2022-06-09 - Le camping des speakers - Day 1

This post is in two parts:

Thursday was the first day of Le camping des speakers, 1st edition. It took place near Vannes, France. And I was there as an attendee, with my ears open.

In this article, I'm going to write my notes about this first day and the conferences I have attended.

Opening keynote - Horacio Gonzalez & Pierre Tibulle

Some slides about the sponsors, and some explanations about what was going to happen during the two days. Then, all the Thursday's speakers gave a synopsis of their talks one-by-one, trying to get attendees to come.

WebAssembly n'est pas qu'une affaire de frontend (WebAssembly is not frontend only) - Benjamin Coenen

WebAssembly has been created at Mozilla. With the lay-off, the team is now working at Fastly.

It is a shared-stack language with basic types only, so compilers have to convert complex types (strings, structs, ADTs, etc) to ints, floats, and bytes.

There are two files formats:

To compile to .wasm, there are mostly four languages:

There are some constraints we have to work with:

Use cases for WebAssembly in the backend:

.wasm binaries are normally run sandboxed. To go around this issue in the backend and be able to access IO, we can use WASI.

La cuisine m'a sauvé du burn-out (Cooking saved me from burn-out) - Yannick Guern

Imposter syndrome and savior complex do not go well together. Yannick worked too hard and tried to help everyone at work. He actually had the whole codebase of his company in his head. He eventually snapped.

Helped by cooking and watching cooking shows (Street Food, Food Wars, Chef Michel Dumas' youtube videos), he learned to cook and took pleasure from it, gradually recovering.

Ressuscitons les ordinosaures ! (Bring back computosaurs!) - Olivier Poncet

What to do first in order to create an emulator:

There are several sub systems in a device:

The hardest part to emulate is the central sub system. More than the basics you'll also need to emulate flags (internal and external), and have extra care working with timings. Plus, some games could exploit some non documented bugs, so reverse engineering can really help.

To run the guest code, there are 4 techniques:

The video sub system synchronizes the emulator with the display frames. If needed, some frames can be omitted to increase perfs.

The audio subsystem does the same for sound. You should not omit samples, or the produced sound will be very unpleasant to the user.

The peripheral sub system is often easy to emulate. It groups keyboards, joysticks, IO systems, etc...

J'ai plié mon smartphone et il ne s'est pas cassé... mais ma web app si (I've bent my smartphone and it did not break... but my web app did) - Olivier Leplus and Yohan Lasorsa

They began with a quick story about screen sizes and formats.

Media queries can be used in css to take into account the foldable devices. Some properties are accessible using js.

There is a posture API to check what posture is the phone in: flat / laptop / tent / book

They showed us some demos with actual devices and on virtual devices.

There are various use cases:

App-Elles - Exemple de tech for good mobile à l'heure du confinement (App-Elles, a tech for good example in the lockdown context) - Robin Caroff

With the lockdowns, it was really hard for social workers and people in need to meet.

His organization, Resonantes, has created a mobile app to fight family violences.

Developers can also help other organizations and did. Some examples:

Lead Dev, 3 ans d'xp, et alors ? (Lead dev with 3 YoE, so what?) - Lise Quesnel

The definition of a lead dev can be different from a company to another. Mainly:

Different aspects to a lead dev:

A lead dev needs a lot of soft skills. There are some difficulties:

Confinement: le livre dont vous êtes la victime (Lockdown, the book where you are the victim) - Noël Macé & Valériane Venance

Disclaimer: for this talk and the next one, I did not write notes, so I'm writing here what I remember from the top of my head.

Noël talked about how happy he was to take some time for himself. He even wanted to work on a book he was writing. However, the lockdown remained on and off for two years, weighting on him.

Valériane talked about how she was talking in virtual meetups (and Twitch?) and how it was depressing showing her happy face, and then sitting face to a white wall, not feeling happy at all.

Mostly, the big issues they were talking about were:

Comment (ne pas) être un connard en 5 leçons (How to (not) be a douchebag in 5 lessons) - Noël Macé & Valériane Venance

We begin with a focus on the French word "connard", coming from "con", an old word for the woman sex.

Then, the whole talk was a sort of theatrical discussion between the two speakers, where they showed different issues:

The conclusion of the talk was that we had to fight back the systemic violence, and that we should help oppressed people even if we are not oppressed.

After that, the speakers had a discussion with the public about issues they encountered. Some of the testimonies were frightening:

I honestly loved this talk. Being myself a HSBC (white hetero cis man), listening to the testimonies of the people next to me was very interesting (and horrific).

Conclusion

That's all for the first day. Of course we also had some good food (burgers and sushi) and we had access to the swimming pool \o/