Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Last year I was in Rio de Janeiro, and a couple of friends and I were just finishing a delightful day in the botanical gardens. Etiene Dalcol was a student at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC) there, and very much interested and involved with Lua, a language developed at the university, and often used in embedded systems and games.

She lamented to me that there had been several international conferences about Lua but all of them were held outside of Brazil. In an offhanded way, I suggested she start a conference. As sometimes happens with things that I say in “an offhanded way” to various people, Etiene took this to heart.

Last week I found that the conference will be held July 9^th at PUC. The website is http://luaconf.com/en#about

The single track, one day conference is targeted towards people who develop applications with Lua, as well as those people that want to help develop Lua's ecosystem and communities.

Working with another organizer, Evadro Gonçalves, Etiene has lined up twelve speakers, including Dr. Roberto Ierusalimschy (Lua's lead architect), Alex Wiltschko (Research Engineer at Twitter), Lourival Vieira Neto (Developer at the NetBSD Foundation / Zenedge) and Tim Caswell (Developer at Rackspace) to talk both about the technical parts of Lua and how real companies are using it.

The conference is moderately priced at 35 reais (10 USD) for students and 70 reais for others. This is a day of technical talks for about the price of a sandwhich or a meal at Subway. In this case I would rather have the food for the mind.

This will be a relatively small conference, with only 150 tickets to be sold, yet the smallness will allow an intimacy with the developers to allow dialog that is harder to have at a larger conference.

Normally Brazil would be difficult to visit for some international travellers because of the visa requirements, but the timing of the conference is during the Olympic Games, and the Brazilian government has waived the need for visas for many international visitors. This is also a great time to leverage a trip to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and attend a great conference.

As in all conferences, the organizers are looking for sponsors. They have Gold, Silver and Bronze sponsorships, with associated values to each one. Sponsorship money will be spent in things like travel expenses for speakers, coffee breaks, and other expenses that go into even the smallest and most intimate of conferences. If you would like to be a sponsor for this important conference, please send email to Etiene at dalcol AT etiene DOT net.

I wish I could attend this conference inspired by a few words in a nice place on a warm summer's day. My heart doctor will still not let me fly on July 9^th, but please do not let that stop you.

Carpe Diem