Heading for Germany and Holland

On Tuesday, I'm heading for Frankfurt for my third German DevCon (and the 14th edition of this great conference). About 1/3 of the sessions are in English, and there are English sessions in almost every timeslot, so if you're unilingual as I am (and not proud of it, either), there are plenty of great sessions by speakers such as Andy Kramek, Marcia Akins, Rick Schummer, Steve Black, Craig Berntson, and Alan Griver to attend. I'm even planning on attending a couple of German sessions, in particular Christof Wollenhaupt's session on Guineu. He showed a few minutes of it during the Southwest Fox keynote, enough to whet my appetite for more.

One of the interesting things about German is that it seems to be relatively easy to pick up at least a few words. There are lots of similarities between words in German, English, French (which I took in high school 75 years ago), and Dutch (which my wife speaks fluently so I've picked up a very small amount), enough so that sometimes I can at least get the gist of a conversation if not the details. Plus, in technical sessions, there seem to be actual English words in almost every sentence, and of course, code is code.

After DevCon, Rick Schummer and I head for Holland to speak at a one-day VFP conference hosted by Software Developer Network. The next day, we're going to do some sightseeing in Amsterdam, which I visited five years ago and have been wanting to go back to. Rick's going to be in shock when he sees the Red Light District, which we pretty much can't avoid since it's right by the central train station.