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.

Yesterday I spoke at Take Off 2007, a tech event on entrepreneurship and innovation which was held on the beautiful city of Coimbra (proving that not all tech events need to take place / centralize in Lisbon).

The nice people from Ideias3 were very kind to invite me and give me this chance to share some knowledge and inspire a great audience of students, web enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and business people.

In the end I think I’ve managed to achieve the goals I had set up for my presentation:
-make people forget about the recent negative thinking around Portugal;
-show some examples of fantastic entrepreneurship and achievements;
-talk about my personal project (weSpendMoney);
-share some advices and tips on entrepeneuship;
-inspire people to do more, learn from my mistakes;

I also had the chance to meet up with some friends and fellow colleagues from past conferences and bloggers from Planeta Asterisco.
It was very nice to meet new people and socialize ideas, this was very important.
I enjoyed most of the conferences, there was great value and knowledge from them so I suggest listening to the podcasts or take a look at the presentations from the official site (all in portuguese).

As it’s expected the community responded to the conference, there were some interesting and incredible reviews on the event, let’s have more this year. :)

“The organization was good, and the event went well. It was awsome to see that many people, some presentations (like the one from Gonçalo Quadros) were so full that there were nowhere to seat, not even on the stairs. Wow. I hope that take off happens again next year, in an wider space.” - Marcos Marado

Update 30-04-2007: And thanks to everyone for the feedback on the presentation, without it, I can’t improve. As requested, here’s the slides (10 Mb!) in portuguese and english until the official site is updated.