Bergen – 1

Sept 27th

Arrive in Bergen. Picked up by Jon Arlid at the airport and went out for geek beers with John St-Claire, Mark Nijof, Oivan, others. Brought some liquor chocolates from Holland for Jon and Mark.

I only made it about 20 minutes into geek beers before some random Norwegian girl was talking to me (and separated me from the group). Apparently I have set the bar high for speakers meeting Norwegian girls.

The conversation was hilarious, she was trying to set me up with one of her 4 friends. By complete random chance she spoke reasonable French so we just sat at her table and she told me everything about her friends at the table with them sitting right there.

She ended up coming with John, Mark, and I for my first experience of a nachtspiel (or drinking after you drink). There is a similar concept called a forespiel (yes in German that’s foreplay) which is drinking before you drink. This is a necessity in Norway as it is not uncommon to pay 80kr (16$USD) for a beer out.

Mark (The Dutchman) Nijof

John St-Claire

Of course I was not just here for geek beers though there were many and they were quite interesting. I went to work with Reaktor for a day doing some training on DDD and building systems. I did 2 short classes there that were mainly about the importance of language in building systems.

Wednesday I did my Unleash Your Domain talk for the user group. It seemed to go over very well (more about how well it went over later).

Thursday and Friday I was at Frende which is an insurance company. They have a system that they had been building that they wanted to get some input on in terms of their domain and perhaps some guidance for how to better deal with their domain.

Parking lot of Frende (quite a pretty area)

I thought Jon Arlid would cry when I told him that I would not actually recommend them to use the domain in the way that they were (it actually simplified many of their problems not to do it). I left him somewhat discouraged to the solace of his wife and child.

The next day at Frende I built up some slides of general things that the development team could use to help improve their system. Examples of this being SRP, DI, Value objects, etc…

I also ended up with a new slide to end the presentation i.e. a “questions” slide as Norwegians are notoriously difficult to get questions out of during presentations (unlike Mark but he’s dutch).

Click through to read it. It is pretty funny, a few people just started laughing after.

 

 

Street

Typical Bergen street (very small and hard to walk on)

Sunny in Bergen!

The harbor (and still sunny!)

I also saw a creole restaurant one day down by the fish market. I just had to go check it out. It was lacking spice but was still quite tasty. The other weird thing about it was they put a langoustine in with the jambalaya, I have never seen a langoustine in jambalaya before. I wasn’t  completely disappointed though it was 274kr (just under $60 just for a jambalaya, Norway is expensive!)

This takes me to Friday, I was originally intending to head out (well I really had no idea when I would leave but the weekend would have been a good time) …