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.