Rich Unger's Blog

Itinerant Java Speaker: Bariloche, Argentina

As some of you may remember from my last entry, my fiance and I are traveling the world, and I'm looking to meet some java programmers in different places along the way.

Well, the first to answer my call was Gustavo Santucho and his girlfriend Guadalupe. They, along with a few other programmer friends, have their own consulting company, based in beautiful Bariloche, Argentina. This is the a city near the fantastic Nahuel Huapi National Park, near the Chilean border.

They picked us up as we arrived by bus, and immediately we discovered that his English was far better than my Spanish :)
I've gotten a little bit better now, since taking some Spanish lessons from a friend of his in Buenos Aires, but most of our conversations at the time were in English.

Looking around the small city, you wouldn't think there'd be much local work for java programmers. It's basically a tourist town, situated on a very large and sleepy lake. However, Gustavo took me for a drive, and on the way he kept pointing to grocery and pharmacy chain stores, saying "they're a client, they're a client". They also have a significant percentage of clients from overseas. They gain most new clients by word of mouth, and in fact, they're getting more work than they can handle right now, and are thinking about ways to expand the company.

Gustavo tells me that the trend in his part of South America is away from webapps and towards RCP-based software, which is why they started using the NetBeans platform. I was particularly pleased to see them using my JDIC-NetBeans integration on one of their apps.

Guadalupe is the real UI designer in the group. She just emailed me some screenshots for a big new project they have, working for the local electric company:

As you can see, they're integrating components from the NetBeans Graph Visualization library (graph.netbeans.org) and Geotools.

Gustavo and Guadalupe were extremely hospitable, and we had a fantastic time. If you're interested in reading about the more vacation-like aspects of our time together, check out my personal blog.

Well, we're off to the airport soon. We're about to fly to Athens and make our way all the way around Europe (clockwise). Caio!

Comments

• Rich, please tell your Argentine friends that NB 5.5 will be available in Spanish on 24 May. Look for it on the nb.org site or visit http://translatedfiles.netbeans.org. Thanks

  Posted by: janicec on April 23, 2007 at 01:13 PM

• These screenshots come from a very early proof of concept, so you'll see a *lot* of imperfections there. Thank you very much, Rich, and good luck on your next stops!

  Posted by: guadalupesanchez on April 24, 2007 at 05:21 PM

• janicec, thank you for the information.

  Posted by: gustavosantucho on April 24, 2007 at 05:24 PM

• Bariloche is a great small city. Skiing in the winter, or trekking in the summer - travel to Argentina is so diverse it's amazing!

  Posted by: chris843 on January 14, 2008 at 09:54 AM

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