I’ve been in Rome for the weekend having a fabulous time seeing the sights and tasting the…. errr… coffee. It’s a great place, haven’t been for nearly 7 years though and the FAO building still stands where I had my first IT contract job.
In my experience of the IT landscape around Europe it’s become evident to me that continental Europe has a fascination and passion for the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). I always wondered what fostered this but it’s so obvious that when there are magazines for sale called PHP and MySQL the market is clearly very strong. I wander into WH Smiths in England and see more magazines about ‘How to turn my Windows PC into a fridge’ than I do about development. Ok so Dr Dobbs appears on the shelves of quite a few book stores but it’s few and far between.
Having 5 hours to kill at Frankfurt airport (long story but I had a connecting flight that I missed) I noticed also that blogger.com was blocked on almost all of the T-mobile Internet kiosks. Very strange. And I really don’t get on with the metalic QWERTZ keyboards. Ever tried to use MSN Webmessenger from one of those things? I wouldn’t.
But 1 Euro for 10 minutes browsing is excellent.