[Elliott Stoneham]

Fantastic news that David Elahee from Motion Twin has agreed to speak at FOSDEM, to quote him:

... i'll prepare something on our full haxe stack and how we make use of it to develop games fast ( or painlessly... ) with targets ranging from stage3d to small mobile phones...

Do you have something you could speak about?

 

[Juraj Kirchheim]

Given that David will already cover Haxe as a multi platform
technology, I could talk about Haxe as a compile-to-js language (which
is what I mainly use it for these days), adding examples of how
macros, abstracts and enums set it apart from Dart & TypeScript.

[Jason O'Neil]

That would be a great talk - make sure it gets recorded! :)

[Elliott Stoneham]

Fantastic Juraj/back2dos, as Jason says, that would be wonderful, thank you!

[Juraj Kirchheim]

Well then, that's what it'll be ;)

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Elliott Stoneham
<elliott....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Fantastic Juraj/back2dos, as Jason says, that would be wonderful, thank you!
>

[tom rhodes]

I'd be interested in a video/transcript/slides of that too. Haxe to JS is now the major share of my Haxe usage, but out of the 3 features you mention the only one I use regularly are enums. I'd love to find a way in to macros and abstracts too :)

[TroyWorks]

Sounds cool. Hope that video/slides do make it up.

[der Raab]

Count me in as well.

[clemos]

I'd be definitely interrested in attending 

and eventually give a hand at preparing a Haxe/JS talk...

Also, I love Brussels and know it quite well, 

so I can also help with organizing (finding places / rooms, etc) ;)

Best,

Clément

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thank you so much Clément for your offer of help, I'm sure your local knowledge will be really important for making the event a success for the Haxe community. And if you would give a talk too, that would be fantastic!

It is wonderful that so many other people are interested in being involved too, thank you everyone, it will be great to meet-up.

Watch out FOSDEM2015, the Haxe guys are coming!

[Simon Krajewski]

I might be able to attend as well.

Simon

--

[Elliott Stoneham]

Wow Simon, it would be amazing if you were able to attend as well.

I remember how pleased everybody was to see you when you walked into the room at WWX2014!

[Elliott Stoneham]

8 people have now +1'd the related Google+ post to this at https://plus.google.com/108357772809637107387/posts/D8ANrxG5H3p

I'm really delighted with the level of interest in the idea of Haxe at FOSDEM'15.

[JLM]

On Sunday, 24 August 2014 09:21:58 UTC+1, tom rhodes wrote:

 I'd love to find a way in to macros and abstracts too :)

Tom abstracts are really more approachable for JS than you might imagine.  For instance JS's obsession with strings everywhere, when you would expect a number, can be very frustrating but you can use abstract's as converters for instance when working with canvas and color

abstract ColorJS( Int ) from Int to Int {         @:to public inline function toString(): String {       return '#' + StringTools.hex( this, 6 );    }     } So I use var string: String; var col: ColorJS; surface.strokeStyle = string = col = 0x333333; Where surface is a CanvasRenderContext2D. Which might seem a bit strange at first glance but when scan reading code is very clear and resolves at runtime to fairly optimal js.

Anyway did not want to distract from the subject just wanted to stress that Abstracts can seem scary at first but they don't have to be used full on, you can sneak them in just to help you with the d-stringification of Javascript.

[Juraj Kirchheim]

I am still not 100% convinced that the man we all saw was the true Simn :D

[Nicolas Cannasse]

It might be an actor that i paid to act as Simn. Some rumors say we are
actually only one person, but I don't think it's true.

Best,
Nicolas

[Juraj Kirchheim]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 11:13 PM, Nicolas Cannasse <ncan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It might be an actor that i paid to act as Simn. Some rumors say we are
> actually only one person, but I don't think it's true.

Well, maybe it's more of a Jekyll and Hyde thing. You pick which is which ;)

Anyway: how about sending that actor who acts as you to Brussels? I'd
love to see him, he's a cool guy :)

Best,
Juraj

[Elliott Stoneham]

Of course I'd be delighted to see the "cool guy" at the FOSDEM/Haxe event too!

Below is my draft e-mail to ask for a development room at the FOSDEM event, which I would be glad to get any feedback on from the Haxe community in this discussion thread by the due date.

It would also be really helpful to have a couple of other speakers and an experienced trainer lined up for the event, to make the submission even more credible. Could you help? Do you know someone else who could help?

[DRAFT SUBMISSION BELOW, PLEASE GIVE FEEDBACK BY SATURDAY 13^TH SEPTEMBER (SUBMISSION WILL BE MADE ON SUNDAY 14^TH SEPTEMBER)]

Dear FOSDEM 2015 organizers,

In response to https://fosdem.org/2015/news/2014-07-01-call-for-participation/ we would like to organize a developer room at FOSDEM 2014 for the Haxe community, which is a small but very active group of open-source developers mostly building cross-platform interactive applications for games, entertainment and business communications.

To quote www.haxe.org: “Haxe is an open source toolkit based on a modern, high level, strictly typed programming language, a cross-compiler, a complete cross-platform standard library and ways to access each platform's native capabilities.”

The Haxe language is maintained and developed by the Haxe Foundation (http://haxe.org/foundation/), whose strategic partners are TiVo (http://www.tivo.com/), Prezi (http://prezi.com/) and Motion Twin (http://motion-twin.com/).

The 2014 annual worldwide Haxe conference was held during May in Paris, very successfully organized by Silex Labs (http://www.silexlabs.org/). The sessions provided by the community were of high quality, as you can see from the videos at: http://www.silexlabs.org/tag/wwx2014/. Around 50 Haxe hackers attended that dedicated conference, and while a development room at FOSDEM 2015 would probably attract fewer Haxe enthusiasts than that, we are hoping it might attract a number of non-enthusiasts, curious to learn about the language by attending a free tutorial.

The main Haxe discussion group has over 1700 subscribers, so that is where our community discussion of this application has occurred see https://groups.google.com/d/topic/haxelang/9SQP3oThY7k/discussion, with more expressions of interest over at Google+: https://plus.google.com/108357772809637107387/posts/D8ANrxG5H3p

Our plan is that part of the day would be speaker and panel sessions, the remainder a hands-on bring-your-own-device “learn-Haxe” tutorial, with members of the Haxe community on-hand to help newcomers to learn the language and the ecosystem. For experienced Haxe developers, this extended tutorial session would provide a Haxe project hack-space.

We have four speakers for the event so far:

1)  David Elahee from Motion Twin (a Haxe Foundation strategic partner) would speak about: “…our full Haxe stack and how we make use of it to develop games fast (or painlessly...) with targets ranging from stage3d to small mobile phones...”;

2) Juraj (Back2dos) would speak about: “Haxe as a compile-to-js language, adding examples of how macros, abstracts and enums set it apart from Dart & TypeScript.”; 

3) Clément (clemos) would speak about other aspects of Haxe/JS  (in addition to using his local knowledge to help with the organisation); and    

4)  Elliott Stoneham would present “An absolute beginners guide to Haxe and OpenFL”.

In addition, we would expect to recruit further speakers once the developer room was confirmed. We also have members of the core Haxe language development team planning to attend, so we would expect to run an expert-panel session. Finally, there would also be space in the program for lightening talks.

Haxe is an amazing, cross-platform toolkit. For example, using the Haxe library from http://www.openfl.org/ you can: “Build games and applications for almost every platform imaginable -- Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Firefox OS, Tizen, Flash and even HTML5. Bring your creative vision to life, on desktops, tablets, phones, even consoles. Publish to Steam, Amazon, OUYA... practically anywhere.”

Yet very few people in the general open-source community have ever even heard of Haxe. Please help us fix that, by letting us meet-up and spread the word at FOSDEM 2015.

Regards,

Elliott Stoneham

On behalf of The Haxe Foundation

[END OF DRAFT SUBMISSION FOR FEEDBACK BY SATURDAY 13^TH SEPTEMBER (SUBMISSION WILL BE MADE ON SUNDAY 14^TH SEPTEMBER)]

 

Thank you for your help with this,

Elliott

[TroyWorks]

The submission looks great, if not awesome.


Not sure if/who to ask about streamed or recorded, the talks look great and highly relevant to my current needs.

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thank you TroyWorks.

Last year the talks in the Go Dev-Room were both streamed and recorded, but the Go community had to provide volunteers to work the cameras. Obviously it is too early yet to know what will happen this year.

On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 5:47 AM, TroyWorks <troy...@gmail.com> wrote:

The submission looks great, if not awesome.


Not sure if/who to ask about streamed or recorded, the talks look great and highly relevant to my current needs.

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[Simon Krajewski]

Great draft!

Simon

[Juraj Kirchheim]

Hey, Simn. Say, if you'll be there anyway (you will, right?), how
about saying a couple of words too? You could always wear a super hero
costume to avoid recognition :P

I'm serious though. I think it would really complement the talks if we
were to present somebody so involved with the language core.

Best,
Juraj

[David Elahee]

Awesome ! 

Unfortunately FOSDEM is not well known here in bordeaux so I can't find haxers to come. 

As an help you can mentions the hundreds of games (flambe used by nickelodeon,disney,lego) and 15 millions of users (mt) or indie Game of the year ( Paper please  ) if you need more leverage.

xoxo

--
David Elahee

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thank you David, great idea! 

I'll add your "games summary" paragraph (slightly reworded) into the final submission, which, as you rightly say, should give us more leverage.

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[Juraj Kirchheim]

Hey Elliott,

many thanks for the initiative! The draft is great, but a few things
popped into my mind:

1. The talks probably need to be preceded by an introduction of some
sorts. Most people will never have heard of Haxe. So we should have
some opener that briefly gives an overview about the history, status
quo and the eco system of the language (Simn? :P). I'm not sure this
needs to be part of our submission, but it occurred to me that this is
a missing piece in targeting newcomers.

2. As for the section that is a bit about Haxe's popularity etc.,
maybe it would be interesting to have a bit more data? It might be
interesting:
- that TiVo is committed with almost 1MLOC of their own code that
they've recently rolled out to 1 million devices.
- that Prezi is making this an integral part of their platform that
reaches "over 40 million people and 80% of Fortune 500 companies using
Prezi"
- to link to some of the showcases provided by OpenFL, Flambe,
HaxeFlixel, HaxePunk and who knows what I forgot. Maybe the ld30 list
is interesting? http://haxe.io/ld/30/
- etc. ... maybe more people like David could step up and throw in
what they find to be an impressive demonstration of Haxe's maturity
and usefulness as a technology.

Just to have something more quantifiable or tangible (well, as
tangible as software can be anyway). Providing an idea of how many
people actually build products with Haxe and what kind of products
they build should be helpful in attracting outsiders to our sessions,
which I think is the critical step in winning them over, because once
we have their attention, it's a piece of cake!

You'll probably going to have to then pick out a few for the
submission (I most certainly don't envy you). Maybe we could throw up
a larger portfolio somewhere on the web.

Anyway, I'm glad it's turning out so well this far ;)

Best,
Juraj

[Elliott Stoneham]

Great ideas Juraj, I'll work them all in.

I agree, I'd really like someone to step-up to doing the introduction to Haxe and also someone to step-up to giving the initial tutorial session. Otherwise it will have to be me, and I'm more-or-less a complete novice.

I think the "introduction to Haxe" and "BYOD tutorial" sessions should be in the morning, with the detailed stuff in the afternoon, this would allow newcomers to be eased in to the day gently.

Thanks again,

Elliott

  

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[Philippe Elsass]

Hello from Massive Interactive ;)

Although the numbers may be less impressive upfront, you could mention that Massive Interactive has bet on Haxe a number of years ago for web and embedded devices development, choosing it initially for it's cross-targets compilation capabilities, and still big fans of it for our large JS-only projects.

Massive Interactive has contributed a number of widely used Haxe libraries (unit tests, code coverage,...) and employs a majority of Haxe engineers.

We still have to discuss it internally but we'd like to be present at the FOSDEM in a way or another.

Cheers,

Philippe

On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Juraj Kirchheim <back...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Philippe

[Juraj Kirchheim]

Awesome! :)

Would it be possible to put that in numbers somehow and (or maybe pick
a flagship product/library for the purpose of the submission)? The
open source community is vast and tumultuous. In some sense we're
pitching against all other projects, most of which have a much smaller
and thus clearer mission. So we need to cut through all that noise
with clear statements. Something like this (only factually correct and
put together by someone with better command of the English language):
"Massive Interactive, with its 300 Haxe engineers, uses the technology
to deliver state of the art UIs to gazillions of devices across
virtually every platform and contributes to the Haxe ecosystem by
maintaining a mature suite of open source code quality tools".

It would be great if Massive could send somebody over to present a
cross section of all the work you guys do! That's maybe even more
interesting to Haxers than to the average FOSDEM attendee :D

Best,
Juraj

[Elliott Stoneham]

That is wonderful Philippe, thank you!  I'll put in a paragraph about Massive Interactive as you suggest, and add you to the list of potential speakers.

I echo the  sentiments in Juraj's post - this is yet more great news for Haxe at FOSDEM 2015.

I'm looking forward to pulling it all together into a redraft, maybe later in the week if time permits.

Best,

 Elliott

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[Juraj Kirchheim]

Hey Elliott, just a suggestion: Maybe you could put it in a gist
(http://gist.github.com/) or into a repo on github or a google docs
file? Anything that makes versioning and collaboration a bit easier.
But if you're not comfortable using any such tool, please don't
bother. That would defeat the purpose or my suggestion ;)

Best,
Juraj

[Jason O'Neil]

I'm going to offer a different possible approach, but, given that I live in the wrong continent and most definitely will not be attending, feel free to ignore me :)

FOSDEM appears to be predominantly about free and open source software.  The sort of people who organise such an event are going to have a certain set of values, and a set of things they care about.  Why else would they organise a free software conference?  They care about freedom, they care about hacker ethics, they care about cool open source code, they care about platform lock-in, etc.  If the general pitch is

"Haxe has a vibrant community and is used successfully by commercial businesses, so give us a dev room"

then it's not much different to

"Python has a vibrant community and is used successfully by commercial businesses, so give us a dev room"
"Scala has a vibrant community and is used successfully by commercial businesses, so give us a dev room"
"Dart has a vibrant community and is used successfully by commercial businesses, so give us a dev room"
"Nimrod has a vibrant community and is used successfully by commercial businesses, so give us a dev room"
"Bash has a vibrant community and is used successfully by commercial businesses, so give us a dev room"

etc...

What if instead you pitch an angle of Haxe that is truly unique:

Haxe is a programming language and open source toolkit that is the secret to beating platform lock-in.

Need your game to run on iOS? Sure.  What about Android: yes, we have that. The boss has a blackberry - how do we even.... oh wait, Haxe can do that too.
Need a website to run on PHP servers?  No worries.  Now NodeJS?  We can do that too.  Wait, Google App Engine? Well, we have a Java target.
Even in a browser, Haxe has watched the transition from Flash to HTML5, and is keeping up with the very best compile-to-JS languages. There was even an experimental Dart target.
In an industry where dominant platforms and languages change every few years, Haxe has outlived the transition from AS2->AS3, from AS3 to JS or AS3 to Mobile, from PHP to NodeJS, and from WxWidgets to Node-Webkit.
And it will survive the next wave of platforms too.

If you let us have a dev room, we will teach open source programmers how to use this (coincidentally also very cool) language, and the mature compiler, to write code that will outlast the current fad platforms.

Take that Google/MS/Adobe/Apple.

------

Maybe it is too patriotic sounding, but at least it is different to what other programming languages can promise.

Food for thought anyway :)  Good luck and wish I could come!

[Philippe Elsass]

I kind of agree with you Jason.

Be careful not to give the false impression that Haxe is a write once / run anywhere.

This only concerns some specific frameworks (OpenFL, kha) for a specific use case (games).

So a good approach would be to say:

- Haxe is one of the best compile-to-JS language for client and server development,

- Haxe code transpiles to a number of other languages: C++, PHP, Java, C#...

- Haxe offers native-performance game frameworks and toolchains for mobile and desktop (you can point on OpenFL showcase).

PS: Massive isn't a big company so that's about an order of magnitude less of Haxe devs ;)

[Juraj Kirchheim]

@Philippe: I know. The number was just taken from a movie you may have
heard of ;)
Still, Kylian once showcased a number of things to me and I'd expect
the compound reach of Massive's projects were a sizable number.
Combined with the fact that Massive is already active since almost two
decades it would suggest that the choice to use Haxe was well
informed. That's why I thought this could be spun around a couple of
numbers that make the point pretty well.

---

As for your suggestion Jason, you're definitely right that this is
falling a bit short in the current draft of the submission (although
it is kind of mentioned toward the end). I think we need to balance
the two facts. If we just tell people that you can use Haxe for any
platform, they will naturally be skeptical about the quality of the
result.

Also I think that our multi-platform nature doens't set us apart so
much any longer. JavaScript has emerged as an omnipresent industry
consensus. It is basically everywhere and therefore so is any language
that can compile to it - which does include Scala, a number of Lisp
dialects, Java, any language that has an LLVM frontend, Nemerle (and
in fact most popular languages to some extent). Sure, we have an edge
(in fact I still believe Haxe makes a lot of things critically better
than its alternatives), but an outsider can hardly judge if we're
really better and to what extent and what that's actually effectively
worth.

What we need to do is hit a sweet spot where Haxe stands out, but
people won't dismiss it as too good to be true or just some cool niche
technology that their boss won't let them use anyway.

Best,
Juraj

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thanks guys, you are really taking this proposal to the next level!

Jason - great angle for the pitch, well done!

No time to reply in detail at present, but I will attempt to follow your advice in the next 48-hours.

Elliott

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thanks for the suggestion of a gist Juraj, I have created one at: https://gist.github.com/elliott5/1591aef6e42cdeb794b8

I plan to edit it in light of the comments so far over the next hour or so, and will post again once my updates are complete.

More anon,

Elliott

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thank you all for your amazing suggestions guys, it is starting to look quite compelling I think!

Rewrite of the draft proposal is now at https://gist.github.com/elliott5/1591aef6e42cdeb794b8#file-fosdem2015haxe-md

Further comments and improvements all welcome of course.

Elliott

[Elliott Stoneham]

Thank you again everyone for your amazing support putting the proposal together. It has now been submitted! 

We should know if we have been allocated one of the DevRooms on 1st October.

Elliott

[Elliott Stoneham]

Just a reminder to those of you who have kindly volunteered to speak in the proposed Haxe Development Room.

If you are also prepared to speak to a general non-Haxe audience, with a more introductory presentation, you should act now!

You have two options:

Option 1: To speak for 50 minutes in one of the main tracks you must apply by 1st October. If you are accepted your travel and accommodation expenses will be covered. Instructions at: https://fosdem.org/2015/news/2014-07-01-call-for-participation/

Option 2: To speak for 15 minutes as a lightning talk you must apply by 20th November. Instructions at: https://fosdem.org/2015/news/2014-09-19-call-for-participation-part-two/

In terms of reaching people who have never heard of Haxe before, speaking in one of these two ways is better than speaking in the DevRoom. So I hope that leading members of the Haxe community will choose to do so.

So far, I know that David Elahee of Motion Twin is planning to apply to speak on a main track. It would be fantastic is some others followed his lead.

If you are moved to tell the world about Haxe, but need any help filling in the forms at  https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM15 , I'd be glad to help.

Elliott

[Elliott Stoneham]

I'm very sad to say that our bid for a FOSDEM developer room has not been successful (see the official response below). I would like to thank you for you help and support with the bid.

If you are still planning to attend FOSDEM (as I am) and still want to speak about Haxe, you still have until 20th November to propose a lightning talk or could speak in another Dev Room (as described below) - please get in touch with me if you would like any help making a submission. 

Otherwise please keep all those great ideas warm ... WWX2015 awaits!

Thanks again for your contributions, with so many great people involved, the Haxe community is a joy to be part of.

Elliott

The official response:

Hi Elliott,

Like every year, we received quite a lot more proposals than we have
rooms at our disposal. Unfortunately, we were not able to schedule your
proposed room this year.

The list of accepted rooms can be found on our website. We hope you'll
agree that we have an interesting lineup despite the absence of the room
you proposed. If the content you intended to schedule in a dedicated
developer room fits in one of the accepted rooms, please submit it there
when the CFP is announced.

Best wishes,

Gerry