This weekend I attended the TakeOff 2008 conference in Coimbra.
The main goal is to discuss, motivate and inform people about tecnology, entrepeneurship, inovation and so on. :)
Most of the talks were very interesting and gave a good insight about the state of things here in Portugal. I had a really good time and the day seemed too short for all the great ideas and discussions which were left in the air.

I’ve uploaded my (fairly bad) photos to Flickr.

I’ve finally managed to took some time to write my trip to Poznán (Poland) to speak at the Rupy 2008 conference.

The conference took place at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna? and according to the organizers “the idea behind the conference is to try to animate Central- and East-European Python and Ruby communities. By inviting experts we want to broaden our knowledge and understanding of presented concepts. The conference is meant to serve the exchange of ideas on the scientific ground”.

I was a bit nervous because it was the first time I was talking outside of Portugal but I guess it went well, there were questions and people seemed interested. I decided to aim my talk mainly at Ruby on Rails newcomers by presenting a series of Rails projects while focusing on a particular problem and presenting the solution in various steps. I’ll try to get the slides online soon.

I enjoyed the time I spent in Poland, I got to meet some genius people (which motivated me and gave me some new goals), some of the talks were very interesting, the conference was well planned and the organization was all very nice, fun and professional.

In the meantime you can find some photos in my Flickr account.

Madrid was the center stage for last week’s conference on Ruby on Rails called “Conferencia Rails 2007″, for the second year, the event reunited several companies from Spain and people from various places of Europe to discuss Rails, share experiences and look at sucess cases.

It was a very exciting event, I managed to learn alot from other people’s existing experiences, conference talks and I enjoyed talking to the people I’ve met.

I ‘m hoping to see next year’s conference and maybe help with ruby-pt creating the first conference here in Portugal.

In the meantime, I’m still working on improving my version of BookWorms which I started at Sapo Codebits, there’s alot of small details and points which I want to see planned and simplified during this week (like the actual trade process which it the main concern and your interaction with the other book lovers).

It’s been a while since I wrote anything in this blog, mainly because I’ve been too busy with my new job at w20 developing in Ruby on Rails and I guess, all these side-projects aren’t leaving me much more free time.

Anyway, yesterday was the final day of the Sapo Codebits competition, an event in Portugal inspired by Yahoo’s hackday but with a different twist, more workshops and activities.

I was very pleased to win the Idea award for the BookWorms project, a social network for sharing books online, which had integration with Google Maps for viewing people around your location with books to lend and Amazon Commerce webservices for adding book information to your growing collection. Btw, the worms illustration was done by Bauke Schildt. Thanks!

It was a fantastic event and a great opportunity to learn, experiment and just go crazy with it. I hope to be there next year and hopefully this month I’ll launch Bookworms in it’s first version. If you have any suggestion please do tell me. :)

In the meantime here’s some pics.

Full mainpage pic with maps and latest books:

Close-up version of the map, showing people close to your location and how many books they have:

Thanks again, and see you there next time.

It’s been a few days since I returned home from London HackDay 2007, the first Yahoo! and BBC sponsored Hackday in Europe was a hit success, this was surely a weekend I won’t forget for a long time.

I have no words to describe how fantastic all of this was, there were talks about many of Yahoo’s and BBC’s API’s and other subjects, a enormous palace, pizza, lightning, indoor rain, faceball, blimps, annoying Nazbatag’s, Lego NXT robots with stencils, Doctor Who, GPS, mentos and coke experiences, Halo 2 multiplayer combat, playing Rayman on the Wii , lot’s of bluetooth and wi-fi hacks, the Rumble Strips concert, beanbags (I got mine!) and over seventy strange, creative and fantastic projects submitted for appreciation by the HackDay judges.

Want to know more?

• See the photos in the Flickr Gallery;
• Watch the short version of the Hack Day London Video (or the 15 minute long uncut one);
• Read the article from Wired Magazine;
• See or experience the winning hacks from HackDay at Yahoo! Developer website or in the wiki;

Anyway, I hope this serves as an example and more events like this show up in Europe, I guess when people feel they’ll learn a lot from the experience, they’ll participate and endure heaven and earth for things to be successful (even indoor raining).

So Kudos to the all the backstage crew at Yahoo and BBC for putting together this amazing event and all the great people who participated.