State of some things: AEiC video recordings, Ada Monthly Meetups, Advocacy and others

General
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Dear all,

I would like to provide some updates on a few matters that I am carrying out. Most of the updates are somewhat negative, but there is a silver lighting to it.

Ada Monthly Meetup

As most of you have noticed, it has been a while since we had one. This has been due to the AEiC taking place and the summer period. However, I can already tell you that I won’t be able to organise it for September and most likely also October, though that remains to be seen.

Sooo… What now? Well, if someone wants to step up and carry it out, that would be great. However, I also feel a lot less pressured to do them as @markhermeling has been doing a terrific job with the SPARK office hours and I have had a blast with them. It is specially cool that we have some people that barely know anything about Ada/SPARK while having also some well-known Ada programmers whose names most of you will know. Mark has also been preparing quite a few things community-wise, which also relieves some of the “pressure” from my shoulders. I would also encourage everybody to check AdaCore’s blog Blog | AdaCore as the cadence and quality of posts has increased quite a lot.

Nevertheless, I still plan on continuing the Ada Monthly meetup once I have a bit more time.

AEiC 2026 video recordings

I do have the video files. @Max published in his Ada Maximized (https://www.youtube.com/@ada-maximized/streams) Youtube channel the live recordings from the Meetup. I think my recordings are of better quality so I would still like to have them published. This year I updated the recording system to already include some of the “post-processing” that usually needs to be done in order to speed things up. However, I have had some horrible months (and I will still have some horrible months) with respect to work and other topics, so the time I can dedicate to creating a post-produced version of the recordings is very little.

If someone would like to to help post-process the videos that would be very nice and I will guide them through it.

Ada User Awards

As (hopefully) all of you have seen, we have launched the Ada User Awards and we would like to encourage and incentivize the Ada community to carry out contributions that we believe can help improve the state of the Ada Ecosystem. We know that some people are carrying out a few of these tasks, but we have received little feedback from the community. Do you think this is a good way to help the community? Would you have done things differently? How do you think we can further improve participation, speed of submission, quality of the results or other ways in which we can help the Ada Ecosystem to become better?

Hopefully in the coming months we will start seen the submission of some of those tasks and hopefully you will get the benefits derived from them :slight_smile:

Other improvements around the Ada Ecosystem

I know that AdaCore is working on the release of a few projects, so I hope you see those soon. Also, some AdaCore engineers are working on bringing GNAT-LLVM to Alire. Additionally, I know that a few people are working hard on Alire 3.0 and they are trying to make Alire better and better with each release.

However, as usual, we are severely lacking on manpower (people-power may be more suited for the current times!) and I would encourage everyone to help out. I personally believe we have to build things from the bottom up: “low”-level and widely used libraries should become “community” standards and with great support and underlying quality while at the same time we make using Ada as easy and ergonomic as possible and we could build a few outstanding applications that showcase its power and “niceness”. Which brings me to…

Ada Advocacy

I would like to remind people that @markhermeling is looking into financially helping Ada programmers with cool projects and/or communication skill to go out there and give presentations in conferences or other events, see: Embedded World 2027 Most of us agree that Ada needs to grow out of its niche and reach people who can genuinely benefit from it. Additionally, Ada/SPARK are extremely well suited for the new AI era that is dawning on us. We should take this opportunity and exploit it to the maximum.

We will again propose an Ada Devroom for FOSDEM 2027 and Mark has shown his interest in helping out and taking part of the event, which is all great!

I will also hopefully give another Ada introduction presentation at another university here in Madrid this next semester. I will keep you posted about it.

But again, having said all of this, I encourage everyone to take the opportunity to go out there and showcase Ada/SPARK in any conference, (online) meetup, hacker or makerspace, group of friends, universities, workshops, etc!!

Crate of the year Award!

This year will be no different and we will have another Crate of the Year Award! Announcing the 2026 Ada/SPARK Crate of the Year Award | AdaCore Sharpen your fingers, finish your projects and submit them to the Alire index to be eligible to one of the three prices! The categories are the same as past editions: Ada, SPARK and embedded!

Ada and AI

As I said before, I think Ada is extremely well suited for the new AI paradigm as it is one of the few languages that allows for machine code to be produced while still carrying proofs and readability in mind. This is extremely important as now more and more code produced by AI will have to read and verified, which is a horrible task if the underlying language does not help with that. AIs are also not deterministic nor exhaustive, SPARK IS both of those things. This is a HUGE thing, as we basically can “fix” AI’s shortcomings with Ada/SPARK, something no other language can do at a production environment. Additionally, thanks to Ada’s contracts, type system and signatures, it is very easy to trace and verify that the AIs are doing what they were tasked with, as we can model the working domain quite precisely. This is a unique advantage of Ada over other languages, which we should exploit in this era.

Miscellaneous

At a personal level, I am very very busy with work, some certifications I am working on, personal projects (some SysML v2 things that use Ada/SPARK/AI, some explicit Finite Element Modelling with advance materials which uses C++ and good old Fortran, Kubernetes and KDE España) and other commitments. With all this, I want to say I am a bit overwhelmed and burned. I will very much continue with helping newcomers, curious people and help organising talks, presentations and conferences, but some other activities may have to be put in the back burner for a while. I am not asking for help or pity, just letting you know and giving you all some transparency :smiley:

Hopefully I did not forget anything. I will keep you updated with news as always. Best regards,
Fer

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Hi Fernando,

My brother and I would be happy to take over post-processing of future AEiC and FOSDEM videos. We really appreciated working on the 2025 AEiC recordings. If you’re open to it, we’d also be happy to jump in and help finish editing the AEiC 2026 videos.

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Thanks for all you do @Irvise ! The amount of things you are balancing and getting done is astounding, great work, but yes, always take care of yourself and sometimes it is better to take a step back.

Thanks for the kind words, we will certainly keep on going with the Ada SPARK Office Hours and everybody is welcome. I know the time-of-day does not work for everybody, maybe we’ll do a few time-shifted ones in a while.

Unfortunately I will not be able to assist with the Monthly Meet Up, that does not fit my schedule.

I would also be happy to assist in the post-processing of the videos if that helps.

As to the topic of Ada SPARK and AI: I am in full agreement. AdaCore is working on some very exciting content here that we will release in the next couple of weeks to both our customers and the community. Stay Tuned!

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Hi! I am very glad that you volunteered again! I have uploaded the raw recordings to my website:

As you already have the title card design and outro from last year, I would recommend reusing it for this year (with updated dates, etc). This year, the audio setup is the same, if there are any audio issues with one track, feel free to use another. Nevertheless, this year I have tried my best to make editing as painless as possible, so the first audio track should be good for most of the recordings. I have also made it so that the logos, etc; show up during the talks. I really liked the backgrounds you added last year but I could not get them to be generated nicely in OBS during the recording, so the background is just white. Do not feel pressured to delete the background and add something more stylish, but if you want to try, feel free! Also, remember to add yourselves as editors in the credits! Finally, Divya’s talk has quite a few technical issues as that was the only one being done directly in Google Meet. I have asked Fabien for his recording in case that is still available. If you could, leave that talk for later.

Again, thank you for volunteering! If there are any issues or questions, feel free to ask me!

Thank you also Mark for the kind words and volunteering to do the post processing too!

Best regards,
Fer