Panama JUG: Two Day Conference

Who would have thought that 4 hours outside of Panama City a conference for Java developers will take place? It will be a two day event scheduled for December 13th and 14th at the Hotel Versailles in the capital of the Herrera province Chitré (Google Maps). The lineup of speakers and topics is quite impressive and it's international. There will be speakers from the Czech Republic, the United States, Chile and Germany. The target audience are Panamanian professionals and University students. All presentations will be done in Spanish.

If you have clicked on the link to learn about the location of Chitré via Google Maps and look at the following pictures you may ask yourself how it comes that one chooses such a location for a technology event. The Herrera province is located on the peninsula Azuero and the dominating lines of business there are cattle farming and rice plantations.

Panama JUG is organized by a teacher at the regional center of Panama's Universidad Tecnologia. His name is Aristides Villareal and he works at the UTP outpost in Villa de Los Santos. He does a pretty good job at teaching Java and software development in general. Together with a body of students he is working on translating the NetBeans IDE into Spanish. That's an important issue as not everyone speaks English reasonably well, but still there are many smart people with good software development skills and ideas. People should not be blocked from using a tool due to language barriers. So kudos to him for doing this important work.

My company Caimito Technologies is sponsering the event and we'll be doing two presentations. One will be about the SCRUM methodology for agile software development and the other one will be about something that we call "the workbench". The workbench is a preconfigured VMware image with Maven, Subversion, Continuum and our product Savila installed and ready for use.

I'm sure we will have a good time in the countryside and maybe a bit of adventure as well.