Events

FOSDEM 2023

We were happy to cohost a stand at FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels, Belgium this past weekend (4-5 February) with members of the Ada community. We want to thank all the participants who helped to answer questions about the Ada language, community and tooling, as well as the SPARK subset and applications in the industry.

To present Adabots, I set up two laptops and a tablet, such that on the participating side, contestants could see a robot (or turtle) move about a minetest world in response to the code they had typed into the laptop presented to them. Meanwhile, I had on my side a laptop that could both navigate the minetest world (projected via x11vnc to the tablet), and type into the same terminal (using ssh and wemux to replicate a NeoVim instance). In this manner, we had a development setup with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and an Ada language server for code navigation, and I was able to help in fixing any mistakes as they happened. To top it off, we had live in person support from Ada experts when users wanted to do advanced programming.

It was a great success; we were able to help about a dozen children and two dozen adults to write their first Ada programs; houses and walls and staircases were built, 3d text was rendered in blocks, mazes were solved in many creative ways, and when all the science was done, each participant received a BBC Microbit, courtesy of AdaCore.

The AdaBots cheatsheet received a few fixes pointed out by participants and is now online at adabots.net/cheatsheet, and the programs written by participants are viewable here on github.

Future events

We look forward to showing AdaBots at future events. If you know of an event where we should attend, please get in contact: you can email us at info@mcglinn-software.com.