Here is my very late post on LGM 2014!
Back in April I went to Leipzig for my first in-the-flesh meeting of Shoebot devs ..
I met with Ricardo + to collaborate on a workshop on shoebot. To make it more fun we hadn't decided what to do it on ! In the anarchic OSP (open source publishing) house we came with a plan to get people making examples for shoebot.
Luckily Ricardo had done a lot of this sort of thing before so did most of the talking, then I showed off some bots - evolution, spirals and also the livecoding work.
Overall the workshop seemed to go over well; we got a bunch of examples, and there was even a plugin for sublime text !
Things that came out of the workshop:
People want an integrated editor - this is OK, since the IDE still
exists.
Differences between the Nodebox/Shoebot API and Cairo are not always
intuitive.
Livecoding is cool!
Shoebot 2 ... or something else ?
Going forward, it might be best to take the Nodebox approach and build
something new based on these lessons, I'm not sure exactly what yet.
What is the most intuitive API, how can we be close to standard APIs.
Non Shoebot Stuff
Outside of the workshops and talks there were plenty of time to drink and chat - apart from talking the head off of one of the mypaint guys I learned quite a lot about OSP off Sarah Magnan and Brendan Howell .. which made me regret missing many of their talks, including Brendans on the screenless office.
Leipzig was a really great city to visit, the venue for LGM was
particularly impressive being inside an old church that the East Germans
repurposed to a university.
Importantly for me I learned about the "kebab circle" - the ring of
gentrification moving from the inside of the city outwards (beyond which
you can still buy kebabs).
With any luck LGM will be able to make it next year and meet everyone again.