This weekend I attended the TakeOff 2008 conference in Coimbra.
The main goal is to discuss, motivate and inform people about tecnology, entrepeneurship, inovation and so on. :)
Most of the talks were very interesting and gave a good insight about the state of things here in Portugal. I had a really good time and the day seemed too short for all the great ideas and discussions which were left in the air.

I’ve uploaded my (fairly bad) photos to Flickr.

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.