It’s been a while since I posted something in my journal.

The thing is I’ve been really, really busy with the development of weSpendMoney, my personal pet project in Rails.
It’s coming along nice, the advantages of working in Rails is that you can develop alot faster, than say, Java and it’s alot cleaner to read too, so I’m having alot of fun with it and I think my coleagues are too.

But having a day job in programming and coming back at home to code some more and manage the project is a bit tyring, anyway I think it’s worth it. :)

The website for the project is up (at wespendmoney.com) but it only contains the development blog and the features list, I’m waiting until the end of the week to work on the final version of the site.

It’s funny to be back in Portugal, I actually miss some of London’s unique traits, I had alot of fun during the week I stayed there for the RailsConf 2006 Conference (I must remind myself to put some photos online).

And I’m looking forward to go back there when I have some time. Also… there’s no Starbucks in Portugal (at least that I know of) so it’s really dificult to find good Cappucino’s or other coffee variations in Lisbon. How I miss ye sweet coffee.

Ahh, it’s soooo good to be back at good old sunny Portugal. I’ve been away to attend the RailsConf Europe 2006 and I have to say I had a terrific time in London.
Well, the food isn’t that great but nonetheless, I managed to take a few days to look at some of London’s great attractions (not all, because there are so many) after the conference. Including a walk through the Hyde Park, Nothing Hill, Portobello Road and much more (yeah, I also went to see all the gadgets shops at Totenham Court Road, my geek side turned over!).

It was simply amazing, it’s a fantastic town and once again I wish I had more time (and the money) to see more of it, maybe in my next job in Rails. *wink* *wink* ;)

The conference was to simply put it, worth every penny, the organization did a really good job managing all the people attending (300 or so), plus the speakers, food, sound and whatever. Kudos to everyone at SkillsMatter.

I managed to meet alot of people, there was an pre-conference party called Pizza On Rails with plenty of socializing and drinks to go around and a London Ruby User group After Party as well. So I guess, programmers can party too.

Most speakers presented really good (and usefull) topics, it was a pity I couldn’t see them all, there were topics ranging from security (Alex Payne), to high performance optimization (James Cox), Ajax (Dan Webb, Marcel Molina Jr, Thomas Fuchs), Capistrano (James Buck), localization (Till Vollmer), databases, usability, whatever you could think of there was problably someone speaking about it there, fantastic.

David Heinemeier Hansson was there of course, giving more details about the future versions of Rails and speaking to everyone. You can find some keynotes from the conference at our friends from Copenhagen.rb.
Other apearances of note, included Kathy Sierra, Why the lucky Stiff, James Duncan Davidson and too many others to list here.

Alot of attendees had cameras with them, so you can find great photos by going to Flickr, my skills on that area are not so good it will take a while to post my London photos.
Yeah, I had a great time, so next stop is the Shift conference at 29-30 September (teaser, hehe).

First of all, as most of you have noticed, I’ve tweaked the site design a bit, changed a few color bugs here and there and replaced the header with a much cooler version. (yay!) Since most of my visits come from people with Internet Explorer I’ve also fixed a little problem here and there.

I just had to post about this, one of my all favourite games for the Nintendo DS - Phoenix Wright - had his “elevator style” soundtrack released but with a twist, it’s played by an Orchestra!

The cd will be released in Japan (doh!) and will feature ten tracks with all the classic elements you could expect in a orchestral soundtrack.

British Gaming Blog has some of the tracks and they sound fantastic. It’s worth checking out. Phoenix Wright is a fantastic game on its own, a new concept which brings back memories of old point-and-click adventures for PC and I really recommend it for anyone who has a DS.

Last weekend was fantastic, I went to Barcamp which was being hold in Coimbra and organized by WeBreakStuff and I had a really great time.

As one can see from the wiki page, there were several presentations with topics ranging from web 2.0 to the music industry and overall they were very good, some of them were improvised but that’s the spirit of Barcamp, everyone can participate and because of this there were also great discussions and brainstormings.

I also met alot of people coming from diferent backgrounds of mine and had diferent experiences, as I predicted it was great discussing having talks with all the diferent participants, I learned alot and brought fresh ideas home.

I had a planned presentation about my overall experience in Rails and my adventures building weSpendMoney from the ground up, I hope my tips, advices and mistakes inspired the people who attended.

Speaking of weSpendMoney, the development is going well, I came back from the conference with big ideas, advices and in overall a fantastic support from everyone. I should update the site soon regarding these. In the meantime you can see the presentation slides in PowerPoint format (aww!) here.

I’m also updating my site, correcting some stupid design flaws I made and getting my blogroll up and running, if I missed anyone please send me an e-mail or use the contact form.

[update 1]: Pedro Custódio made a nice overview of what happened at Barcamp on his blog - Centopeia - and Planet Barcamp pt has much more info from everyone who attended and has a blog. Worth checking out, oh, almost forgot, pictures are up. thanks guys!