Intro
So a slightly belated write-up of my Saturday jaunt up to the Big Smoke.Just so you know, I really use Emacs mainly for org-mode but I am also playing with Common Lisp ( is slime/swank) and Clojure (via nrepl). I am not a power user, and have not done any elisp except twiddling with init.el.
Why did I go? I fancied a day out, hoped to learn some new stuff and to be at the first Emacs Conf so I could tell my grandchildren (for the record my children didn't care!)
Did it meet those expectations (except the last!): yes, and more!
Venue
I can claim another first - never been to Mornington Crescent tube station ( which is just north of London's Euston (main station for the North of the UK).The venue ( 2nd Floor, Centro 3) belonged to Forward and was great: auditorium, canteen area with a plentiful supply of beverages. A big shout out to them and
There were issues with the streaming so not all talks were recorded for posterity; there is an explanation here. As someone said on that thread - this was a free conference done by a first-time organising team, so these things happen... That said people are pulling together with audio, video from phones, and (obviously) the side decks ( or org files!) etc.- all is not lost!
Alex Simic (+Aleksandar Simic) led the organising team and was the MC.
The weird internet life
A couple of odd things:- At work I know only one other person who uses emacs - but here everyone was taking notes in it! (except me who thought he'd be smart by just taking the Galaxy S3, when I could have completely re-engineered my init.el by the time I left!!)
- This was the worst case for me so far of meeting people who I have seen on vimeo/you tube, read on Twitter/G+/blogs etc. but you have never spoken to before. I felt I knew them, they wondered who I was. Luckily nearly everyone was very approachable so I felt they were best buddies by the time I left.
Keynotes
Sacha Chua and John Wiegley did a joint Keynote.Sacha did a a fantastic "Why Emacs is so great" presentation to an emacs conference - everyone loved it and everyone around where I was seemed to learn something new from it; no mean feat to 100 emacs experts (well, 99).
Sacha is a person of boundless enthusiasm!
John did a history of Emacs and its antecedents together with personal anecdotes of his own. Sounds as if it would be a dry topic but I learned some new stuff and he delivered it in an amusing and engaging way.
A great start to the conference!
(Audio here)
Other Highlights
Nic Ferrier talked in his usual entertaining and unique style about loads of stuff: emacswiki, elnode, the nature of lazy collaboration and more! Oh and he used org mode for his notes.Dimitri Fontaine spoke about el-get which is the package system I tend to use as a preference - partly because I found it first, it worked on Emacs 23 and it can use other package systems as methods. Dimitri, Nic and Steve ("Luna Sandles") Purcell also gave an interesting panel on package managers and resisted over complicating the domain!
Sam Aaron talked about emacs-live (pointer to foundation packages). As one of the oldest people there I needed to get home for an early bedtime, so I missed his emacs driven music performance (with free beer and pizza!) later on.
But really there is almost too much to mention (sorry if you didn't get an explicit mention) - a very good day!
