Ralph and I attended the ECLIPSE-IT International Conference hosted by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Napoli Federico II this week in Naples, Italy. Ralph did a great presentation on building innovation networks. Mine was on one of my favourite topics: test-first development. Frankly, I’m not 100% happy with my delivery (I’ve done better), but I think it went okay (after they told me to slow down). Unfortunately, all the other speakers that were speaking in Italian so I couldn’t understand very much of what they were saying (I apparently know enough bits and pieces of various languages to frequently get a gist of what was being said). One of the talks leads me to believe that the Italian government is making its way into the open source world, which is goodness.
From the show of hands during my talk, it seems that most (if not all) of the students, researchers and faculty at the university (at least the ones doing software) are using Eclipse. There were also a handful of posters covering some Eclipse-based research areas. There’s a heck of a lot of Eclipse work happening at the university. In fact, there’s a heck of a lot of Eclipse work going on at lots of universities.
After the morning sessions, Ralph and I decided to do a little touring and visited Pompeii. Pompeii is pretty amazing. Ralph has posted a bunch of pictures here if you’re interested. Assuming that we survive one more trip in a taxi (the traffic here is… aggressive) we’re making our way back to Germany tomorrow morning to gear up for Eclipse Summit Europe. See you there!
As an aside, why do we call it Naples when the locals call it Napoli? That just doesn’t make any sense to me…
