Next week marks my first visit to Geneva, Switzerland. While there, I will be teaching a course on Refactoring to Better Design and Test Driven Development: Evolving Legacy Code at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN.
I’m excited to be making the trip and I hope to find some time while I’m there to take in the sights, not least of which is CERN itself. You may have heard of CERN recently, as scientists there have made international headlines with the discovery of the “God Particle,” the Higgs-Boson.
According to their site, “At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.”
A less well known fact about #CERN is that it was the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The web started out at CERN in a project called ENQUIRE which was headed up in 1990 by Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee as a means of facilitating collaboration between scientists. A copy of the first web page ever created can be found here.
I will be arriving Sunday, Sept. 15 and returning Saturday the 21st. If you will be in Geneva that week and you’d like to get together to discuss #refactoring or #tdd, please contact me. For information about other upcoming trips (like Brazil!) visit my page at joeyoder.com.
