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.