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.

It’s been a few days since I returned home from London HackDay 2007, the first Yahoo! and BBC sponsored Hackday in Europe was a hit success, this was surely a weekend I won’t forget for a long time.

I have no words to describe how fantastic all of this was, there were talks about many of Yahoo’s and BBC’s API’s and other subjects, a enormous palace, pizza, lightning, indoor rain, faceball, blimps, annoying Nazbatag’s, Lego NXT robots with stencils, Doctor Who, GPS, mentos and coke experiences, Halo 2 multiplayer combat, playing Rayman on the Wii , lot’s of bluetooth and wi-fi hacks, the Rumble Strips concert, beanbags (I got mine!) and over seventy strange, creative and fantastic projects submitted for appreciation by the HackDay judges.

Want to know more?

• See the photos in the Flickr Gallery;
• Watch the short version of the Hack Day London Video (or the 15 minute long uncut one);
• Read the article from Wired Magazine;
• See or experience the winning hacks from HackDay at Yahoo! Developer website or in the wiki;

Anyway, I hope this serves as an example and more events like this show up in Europe, I guess when people feel they’ll learn a lot from the experience, they’ll participate and endure heaven and earth for things to be successful (even indoor raining).

So Kudos to the all the backstage crew at Yahoo and BBC for putting together this amazing event and all the great people who participated.

Greeting from London.

I’ve arrived today after a 2 hour peaceful flight from Portugal, everything went smoothly and thanks to the hotel’s free WI-FI connection I can write something up as I collect my thoughts from the day.

I didn’t manage to see a lot from London today but what matters is that tomorrow is the beginning of HackDay, from what I can see from the profiles page at the official website, there’s people coming to this event from most of Europe (but mostly Britain) so I’m guessing there’s alot of expectation and anxiety for tomorrow’s events.

I’m hoping forward for some of the morning sessions on Yahoo! API’s (like Maps, Flickr, Local & Answers, etc) and the YUI Library. I’m not going with the intention of directly competing for the event’s prizes, I want to learn as much as possible and use the occasion to share experiences with other developers.