The best moment in any vacation is when you shut the office door behind you, the night before the vacation begins. You feel a free man, even if it’s only for a few days or weeks. Today I had that moment, and I’m still enjoying it now.
This year, my Christmas vacation starts off with a visit to the JavaPolis conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Technically, it’s still work; but it’s a lot more fun than solving issues and debugging code, which I’ve been doing since our first major release back in October.

The other night, a colleague told me he doesn’t like going to conferences because you get so little out of the — usually short — presentations. But for me, a conference like this is all about hearing and seeing new things, being inspired, getting new ideas, thinking up new plans, new projects… As well as meeting people: people I’ve worked with in previous projects, or people that you only knew on-line, or people who helped build the stuff we’re using everyday: Java, Google, Spring etcetera. Not that meeting them would change the way you work with their tools, but I think that people who’ve created something noteworthy, are often inspiring to meet and talk to. A conference can be so much more than just the presentations you attend. I hope JavaPolis will be like that.

I’m going to try to blog whenever I can, but that will probably only be at night, in my hotel. WiFi seems to be the one thing missing from JavaPolis, unfortunately.