Google Zurich has been a hive of activity lately — with Code Jam, Googler for a Day, and now the latest Open Source Jam.
Our lightning talks were far too interesting and informative to confine to five minutes, but with snacks and beer in hand, noone seemed to mind.
Thomas Koch kicked off the evening, with a talk on using Vim as your IDE. Peter Arrenbrecht gave us an introduction to Patch Branches, and followed up with a quick demo during our break.
Paolo Bonzini told us all about his favourite project — GNU Smalltalk — and sparked a bit of a discussion on making a living from Open Source work. That kept us entertained while our experts worked to sort out some "technical issues" with the projector!
Once we got things up and running again, Gabriel Petrovay gave us a demo of XQuery support in Eclipse, using XQDT and Zorba. And, to round off the evening, Simon Leinen snagged himself a cool Google T-shirt by giving a talk about OSS vs "The Cloud"!
If you're still not sure what the Open Source Jam is — well, it depends on who shows up! It's an open forum for open source fans, hackers, and just plain geeks to get together, have a beer, and hear what's going on. And if you're looking for people to try out your latest patches, or to help you get a project off the ground, it's a great place to start a conversation. This time around, we had geeks from Germany and Italy, as well as plenty of locals — so there's no excuse!
But if you missed out on this one, don't worry — the Zurich Open Source Jams are semi-regular events. To stay informed about the details of the next one, or to catch up on discussions about previous ones, join the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group.
