In my old job I worked in a very ordinary office, it was open space, with a dark green carpet, beige desks with green chairs too and everyone wore a suit and tie every day looking uncomfortable.

The office didn’t have anything that stood out, the view outside was great but you couldn’t differentiate one room from another except for the people in it (and their personal items) .

It was pretty boring and without surprise, creativity didn’t have a strong presence. Some may say “it wasn’t needed, anyway.” but the thing is, your working environment has a direct influence on your state of mood, your happiness and your productivity. Check for example, Carson’s ideas for their office.

Fortunately there are a lot of places in Lisbon to get inspired, the sun is most of the time shiny with nice weather, there’s outdoor cafes, some parks, nice museums (with free collections to watch) and the riverside is very nice to walk.

Sometimes the best way to get an idea or solve a problem is just getting out of the office for a while and comeback fresh.

I use TextMate on a daily usage, it’s the most useful program I have on my Mac and it simplified alot my development work.

At the same time, I also use SVN for version-control (but i’m looking at GIT…) so I was very happy to find a plugin for TextMate that enabled me to visually know which files were changed, waiting to be commited, in conflict, etc.

It reminds me of TortoiseSVN for Windows (a great tool, btw), so if you use Textmate and SVN I recommend you take a look at SVNMate.

Note: There’s also a built-in svn bundle for Textmate, simply use ctrl+shift+a on a file or folder to access a few basic SVN commands.

I’m having alot of fun at OFFF Lisbon, it’s like someone dropped a creativity bomb in Lisbon. :)

I’ve also taken some photos from the Festival which are available at Flickr, so take a look if you’re interested.

In the meantime, here’s some web development resources for this weekend.

Confused about messing with .htaccess files stored on your server? Thankfully, someone invented this handy .htaccess Editor webapp that simplifies your work.

An analysis and comparative on the various CSS Frameworks available today, my favourite is BluePrint but take a look at what satisfies your needs.

LifeHacker published some tips on Blogging, very good info on helping you blog , I should problably take the time to follow them. :)

If you’re in Lisbon enjoy the rest of the weekend, there’s alot of nice places to visit.

A List Apart - a great source for information regarding web development and design - wrote 2 articles a while back talking about Ruby on Rails.

The articles are a sort of introduction and description of the pros and cons of Ruby on Rails, it’s a good reading:
Getting Started with Ruby on Rails
Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails

It’s also worth mentioning an interview that Akita did Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui, from Phusion -

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.