Was it any good?

A quick note about the events we've been to the last few weeks. Was it any good?

The NITE (Noordelijk IT Event, pronounce 'night') was not yet a great success. There weren't a lot of visitors, creating a bit of an awkward situation. Maybe next time a smaller venue would be better. The first talk was the most interesting for me. Elly de Jong of the police of Groningen talked about their research and development program. He showed some nice projects that I never heard about. Their GPS-based PDA application looked like the project my students do. These projects are happening here in Groningen! That's the effect the people behind NITE wanted to achieve.

The Achmea talk was ok, giving insight in the way such a big firm tries to handle their systems. The location at the top of the Achmea tower in Leeuwarden was especially nice. After sunset we could see the lighttower of Ameland.

Monday we had a guestlecture by Quintor on Continuous Integration. It was very well suited for our students, nice and technical. Maybe a bit heavy on the toolingside (just to give you an impression, the following tools were mentioned: ant, maven, JMX, bamboo, wiki/confluence, jira, clover, blazeds, alfresco, dbunit, hsql, spring, coberture, jcoverage, cactus, ...) but after you master the basics there's always a toolingstep to make.
But for the attentive listener there was also much of interest about agile development and working for regional companies. The students gave it a big thumbs up.

A busy period

There's a busy period coming up for me and 'my' software engineering students.

First we had studentpresentations about Open Source-related subjects. To spice things up we had a number of experts from the NNO (http://www.nn-open.nl/) who asked critical questions and provided feedback. We all learned a lot more about Open Source, what it is and isn't.

This week there's the NITE congress (http://www.nite.nu/node/6) of which I will attend the wednesday. I have yet to find the time to look up what the programme exactly is... :-)

Thursday I'll take 30 students to Achmea for an evening programme on J2EE in the insurance business (http://www.quintor.nl/index.php/quintornieuws/16-okt-java-op-hoog-niveau.html). Quintor is also involved in that.

Later on Quintor (http://www.quintor.nl/) will also be giving a guestlecture at the Hanze about agile development with special focus on Continuous Integration.

And at the end of the quarter I'll be taking all of my students to the JFall (http://www.nljug.org/pages/events/content/jfall_2008/sessions/?template=showprogram.html&fs=1). Thanks in advance for the JFall organisation for making this possible. I'll post my selected programme later.

And between this events I'm also doing some other interesting stuff which I might get around to later.