Last week’s Wednesday (seems like ages ago, and I haven’t got any blogging time since), the Sun MySQL Meetup-Mashup World Tour got to Paris.

The Meetup-Mashup gets a local flavour wherever we are. And the local flavour in Paris was an Irish Pub, where we had an intimate meeting with a good 160 of the closest friends of MySQL.

We had some bière gratuite (free beer) to celebrate the logiciels libres (free software), as well as a presentation by Giuseppe, after a brief introduction by myself and followed by an overview by Sun.

I had good encounters with old friends and made some new ones. Damien Seguy from Nexen.net belong to the oldest, and our discussions ranged from the well-being of the French PHP community to stuffed animals, particularly those depictingo species relevant to FOSS (elephants, penguins, and, let’s not forget, dolphins).

The PHP contingency was probably the biggest developer audience in the group, but Ruby on Rails and Java were also ably represented.

From a community perspective, the most interesting discussions I had with three gentlemen from www.developpez.com: Adrien Artero in charge of the Business Intelligence column (bidvp.com@gmail.com), Nicolas Joseph and Antoine Dinémant. They asked us to help them by identifying the best articles related to MySQL on our website, so that their volunteers can translate them to French and publish them on their developer site. Talk about well-aligned interests! We’re happy to oblige, as we very much welcome spreading the word on MySQL in the languages relevant to the developers — in the case of France, French.

Some notes on www.developpez.com, the French language community that concentrates the largest number of professional IT specialists:

• Provides for free all kinds of useful services for IT specialists: newsletter, magazine, topicality events, tutorials, articles, FAQs, tests, benchmarks, debates, surveys, tools, sources, components and examples of code, blogs, and free site hosting for IT specialists.
• Up to 130.000 visits per day
• More than 1.400.000 distinct readers attend www.developpez.com at least once a month.
• With more than 5000 messages per day, it is also the most active forum of mutual support in its field.
• The largest voluntary editorial team: more than 500 authors.

A great thanks to Mick Carney, our senior Sales guy in France, to Giuseppe Maxia, who organised the event from a community perspective, and, most of all, our long-time French PR agent Véronique Loquet of AL’X Communication, who did an amazing job in planning and coordinating this event.

Looking forward to the next French event, an enterprise event directed at Sun & MySQL customers, happening in June.

References:

• Damien Seguy’s blog: http://www.nexen.net/articles/dossier/18257-rencontre_sun/mysql_du_3_avril_2008.php
• Giuseppe Maxia’s blog: http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/meetup-in-paris-mysql-social-event.html

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 0:32 and is filed under Events, MySQL, Sun, Sun visits, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.