Trolltech!

(Friday, May 15 17:17) Resting, Hungry

I’m back home now after visiting Trolltech. Wow, what a day. First was the sculpture garden. There was a marching band there and many Norwegian families – when I asked Kristin later she said that it was a trial run for tomorrow’s parade! It seemed to go quite well when I was there, and I did get some good video of it, so hopefully I will be able to show that when I get home. The batteries I bought yesterday didn’t work. Now, they weren’t the most powerful, so shame on me for not being careful of what I buy. But anyways, I still have hope for the rechargeables, acheter viagra professionnel. After reading online that sometimes the Nickel-Cadmium ones take a few cycles to get to their full capacity, I discharged the batteries completely last night to see if that helps. They’re currently charging again. Trolltech, wow, I think that deserves its own paragraph.

So, I took the local transportation, specifically the subway and bus, around today. It was only about 4 stops from Myuerstrauen (Ok, I botched that spelling, I’ll get my little packet later), the stop for the sculpture garden. The building was this gigantic complex called BI, which housed the Norwegian School of Management. Trolltech was located on the 6th floor of just one of the 4 quadrants of this building. At first the secretary wasn’t aware of my visit, in hindsight I should have brought the most recent email with my contact’s name instead of the one two messages back (the older one had the address and directions on it). Anyways, I brought up gmail on her computer and it all went smoothly from there. Trenton, also from Minnesota, was my ‘guide’. We started out by eating lunch, and I was lucky, this was the one day of the week where they had a cooked ‘hot’ lunch instead of the traditional sandwiches from home meal. I met 5 or 6 other devs at lunch. Two were from Norway, 2 from the US and 2 from other places in Europe (Finland and Germany?). All spoke English. I actually think that almost all of the interactions that I saw took place in English. I guess that makes sense, because in the global market that is almost always what companies need to use. Anyways, Trenton showed me around after lunch. It turns out that he works on the Mac side of things. I had read that Trolltech was porting Qt to Cocoa (from Carbon), and he confirmed that he was one of the main ones working on that. There were two people to an office in the programming side. I thought this was interesting (more on that later if I have time). We visited some guys working on embedded devices (very cool) and a whole bunch of themed (and named with company core values) office/conference rooms. The office was actually two floors, one above and one below. Although below is a bit of a misstatement, as it was still on floor 5. Trenton showed me their bug tracking system (wow, great for collaboration) and discussed a few of the internal ideas about revision control. (Turns out that Git and Mercurial are dueling it out). At the end of my visit, we went and met the main apparel lady. Oh wow. I now have not only a T-Shirt but also a laptop bag, lanyard, and even a Trolltech branded combo USB Hub/Coffee cup warmer! Crazy stuff.