Monday, December 22, 2008

Oh, Devoxx!

Oh, Devoxx!
or
Odevoxx
(An Ode to Devoxx)

In December, Antwerp's miserable,
With wind and rain both terrible,
But beer and fries flow every night,
So, in the balance, it works out right.

Though changing names caused such pains
The geeks still flock and the show remains
The hottest conference in the coldest place
(Now, to thaw out my frozen face).

Devoxx is the place to be,
Especially if you're in BE,
Where talks on Java, Flex, and such,
Are thankfully given in English, not Dutch.

I was over in Antwerp a couple of weeks ago, giving various talks on Flex and related technologies at the Devoxx conference (formerly named JavaPolis). This conference is always fun, with lots of great talks and speakers, so that we all manage to forget how awful the December weather is in northern Europe and enjoy ourselves.

All of my talks were recorded and will eventually be posted to Parleys.com, but in the meantime, I'll post the slides in case you're interested.

The first talk I did was on Effect-ive Flex (apologies to Josh Bloch for shamelessly ripping off his Java book title for a completely different purpose). I wasn't planning on giving this talk at all, but due to a last-minute cancellation on Monday afternoon, Romain and I found ourselves giving surprise talks on Android and Flex. MAX attendees may recognize some of this content from the presentation I did there, although this one was focused purely on Flex3 and Gumbo effects.

Anyway, here is the PDF of the presentation.

Stay tuned for other slides; I'll dribble them out one by one over the next few weeks. And I'll post pointers to the parleys.com videos as they are posted; the videos combine shots of the speakers, the slides, and the demos. And by the way, the Parleys player is an awesome Flex/AIR application!

4 comments:

Joshua Bloch said...

Of course I ripped the title off from Scott Meyers;) And he didn't mind either.

Happy holidays,

Josh

Anonymous said...

Northern Europe??
Antwerp is still very much a part of western europe, just a little France above Spain! :)

Although I'll admit it didn't feel like that during the Devoxx days, some of the coldest of the year...

Chet Haase said...

Frank -
My mistake. All I know is:
- Belgium is north of places I'd consider Southern Europe
- I flew over Northern Canada, Greenland, and Iceland on the way there
- It borders the North Sea
- Coming from California, all weather seems northern

Having said that, it was even colder in California when I got home. Maybe the whole planet has traveled north.

Anonymous said...

Although I'll admit it didn't feel like that during the Devoxx days, some of the coldest of the year...