Prague Bound, Or the Czech In the Mail

Countering my usual claim that no good thing can come from going into the office, I went into the office on Thursday and found myself on a plane to Prague Czech Republic on Sunday. I'm delighted about the opportunity to go to Prague, and the boss is equally delighted that I'm not hanging around the office and generally disrupting a pleasant working environment.

So what am I going to be doing there? Well, I hear that there's great coffee to be had in Prague, so there's a good chance you'll find me in a coffee house or two.

And as Michael Swaine reported last year in his article Software Development In Eastern Europe Prague is a hotbed of software development. From what Michael discovered, the software dev action in the Czech Republic is due in part to an excellent educational system which is turning out some 5000 engineering grads a year. More over, there's a motivated and talented labor pool with professional standards and favorable labor costs.

It's hard to find a major computer company that doesn't have a presence in Prague. Off the top of my head, there's Intel in a big way, along with CA, Microsoft, IBM, and Sun, to mention a few. (Sun's NetBean development is done in Prague). I'd be curious as to other dev centers in Prague that you might be aware of. As for the specific reason for my being there (other than the coffee), I'll be learning more about multi-core and parallelization, a favorite topic of mine, at an Intel conference examining the same. I will keep you posted as to what I learn and how good the coffee is.

But I've already learned one thing. If going into the office leads to a trip to Prague, well, maybe going into the office isn't such a bad thing after all.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:47 AM  Permalink