I was traveling for the whole week last week.
My first stop was at Copenhagen. I attended the two-day Hudson/CI workshop hosted by Nokia, and I was very impressed at the degree in which Nokia embraed Hudson and the amount of the Hudson plugin development they’ve done thus far. I hope some of those work will be publicly visible some time (nag, nag.) I also got some inspirations about new plugins, which I hope to implement soon.
We also hosted the Hudson user meetup at the same place Monday night. We had about 20-30 people all in all, which I thought was a great attendance. It looks like there will be a LinkedIn group for Copenhagen Hudson users, so please go join the group if you couldn’t come to the meet-up. Aside from all the conversations that I enjoyed, I was able to discuss and validate some of the ideas that I’m doing in ICHCI, our value-added Hudson distribution.
On more lighter notes, I was finally able to meet Simon Wiest in person, who is a long time Hudson contributer and an author of a German Hudson book.
Simon also “discovered” that Nokia deployed extreme feedback devices throughout their offices, and that their builds are so always green that they only have yellow and red lights. Must be a Scandinavian energy-efficiency thing.
Nokia folks told us that should these lights ever come off, there will be sirens and people will be evacuating the building. Clearly, a broken build is a serious, serious deal 🙂
In the later part of the week, I moved to Oslo to attend JavaZone 2010. As usual, JavaZone was very well organized, and aside from everything being twice as expensive than the US, I enjoyed Oslo. The attendance to the meet-up was much smaller here, but nonetheless I had a good 2 hours in a local bar talking about Hudson, life in Norway, and so on. The talk went OK, with all demos working correctly.
One thing that always strikes me in Europe is that how much people drink. Here at JavaZone, they even serve you beer at the conference, which is unthinkable in the US! So when I realized that I had some extra time in the airport, I just couldn’t resist mimicking an European by indulging myself with a glass of beer (at 10am!)
The only regret for me was that I didn’t have much time doing sight-seeing — I would have loved to visit Legoland Denmark or the famous Fjord in Norway — but then, there’s always the next time. For those who I met in person during the travel, it was a great pleasure to meet you. There’s something special about meeting people in person.