Last week I went to Paris in order to assist to the second XP Day France conference which was held in Paris. This was an excellent opportunity to catch up with the french speaking Agile & Rails communities. After all, I left Paris almost 5 years ago - in july 2002 ! Nethertheless, I am feeling deeply connected to my home country and I really can't stand bad croissants full of vegetable hydrogenated fat ;-) I have met and talked with passionate people, among others:

• Laurent Bossavit, Paris, The organizer who did a very good job, the conference place rooms food & drinks were quite good. Laurent is an independant Agile consultant and offer training services about Agile practices
  
• Richard Piacentini, Paris, who created RailsFrance, organized Paris on Rails and is a founder of nuxos.fr, a consulting company on open source and Rails projects.
  
• Ludovic Blaas, Besançon (my home town!!!), Agile coach at Parkeon ex Schlumberger where people work with Pair Programming, unit testing, Continuous Integration and so on. Allez Besac!
  

• Olivier Lafontan, UK, Agile consultant at exoftware. I attended 2 excellent session given by Olivier: "XP Game" perfect training session to re-learn how to do the planning and "Numbers which sell Agile methods" which focussed on ROI of Agile projects and how to give a business value to customer stories
  

• Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, Brussels, nayima, gave a very good presentation on identifying bottlenecks on projects. Pascal is one of the inventor of the famous XP Game, he has also a looooot of experience in programming
  

• Jacques Couvreur, Geneva, hortis.ch, gave a return on experience about Pair Programming
  
• Jérôme Laurens, Paris, founder of ss2j, part of the "sustainable" and ethical consulting network ss2j
  
• François Beauregard, Montreal gave a talk about GreenPepper, a product which is a mix of BDD / wiki and FIT
  

If you read in French and want to join the hip crowd of happy Rails developers, BUY THIS BOOK! This is the second edition, updated for Rails 1.2.3, translated by Laurent Julliard and Richard Piacentini and published at "Editions Eyrolles". A Must Have !