Desafio NetBeans - the plugin contest - postcards from Brazil II

I'm here in Brazil to kick off the Desafio NetBeans, the NetBeans plug-in writing contest. A training company down here, that I've worked with, GlobalCode is running the contest, and Sun is supplying the prizes - three expense-paid trips to the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in May. It's country-wide, and open to all Brazillian Java developers. It's a lot of fun to be helping put together something that will give away something really cool - and a trip to JavaOne is pretty darned cool.

So as a part of that, Charlie Hunt and I are frenetically flying around Brazil, doing training on NetBeans and NetBeans module writing, and the new plug-in development tools in NetBeans 5.0. We did a three hour talk for the local JUG in Sao Paolo last night, got in after a late dinner at 2AM, and were on the way to the airport to Salvador at 5:30 this morning; then we'll fly to Natal at 1AM tonight, with a 3AM stopover, to do the training talks there tomorrow night. Did I mention it's fun? Did I mention it's exhausting? :-)

Brazil is, as always, a fascinating and beautiful country. I'm continually amazed by how networked people are here - every Java developer seems to know every other one. A friend of mine who works at Google told me that a social networking program called Orkut is hugely popular down here - and indeed it seems to be - I'm told even taxi drivers have accounts on it, and teenagers compete on the size of their friend networks. I've never seen anything quite like it.

A panorama from Florianopolis (click for full size)

So, for any non-networked Brazilian Java devlopers who would like to meet us in our travels, here's our basic schedule:

• Thursday, November 24, 2005 - Sao Paolo
• Friday, November 25, 2005 - Salvador
• Saturday, November 26 - Natal
• Monday, November 28 - Brasilia
• Tuesday, November 29 - Florianopolis
• Thursday, December 1 - Porto Alegre
• Friday, December 2 - Campinas