It has been two long days; not because I’ve been going to sessions all day long, but because I’ve reworked my presentations quite heavily. But now both the BOF and the TS are finished, and I think they went well. I had to keep the level to Ruby, JRuby and Rails introductionary material, though, since most developers here didn’t seem to know what is possible with these technologies.

But it’s been great; I’ve gotten good feedback and had some really interesting conversations with lots of people.

We have been doing the town each night, and I’ve found that I like Barcelona very much. Except for the food: this country doesn’t seem to be good for vegetarians at all. Very annoying. I’m going for beer and wine instead of food the rest of the week. =)

One day left, though, and it’s bound to be nice. Me and Martin are both on a developers panel about the state of programming languages in 2020; I have no idea what to say, and I’m thinking about just ad-libbing it. I know my own position in these questions fairly well, and the current Yegge-debate have made my opinions even more explicit.

But now it’s time to see the town again.

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: barcelona, java symposium, jruby, theserverside. | #

Getting back from RailsConf meant getting thrown into loads and loads of preparation work for London. Oh my. Since I’m moving in 8 days, and almost all packing needs to be done during the weekend (and I haven’t begun yet), I don’t think I’ll be able to be that communicative. Further, I will have no access to a computer or cell phone from Wednesday to Monday, so if I don’t answer email, don’t get upset. =) That incidentally means I won’t blog either.

June 4th will be my first day at ThoughtWorks and I’m incredibly excited by it. Hopefully I’ll be able to blog some about my experiences, but I guess the first few days will be focused on getting setup and finding an apartment (If you know any nice place close to Camden Town that’s available by the beginning of June, please do tell), and doing all manner of things.

If I’m unlucky I’ll need to go to DC the week after that, but we’ll see. Hopefully I can wrangle out of it, since Stella (my girlfriend) will arrive in London that weekend.

After that week I’ll have a week of quiet and solitude, and then it’s time for TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona. I will in fact be involved in no less than three events during this conference. First, a technical session on JRuby, secondly a BoF about deploying JRuby on Rails applications, and third a panel discussion called “2020: A Developer’s Odyssey Panel”, which is bound to be interesting. I have no idea whatsoever about what I’ll say yet, but Martin Fowler will be one of the panelists which makes it a certainty of fun. I’m looking forward to TSSJS for a few more reasons; seeing Barcelona, since that is said to be a lovely city, getting to say hi to Dr. Heinz Kabutz, meet up with Jonas Bonér from Terracotta and continue discussing how to utilize Terracotta and JRuby together. I’m looking very much forward to the whole event, in fact. If you are there, don’t hesitate to say hi!

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: barcelona, future, planning, presentation, theserverside. | #