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Esteban Lorenzano - Pulsar: Use It. Break It. Improve It - 28 October 2026

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Pulsar is an experimental IDE for Pharo, built with Spec. It aims to give programmers more leverage in their everyday work through faster navigation, richer feedback, deeper inspection, persistent lines of investigation, and a more fluid relationship with the running image. It is not simply a new browser, but an attempt to rethink the IDE as a coherent workbench for understanding, modifying, and evolving software. Esteban Lorenzano studied Computer Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires, and worked since 1994 in several object-oriented and low-level technologies, in different software companies, serving in various positions from programmer to senior architect. In 2007 he co-founded Smallworks to offer Pharo-based agile development projects. Since 2012 he dedicated full time to developing the Pharo code and community. He works with the INRIA-EVREF team in Lille, France, as core developer for Pharo, being responsible with the coordination of new releases and the implementation and maint...
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Norbert Hartl - The ins and outs and ups and downs of deployed Smalltalk images - 30 September 2026

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Deploying a Smalltalk image as a service raises a new class of questions, and answering requests is the least of them. What are the ins and outs of a running image — what do you put in, what does it report back out? And what about its ups and downs, now that staying up is the job? Canopy , grown out of running ApptiveGrid in production, is one way to look at those differently: two things you normally maintain separately turn out to be the same thing. Along the way we work out what actually matters when you have to keep a service running — and what follows from that is the rest of the talk. Norbert Hartl is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with a strong track record of delivering business projects and developing key libraries and frameworks. As the co-founder of ApptiveGrid he focuses on creating efficient, zero-dependency software solutions that drive business innovation and streamline operations. This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please s...
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Squeak 6.1 launch party - 2 September 2026

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Join us for this special off-cycle event to celebrate the new release of Squeak 6.1! More than four years in the making, the new release brings a new tree browser, the return of "The Worlds of Squeak" from 2004, and many other new features and improvements across the system. Rather than a regular presentation, this will be an informal online release party. We'll take a tour through some of the highlights of 6.1, hear from Squeak contributors about their favorite changes, and leave plenty of room to chat about the present, past, and future of Squeak. Also, we'd love to see what YOU are doing with Squeak! If you want, bring a short demo along (max. 5 min) and show us your work. New tools, shaky experiments, and works in progress are all welcome. Come celebrate the release, meet fellow Squeakers, and see what's new in the world of Squeak! Original release announcement on squeak-dev: https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/archives/list/squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.or...
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David Long - SecureCell, SageTea and the Road Back to Pharo - 26 August 2026

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  Much of today's software is locked inside large, evolving code bases where the original design has gradually been lost. What if we could automatically recover that design, represent it using a language-independent application model, and then allow a modern runtime to render, evolve and maintain the application independently of its original implementation language? This talk presents that vision through  SecureCell , a secure communications appliance developed by XTC Mobile for organizations that require privacy, security and local control. I'll demonstrate how  Graphify  analyzes existing applications to recover their architectural structure, how this information is transformed into the SageTea Canonical Application Model, and how the runtime can automatically generate user interfaces, navigation and application behavior from that model. Rather than treating software as language-specific source code, the emphasis is on recovering and preserving the application's se...
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Koen De Hondt - Behaviour-Driven Development with Hera - 24 June 2026

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At ESUG 2025, Hera  was introduced as a BDD framework bringing full Gherkin expressiveness to Pharo. Since then, Hera has evolved significantly — both as a framework and as a tool adopted in real-world industrial settings. After a brief introduction to Gherkin for writing given-when-then scenarios, various aspects of Hera will be highlighted. A functional overview will set the scene, followed by a dive into the code to show how Hera maps Gherkin features and scenarios to Smalltalk classes and methods. During a live demo, example Gherkin scenarios for a simple Pharo Spec application will be written to explain the full scenario development cycle. Koen De Hondt has used Smalltalk since 1988, first as a student, then as an academic researcher, and then in industry. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1998). In the nineties and a few years after the turn of the century, he was one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG)....
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Domenico Cipriani - Music and Sound with Pharo: an Unexpected Ambassador for Smalltalk - 27 May 2026

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 Coypu and Phausto are two Pharo packages offering respectively a DSL and an API that turn the Pharo IDE into a music and sound design environment. They enable on-the-fly music composition, pattern sequencing, and DSP (Digital Signal Processing) programming. Born as a solo project and free, open source alternative to Symbolic Sound Kyma, they have been subsequently funded by the Pharo Association and Inria. Coypu , deeply inspired by Tidal Cycles, handles musical pattern creation and playback across different audio servers. Phausto  provides an interface for programming synthesizers and audio processing via an embedded Faust compiler, with Bloc widgets that make it easy to display and control synthesis parameters. Phausto can also be used to develop audio plugins thanks to its JUCE and Cmajor exporters. Live performances with both tools have demonstrated that Pharo can handle real-time music and sound design reliably, with solid timing and no audio glitches. Domenico Cipriani ...
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Agustín Martínez - Diálogo: A Drawing-Based Programming Environment for Kids, Built in Cuis Smalltalk - 29 April 2026

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Diálogo is a desktop tool that lets children aged 10–17 create their own videogames by combining drawn characters with a set of visual icons — no typing required. The icons compose like cards, activating behaviours in the drawn objects and naturally leading kids through concepts such as categories, rules, recursion, and metaprogramming. In this talk I'll show how Smalltalk's live, image-based environment made it uniquely suited for building Diálogo. I'll give a demo of the app, walk through some implementation metrics, and discuss the pedagogical ideas behind the project — including a free 7-class course I've shared online and workshops I've run open to the community at the Faculty of Exact Sciences (UBA). Agustín Martínez is a developer and researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), and the creator of Diálogo, a programming environment for children built in Cuis Smalltalk. He presented a paper on Diálogo at the Onward! track of OOPSLA, and has given publ...
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