fragility

So here I am, a couple of days after coming back from Sapo Codebits 2008, still feeling a bit off because of the lack of sleep (or the exaggerated amount of sleep I’ve had yesterday and today) but at least, unlike many others, I didn’t catch the flu. All in all, I’ve had an awesome time at Codebits. I met lots of people, found some people I had already met at Takeoff, learned a bunch of stuff and had lots of fun.

As for the workshops and presentations, I didn’t attend everything I wanted to I would just lose myself talking to people. However, I did attend those I though were more important for me (except for the one by Peter Svensson). On the first day I attended the Mário Valente (serverside JS) and Jan Lehnardt (Couch DB) presentations. The first made me realize that Javascript on the server might have some nice advantages to it, but until we don’t have a working implementation and we start seeing things working on the “real world”, I’m still a bit skeptic. As for the second one, it was something I was really looking forward to learn more about, and the presentation convinced me to try and use Couch DB on my project.

On the second day, I attended Celso Pinto (technology at 7Syntax) and Pedro Melo (XMPP) presentations. I think the first one showed that people can really learn from others mistakes (read Twitter) thinking in advance about their platform implementation and it also convinced me even further to try Couch DB. The second one was a really great introduction to XMPP and it’s possibilities (not that I didn’t knew anything about XMPP, but I didn’t really knew much about what you can do with bots) and it nearly convinced me to put aside my project idea and try to do something with XMPP (a frontend for drop.io), but apparently my specific idea was a bit plagued by some XMPP troubles regarding file transfers (but I might still pick up this idea again someday).

The rest of the time was spent trying to work on my project, taking part on Alcides band on the RockBand competition (did we achieve our goal of finishing up last ?), eating pizza (no more please), and of course talking to lots of people. As for my project, I attempted to do something close to Idiomag, but giving a lot more freedom to people when choosing the contents and delivering them in simpler ways. I didn’t finish the project in time because I decided to hack some Django parts to use Couch DB, which took me some time (I didn’t really need Couch DB, but I wanted to use it, just because). But the project isn’t dead and it will move on and show up…some day.

I also didn’t stay for the projects presentation, because since I didn’t have anything “visible” to show and I was really sleepy, so I ended up coming home sooner.

Overall, it was a great event, but I’ll leave here some suggestions for next year:

• More food diversity. Some sandwiches or salads would’ve been nice.
• Better wireless connectivity. Sometimes it felt like the wireless AP’s were struggling with so many connections at once, and the connection would drop really often.
• More real time updates on the blog or the screens about delays and schedule changes
• Also, weren’t we supposed to get some kind of kit ?

Codebits 2008 is over. Now let’s hope Codebits 2009 will be even better !

PS: It seems my prediction of #anita dying out after Codebits is turning out to be true.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under technology, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.