I spent most of last week in Antwerp at Devoxx 2012, probably the biggest developer event in Europe. The European context was front-of-mind since, for recreation, the week before I’d been occasionally reading US right-wingers introspecting on why they’d lost the election and where America is going. A repeating theme is how the US is at grave danger of becoming like Europe; they’re convinced that that’s Barack’s hidden agenda. And Europe, you see, is a terrible place.

A week there, in only a corner of the continent, but among Eurofolk from all over it, and my opinion that the US wingnuts are just wrong is reinforced. The US’ most important problems are not going to be well-addressed by becoming less European. Having said that, I remain firmly a New World person; I like living in a young society, and anyhow Euro pop music is mostly shit.

I’ve covered Antwerp before (with nice pictures) and really only got out after dark this time; here are a couple of Antwerp-by-night shots:

Antwerp by night
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Antwerp by night

It’ll never be a big tourist attraction, but it’s friendly and generally works well.

The conference is exemplary: Nice location, reasonable price, well-produced. The world owes Stephan Janssen thanks for taking the time and effort over all these years.

Stephan Janssen

My big gripe is that there’s too much Enterprise stuff and too much mainstream Java (I mean, JavaFX, gimme a break). And really, that’s maybe the least interesting part of our profession, these days. But the proportion of my tribe who earns its living up against that particular coalface is pretty high, and I guess they deserve to hear people addressing their particular problems.

It draws an impressively international audience:

Where people came to Devoxx from

They’re branching out a bit: There’ll be Devoxxes in Paris and London int the same week late next March. Clever.



Contributions

Comment feed for ongoing:Comments feed

From: Lars Marius Garshol (Nov 17 2012, at 15:15)

You went to Antwerp, then failed to go to Kulminator to sample Belgian (or English) beer from the 80s? WTF?

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From: Zack (Nov 17 2012, at 15:38)

Nice to see that 5 people made it from Elbonia.

(for those that don't get the joke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert#Elbonia )

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From: Ben Hutchings (Nov 17 2012, at 22:41)

I got a weird error dialog from this page initially in Firefox 10:

"Hyphenator.js says:

An Error ocurred:

Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIDOMStorage.getItem]"

and not much content.

Blocking your hyphenate.js brought the content back. I've never seen this with any other entries.

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From: Hildeberto Mendonça (Nov 18 2012, at 00:04)

It's clear you are going through a very pessimistic time. That's sad :(

To see Europe as a "terrible place" really depends on where you are looking at. Even worse is the fact that you opinion is build on top of those "eurofolks", not places or things. Wow! That's not nice :(

I won't continue to analyse your thoughts. This post just opened my eyes: You look like a Google's puppet selling a image of positiveness, but with a hidden evil soul.

Take care.

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From: Colin (Nov 18 2012, at 15:29)

Hildeberto,

Tim is not saying that Europe is a terrible place. He is saying that a lot of American right wingers think that Europe is a terrible place...

Colin

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From: Hildeberto Mendonca (Nov 30 2012, at 00:14)

I didn't notice the irony in your text. I probably read it too fast. I apologize for my comments.

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