Category: work

CSS 2008 – A little light relief

Hans and I can be found behind our computers in the mornings and evenings, catching up with email, blogging, and planning our schedules for the next day.

It’s not (quite) all about sitting behind computers. We went out before the start this morning, and again at lunchtime to take advantage of the good weather.


Colorado Software Summit 2008

After a year’s break, it’s again my turn to visit the Colorado Software Summit in Keystone, Colorado.


I arrived on Saturday to fantastic weather and took the opportunity to do some hiking and geocaching (GC82F4, GCPPTV, GCWYDB) before the conference started.


When my colleague Hans arrived on Sunday (after a number of flight delays) we took a drive over to Aspen to sort out the car rental. It turned out to be a 6 hour round trip, but certainly worth the drive to see the scenery, and cross the Continental Divide at 12095 ft).

JFall

Today I visited JFall, a one day java conference organized annually by the Dutch Java Users Group. The conference was a good chance to catch up on the latest technologies (with a bias towards Adobe products, as they were the main sponsor of the event this year), and also meet up with some old colleagues of mine.

In the end I attended sessions on:

  • Webservices security (a necessary evil)
  • Adobe AIR (bringing flashy internet sites to the desktop, for example eBay Desktop)
  • New features in Java 6 & 7
  • JavaFX (a new scripting language for Java user interfaces)
  • Concurrency

The conference was for the most part well organized, with the exception of the bus service which was provided from the train station to the conference venue – 2 7-seaters which were hopelessly under capacity to carry everyone. Since there were no signs indicating where the buses could be found, it was a good thing that an all male group of computer programmers is hard to miss.

All in all, though, an enjoyable day which was both educational and social, and gave me a good opportunity to practice my Dutch. I’m looking forward to their next conference, held in April…. JSpring!