Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Devoxx Antwerp

Arrived yesterday evening in Antwerp, check in, take a walk. The area in the neighborhood (south-side) wasn't too lively, hope that the downtown area provides more fun. What I've seen from downtown on other visits was actually quite amazing. Just coming in by train is an experience, waling up the stairs in that wonderfully architected train station.

Devoxx is great. Sold out with 3´500 attendees and a good line-up of partners it shows me that Java is not dead. I feel that I'm pretty much the oldest person here, close to double the age as the average attendee age. Having the conference hosted in a large movie theater is great for good audio and video all over the place.

The organizers have made a great effort in 'electrifying' the conference. Custom made electronic voting machines that go with your NFC arm band, stand-up terminals for the program (sponsored by Oracle as it looks like), TV-screens everywhere with the latest announcements, , movie evening with the new James Bond movie Skyfall. Looks like they have vast resources to put into lovely things.

Some things are too colorful and to fast for me. But I guess it's ok for the kids. Oh - and not to forget: The program is packed, and so are the rooms. Folks I talk to seem to think that the program is pretty good! They don't even mind the bad sandwiches.

So the concept works. It actually seems to work well enough that it got exported to France. And we'll also see a Devoxx UK next year, as I understand. Congratulations to Stephan Jansen and his team. What started as a JUG event has become a great series of conferences!

I also feel sad around the conference though. There's only one talk on the program about Eclipse. Working for the Eclipse Foundation I wonder what happened. Have we lost the contact to the Java community?


Monday, November 12, 2012

Eclipse Demo Camps Fall 2012

Just looked at the Eclipse Demo Camp site on our wiki to make my travel arrangements for the fall. Because the demo camp season is coming up!

So here is what I'm going to do, applying some optimization algorithm of my own. I will start with demo camp  Dresden on the 20th. This will give me enough time on the train to do all my email that is still lingering from EclipsCon in my inbox. Going back from Dresden, I will stop in Braunschweig and attend the Bredex party, a demo camp in disguise. Now I would have loved to go to Poznan afterwards, but due to a personal appointment that I cannot move I have to skip. But I'll try next year!

The week after, I'm definitely going to the Yatta demo camp Kassel in the wonderful Circus Rambazotti, and I'm toying with the idea to go to Fraunhofer Berlin as well. But I'm not sure yet if this works out!

The week of December 2nd you'll meet me in Munich at the EclipseSource demo camp, where Max and Jonas will put on a great party I hope. Including some fun that involves a Kinect.

Now what about you? Have you made all your plans? Go find you demo camp, it's fun. Look up the list on our wiki and register.