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My First ABUG

Last week I went to ABUG-4 , this was my first ABUG ever. As I’m a long time Atlassian user, it was long overdue but I finally made it.

I really liked the venue. I was a bit amazed by the number of people that showed up. 73 according to Stijn’s tweet.

The content was also good. As the company I work for is also an Atlassian partner, I didn’t see many new things regarding the stack. However there were a couple of interesting sessions by customers who explained how they used the tools in their day to day business. e.g. the guy from http://www.onyxonlinelearning.com/nl/home made a very nice presentation on how Confluence is really at the heart of their business. It’s nice to see all kinds of businesses are finding the openness of the Atlassian tool suite a good fit for being one of the cornerstones of their business. I for one use Confluence, Jira and GreenHopper pretty much every day (multiple times an hour). Off course the products are not a silver bullet (as nothing ever is), so I’m still skeptic about a lot of things.

After the venture we went to the bar of the hotel next door. We were there with almost all the Atlassian Experts from Belgium. The least you can say it was an interesting session with some heavy discussions but in the end I think it was very fruitful discussion.

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Moved from Gnome to Mac

My last post was a follow up on Debian testing. This ran for a couple of months pretty smooth, but still it hang now and then. I had to use VMWare workstation with a Windows XP inside to run Outlook as still many of the features weren’t working using my Linux hacks.

When it crashed my VM crashed also. This had the consequence that now and then the VM got corrupted. So restoring backups was necessary. In the end it took me more time than I was willing to sacrifice.

As I didn’t want to switch back to Microsoft, there was not much left. Apple released their MacBook Pro with Retina display and this made me decide to finally switch (back). After almost 10 years of using a Linux desktops as my main environment, I abandoned it (now and then I had a secondary machine, one was Mac).

I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and it works pretty well. Okay it also crashes now and then, but I have yet to see this happen during a presentation.

The downside of Mac is off course that they try to hook you into each and every one of their products. I’m still using an Android phone and we still have a lot of Linux servers and other non Mac stuff running, so I won’t give in.

Switching from developing on Linux (and Windows) to Mac is also difficult in the beginning. As on Mac the keyboard layout is totally different from the regular LATIN-BE settings. However once you get used of it, it works pretty ok.

Like I mentioned I’m using a Retina display. The consequence is that not that much applications support the High Resolution, this gives a lot of applications a blurry look.

There is one thing I really love and that is the fact that switching from my Dell to my Mac, I suddenly got multi touch support on my trackpad. 2 finger scrolling and 3 finger gestures for switching between virtual desktops and calling expose to get an overview of all my apps and screens is just sweet. I know the reason I didn’t have this on my Dell is because Dell didn’t put the right hardware in, but that’s always the issue with all those vendors. They seem to always have som flaws in their configurations. This one I really have to hand to Apple. When they put together all the components, they seem to have figured out pretty well what are must haves and what are nice to haves. e.g. I don’t have a cd/dvd station in my system. During these months I still have to find the need to use it. Everything is online, you don’t really need this. If needed I still have a usb CD/DVD station from installing servers  that didn’t have CD/DVD stations.

As I also spent a lot of time talking to customers figuring out what is a must have and nice to have, it’s nice they manage to do this quite well.

Any way, enjoy your 2013. I hope to post some more stuff regarding the things I’ve been doing lately.