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SAPO Codebits ended, echoes will continue

It was 2.5 days of pure geekness. The event ended yesterday, but I couldn't come straight to the computer and blog because, well, I only ended up sleeping for 1 or 2 hours. I must admit, the practice given by the University projects, all-nighters pulled until the deadline of many a project came in handy yesterday.

As an Internet event, it's safe to say it was the best ever. There's more to us - Portuguese - than just plain gamers that fill LAN Parties ever since the 90s. We saw many projects presented at a fast pace (90seconds), with some unavoidable technical glitches.

But before writing about what I did, let me give you my overview of the event. I'll try to keep it short.

Day one

Mike Culver from Amazon presented their S3, EC2 and SQS (were there others?). Even though it all sounded like marketing, the guy made sense. Nothing new if you're into AWS, but still, a very valuable presentation. Specially when they've just announced an European Center. Later, talking to him, he told me they're looking for an evangelist here in Europe, to live in Luxembourg. I asked him if that's where their data centers are situated to which he replied Can't say, sorry. I would use traceroute, though.... Very nice guy to talk with, that's for sure.

Curious thing about Mike's presentation: he showed a timeline, in which he plotted the dotcom bubble between 97 and 2001. He did the same with Web2.0 between 2004 and the end of 2006. According to him, now is the time for Webscale Computing. Marketing-mumbo-jumbo? Maybe... But when I came downstairs, I noticed some presentation going on in P2 (?). I could see from the distance the words "Web2.0, um novo conceito" - which translates to "Web2.0, a new concept". Way different realities, no?

After that, I caught the amazing presentation on Unicode Poetry, by Cláudio Valente. Please, if you work with computers, you should watch that.

The first day came to an end much quicker than I expected, but not before watching Fred deliver a great presentation on Building platforms. He was pretty much spot on, as usual, in terms of what's hot on the web right now. When you have LOLCATS, Microformats, OpenID, OAuth in the same presentation, you know you're on the right track.

One thing that caught me by surprise was that at the end, all questions were about our dearest microformats! At least one even came from a Microsoft zealot. Funny, no? Nevertheless, I spoke up only to clear some possible doubts after listening Fred talking about Microformats as APIs for developers to scrape data easily off of websites. Well said, but I wanted people who never heard of them to get the story straight. It's targeted at end-users and that's where we're heading. Firefox 3 will support it... Opera has talked about it. Apple seems to be interested as well, but the dev community will get there before Apple do, with a future plugin for Safari being developed already. I talked to him afterwards, no harm done. I was afraid I had come across a bit cocky... but he was ok with it, he thanked me. Cool guy, he is.

Day two/three

Yes, to me, they're glued together with only two hours of sleep.

It started early with one of the nicest dudes I met recently on stage. Cláudio Gamboa's presentation) on Lib.SAPO.JS started waaaaay too early (scheduled for 9am). Still, they shifted it half an hour forward, to wait for some late attendees (amongst whom, I was shamefully included). I caught the whole thing and it was great. I'm still much more fond of JQuery, but I recognize the value of an utility-filled library. I'll definitely consider using Lib.SAPO.JS for my next personal project.

After that, there was a bit of a confusion with the schedule. I ended up watching a bit of Eduardo Pinto presenting RSS, the XML Democrat. I liked it a lot, showing off what you could achieve with such a generic format. Even though it wasn't highly technical nor earth shattering, it was definitely useful for this kind of event and some of the guys there really looked interested.

Quick lunch and we were onto the hacking!

I'll actually leave the projects I was involved with for a follow-up post. Hopefully tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Organization

Everyone involved in putting all of this together should now take the time to take a step back and just enjoy. Enjoy the gratitude of 500+ geeks who were a part of the biggest and best event from Portuguese to Portuguese. Yes, we had Mike joining us, but now, HE was the foreigner.

It was unbelievable! We had everything at our disposal... Segways, XBOX 360s, a Wii, (lots of) pizza, snacks, fruit, regular drinks, energy drinks, coffee... you name it. I believe the big picture here is the "reconciliation" (if they were ever separated) of the developer community and SAPO/PT. They really put their hearts into this and pretty much everyone was saying how great it was to have this kind of events here. I'm sure the next barcamp will be bigger and better. The next Shift, much more attendees. At least I hope so, and I hope we can all turn our heads back and see where all of this national internet awareness spurted; SAPO Codebits, where else?

Me, at codebits
Where's Waldo andr3? (Photo by Isa Costa)

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