On Monday evening I started my journey across to Amsterdam for this year's Autodesk DevCon. In this post I'm going to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about this journey, mainly because it was a little different.
I took a couple of very standard Swiss trains to get across to Basel.
My main hack when it comes to Swiss trains is to camp out in the restaurant car: these are typically very comfortable and give you a feeling of luxury for the price of a second class ticket. Not that I have to travel second class, but I only tend to upgrade to first if I don't get space in the restaurant.
I arrived in Basel quite late - around 10:30pm, but there was still a modicum of life.
Basel's station is actually pretty cool.
Around 11pm the "main event" arrived: my NightJet train to Amsterdam. I love the idea of night trains, but I admit to having been a bit apprehensive about how well I would sleep.
I ended up getting quite lucky. I had the middle bunk, between an older Dutch guy on the bottom and a young Indian guy on the top. They had both joined the train in Zurich - and would get off in Utrecht, the stop before mine - and were already well settled in by the time I joined them.
To my great relief I slept fairly solidly through to around 7am, at which point we opened the blind to see the view.
Before sleeping we'd each filled out a breakfast card and so had a customized breakfast-in-bed delivered soon after waking. All very civilised!
Once my bunk-mates had left I could take a picture of the space, to give you a sense of how big it was. This is a triple-berth Sleeper... on the way back I could only get a 4-berth Couchette, so we'll see how that compares.
Somewhat amazingly we didn't have any delay going through Germany. This is a minor miracle, frankly, so we arrived bang on time at Amsterdam Centraal.
It was a short walk to Beurs van Berlage, the event venue.
It was a matter of minutes to register and pick up my badge...
… and then find the room hosting this year's Dynamo Hackathon. All teams were formed and hacking away by the time I arrived: pretty much every one had chosen to use Dynamo's MCP capability, which I'm not especially familiar with, so I didn't have much to do.
The Expo had been prepared, ready for the evening reception and the conference itself.
I popped by the MCP workshop being held downstairs… the energy was great! You could almost smell the tokens burning.
Before the evening reception Tomas - who had arrived at more or less the same time and was staying in the same place - and I checked in to our hotel. When I first saw the entrance - even without Tomas filling - I did wonder about the size of the rooms, but they turned out to be just fine.
I'm on the 6th floor, and have a bit of a view across the nearby rooftops.
Back at the welcome reception I spent some time helping judge the Dynamo Hackathon. Thanks to Aaron Tang for providing the following two snaps!
Here's a group photo with the Hackathon organisers and my fellow judges.
Afterwards Tomas and I had the chance to hang out with some great people. Tom Benson, from Sidara and MIT - who had come along to the Encoding Experience event in London - was in town for another conference, so we had the chance to catch up.
Jan Liska and James Awe from the Tandem team are also great company.
And of course, former-Autodesk legends Lee Mullin and Jeremy Tammik should need no introduction to anyone!
A little secret (knowas that Day 0 was my birthday - or as Cyrille's card said, my "beurre's day" - so we did get the chance to celebrate that a little. Maybe I should have thought of it as my Beurs Day? Hmm.
I did get a birthday message from Daisy, who is clearly missing me as much as I am her.
For dinner we headed across to ARCA, a Portuguese restaurant that seemed to be have been filled with DevCon attendees. Tomas, James and myself sat across the bar from a bunch of old friends.
Jaime Rosales, who now works at AWS building technology to help design datacentres, took us to Café Belgique for a nightcap (or two).
A lovely end to the pre-conference day ahead of DevCon itself. It's shaping up to be another good one!
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