Traditionally , one month before the jPrime Conference we are starting our featured speakers interviews series! The first one our great friend Sebastien Blanc! Enjoy!

Hello Sebastien, can you please introduce yourself?
Hi ! I'm Sébastien Blanc, I'm half dutch half french and I'm a Principal Software Engineer. I'm located in the south east of France , on the Riviera and I work for Red Hat on the Keycloak project.

In Red Hat you are now working on KeyCloack project. Please, tell us few words about it. Why should people start using it?
Security is hard and painful, and worse, you will probably implement it the wrong way, believe me. Keycloak will remove these constraints and handle for you the user management layer, including authentication and authorization. As I will show it during my talk, it's really easy to setup : unzip the Keycloak server, run it, add the adapters to your apps (front or back), define your security constraints and you are good to go !

You are highly involved in programming for kids initiatives. You also do co-present with your daughter quite often. What do you think is a good age to start coding?
Teaching code to kids is becoming more and more a real passion for me. My advice is to start with your kids when they are around 8 with Scratch. But it's really - and I insist on "really" - to not force them. For instance, my son is almost 10 and until 2 months ago he was absolutely not interested in coding. For some reasons, he got the trigger a few weeks ago and now he is unstoppable. Before 8, you can try Scratch Junior but it's only available on tablets.

My other advice is to let the kids as much as possible discover by them self how things work. Give them a quick demo on how Scratch works and then let them alone for 1 hour. When you will come back, you will be impressed by their creativity, believe me.

How do you spend your free time? Do you have any other hobbies except programming?
In my free time, when not spending time with my kids and wife I practice Kobudo, an old martial art from Okinawa. I also love retro gaming and built this arcade table last year : https://twitter.com/sebi2706/status/828897019913715712 ... And , oh I'm an absolute fan of Half-Life ;)

Thank you very much, Sebi! See you soon in Sofia!