Last week I went to codebits, the 24/3 hackers contest organized by the portal sapo.pt. And it was awesome! I had loads of fun, learned tons of stuff, met a bunch of new and interesting people, worked on my tech social network, etc, etc...
The organization was perfect (some sapo team members are the organizers of the famous Shift conference). We had free wifi, free pizza for lunch AND for dinner, 24/3 free fruit, candy bars, chips, sodas, water, all inclusive and in abundance. Never was I found short on anything of those precious resources. That's pretty impressive in my book. Loads of puffs, loads of tables and chairs. We had xboxes, playstations and wiis to relax. All that with cool lighting in an open-space environment. All you had to do was to bring your laptop. Heck, that's a programmers paradise. The only single itch was that there only was two internet wires available per tables of six laptops. That combined with frequent wifi jams. But still, that wouldn't stop us from coding hard.
The main buzzwords that got wired into my brain were xfn, xmpp, couchdb, erlang and javascript. The talk that impressed me and inspired me the most was Mario Valente's talk über server sided javascript.
Over 580 participants presented roughly 80 projects built during the 24 hour contest. I met and teamed with @arturmartins and we built an xmpp bot which can be invited to chat with at codebits@jabber.cc. We called it "Codebits spy, #27". The bot yields the latest rfid location of the participants at the event, provided the user inputs a name or an id. It works quite nicely IMO, but sadly another participant also presented the exact same concept. I guess that was a pretty obvious and rather easy thing to do... Another easy and obvious thing to do was the codebits buzz page, which I implemented an iPhone version, only to find out later that the codebits organization already had a web-based identical version of it...
A lot of projects were really fun and interesting. Loads of rails web2.0 apps, a cool miniature remote truck commanded from a web interface with a camera-mount; powerful apps containing data-harnessing algorithms; mashups; a million-dollar world app; and so many other cool stuff I can't remember...
I think I'll integrate all the xmpp bots I'll build into @als and @rubenfonseca's github served modular xmpp bots project in the future... By the way, @rubenfonseca developed an historical database of the participants' rfid location. So, kudos to him.
Some easter eggs found were the Magellan laptop cluster, the chumby column, the Meo box-tv with messenger functionality, the arcade workshop, #anita became the fastest twitter meme ever,and more, many more...
All-in-all, it was great. And I'll be there next year!
