Remaking MBNet at Codebits

December 5th, 2009 • 4 comments Blog, Events, Programming
Tags: codebits, mbnet, Programming, rails, ruby

We’re participating once again on Codebits this year with the help of Bauke Schildt on the design.

We’ve decided to try something diferent and create a proof-of-concept remake of the MBNet platform to show how it can be improved and adapted for todays time.

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Codebits 08 recap

November 20th, 2008 • 2 comments Blog, Programming, Web
Tags: bookworms, codebits, rails, ruby, think orange, web 2.0

Last weekend, the LX Factory in Alcantâra was stage to SAPO CodeBits 08, a 24 hours programming contest for the web, with an aditional full day and morning of workshops to learn new stuff.

More intense and bigger than last year, the event had areas where you could play with machinery, RFID technology, OpenMoko’s, make videos or just invent something for the web and so there was something out there to please anyone.

My project for last year was Bookworms, a small web app where you could add books from Amazon to your personal collection and share them with your peers which appeared on the map (you could give your address which was geocoded) .

One year later and with the support of SAPO, Bookworms was presented live (scary!) at the event as a social book discovering website and now available as a beta version. The presentation went very well I think, complete with nonsense slides and chinese proverbs.

I was overwhelmed by the people’s reception and fantastic feedback received in the last days, I didn’t have the chance to include everything I wanted in the launch version but in the next weeks there’s going to be new improvements.

This was also a opportunity to unveil Think Orange – my very own startup (weee!) – which will be focusing on creating web products that drive social interaction and make you smile. I’ll be sure to give you more news on this soon. :)

Finally, the project for this year’s Codebits was a web application for portuguese freelancers to calculate and help with taxes (Recibos Verdes), you could log individual receipts, calculate how much you expect to pay by the end of the year and to complement there was also a small statistics area, all in about 14 hours I think. Done with Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

We didn’t win but we expect to launch it “soon” as an online service. (we need suggestions for the name!)

And that was it, a great experience once again. I ended the week feeling very very tired but optimistic for the future.

Once again, amazing illustrations by Bauke Schildt.