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Reboot, Shift and a 20% discount!

October 2, 2008 Event, Uncategorized No comments

SHiFT 2008

I went to Reboot in Copenhagen …
You should come to SHiFT in Lisbon!
And I have a 20% discount code to make it easier for you to decide.

So what was Reboot?

Reboot was a like a “broaden your horizon” kind of experience.

It had amazing speakers, amazing talks and I met a lot of interesting people.

I had lots of feedback on my projects, gave lots of feedback on other projects and most of all I fell in love by the city, its people and for the kind of conference Reboot was and is.

The whole spirit of the conference and its attendees is nothing like I’ve ever had experienced before.

And it’s always hard to return from a place were like minded people mingle, co-exist, discuss and help each other without asking for nothing in return. I’m not only talking about the average John Doe like me but also all the speakers and the organizers were at the reach of a “hi”.

All in all, everybody was in the spirit and when that happens in a conference, it can only be a success.

All of that made such a huge and positive impact in my personal and professional life that I’m still digesting it.

And what is SHiFT?

It’s just around the corner, as it will be on the 15th, 16th and 17th of October and I’ll present it like a “small” Reboot in Portugal with a lot of juicy stuff.

First of all, I am lucky enough to be part of the organization and as such I know that we’re doing the possible and the impossible to make it a memorable event.

Then, and for the first time ever in SHiFT’s history, we’re going to have a full day of FREE workshops.

So instead of having to pay for each workshop individually and also pay for the conference, you’ll be able to come to the conference and choose and see all the workshops for free.

We have some pretty amazing speakers lined up: Andy Budd, Brian Suda, Tara Hunt, Manuel Lima, Joshua Kaufman, Julian Bleecker, Tijmen Schep, Leonel Moura, Felix Petersen, Stowe Boyd, and the list goes on.

And if you don’t know any of this names then I must tell you that you really need to come to SHiFT (or choose to go see them somewhere abroad like I did in Copenhagen). These guys are top notch in their areas and it was really a privilege to hear some of them in Reboot.

So I’m really excited that we are able to have them here in our backyard talking about such diverse and amazing stuff as “Artificial Creativity“, “Designing the User Experience Curve“, “VisualComplexity: A visual exploration on mapping complex networks“, “Transient Semantics and Microformats” and so much more.

The 20% discount

The “yorray!” factor: We’re a non profit organization but we pretty much have secured enough sponsorships to support the whole conference.

So as a way to help all of you guys that haven’t decided yet to come to the conference, we’re giving away 20% discounts. To use the discount simply use this code when registering: shift08t60dd6539

What more can I tell you?

Since I’ve been to Reboot 10, my only regret was that I didn’t went to all of the other 9 before.

Don’t let this happen to you and don’t miss this great opportunity to see and network with some amazing, like minded, interesting people. It’s gonna be a heck of an experience and you can be a part of it.

Will you?

1st Webtrip – Aveiro City

June 10, 2008 Event No comments

Last saturday I went to the very first Web Trip. Another cool event.

First an introduction… what is Web Trip? Well Web Trip is about networking in Portugal. You don’t have the resources to come to Lisbon? Everything happens in Lisbon (or in Coimbra?) Vote on a location and we’ll go there.

The way up

I went to Aveiro with Bruno Pedro of Tarpipe. It was a nice oportunity to get to know him better and change a few ideas about php frameworks, smarty templates, scalability issues, my project, his project, integrations etc.

It was a 2 hour cool smooth ride.

Aveiro City

We arrived in Aveiro at about 12:40pm and learned that the 4th exit in the roundabout was really the third for us (c’mon … the hospital is a private entrace … not really an exit :) )

So after we got our path straight (after some cruising along the river and the center of the city) we finally got to the restaurant where we met Sergio Veiga and Alexandre Solleiro.

The restaurant was Monte Velho (unrelated with the wine). Nice food, a little bit noisy but cheap (in comparison to Lisbon). No matter. As we all knew each other we really didn’t need no introductions and started away discussing stuff. Celso Pinto came by motorcycle and was late so by the time he arrived we already had talked a lot about tarpipe and we were finishing eating. (pt warning: Bacalhau com natas e carne de porco à alentejana … cool) . We continued to talk about Pedro and Sergio’s project. Afterwards we went to a nearby cafe: Cafe Convivio.

So the Cafe had … free wireless. How cool is that? We went on and on about our projects, had a glimpse of tarpipe and erlang and the very first prototype of Pedro and Alex’s DataHub. We spoke about my project on ways to improve it and ideas on how to market it. Soon it was 5pm and as we all had stuff to do in Lisbon we had to say goodbye to Aveiro. Quick stop to buy Ovos Moles (local delicatessen) and a few more words between myself, Bruno and Celso about sharing ideas, designers and handivi.

The return trip and the vanishing act

The return trip was as enjoyable as the one before with a lot of conversations about sharing ideas and projects.

One small catch though. Celso was following us and after a few K’s we just lost him. As we couldn’t turn around our only idea was to call him. Celso’s byke had a few problems on the way up and eventually he had to stop and call a tow. Thankfully nothing more happened! :(

As for me and Bruno we went on and on until Lisbon and got here about 9pm. I still had time to see the last goal of Portugal at a friend’s anniversary. (Happy Birthday Verinha! :) )

Bottom line

The first Web Trip, as we all more or less knew each other, was all about sharing ideas, projects, looking at source code, debugging, hacking and brainstorming.

Nice discussions regarding tarpipe, the DataHub project from Sergio Veiga and Alexandre Solleiro (tip: it has a black box) and my unnamed restaurant project (tip: to answer the question “where will I eat today?”). Nice conversation later about handivi from 7sintax (tip: it’s not vaporware).

Cool trip. Cool people. Cool projects. A few but great people!

When is the next one and where? I’ll definitely try to be there.

Related:

Celso Pinto

Flickr

WebTrip

image originally from 2.0 webmania related post

1st Twittlis – Hardrock Cafe

June 5, 2008 Event One comment

thx to @armandoalves

So I went to twittlis yesterday. Not the very best day for me as I was very tired but nevertheless it was a very cool event.

Some very interesting people there and my guess is that it’s going to get bigger:

@ppinheiro76 – Pedro Pinheiro, @als – Alexandre Solleiro, @jneves – João Neves, @armandoalves – Armando Alves, @dbar – Daniel Barradas, @mca – Luis Amaral, @jnogueira – João Nogueira, @vd – Vitor Domingos, @guillaume7 – Guillaume Riflet, @alexandrariflet – Alexandra Riflet, @olifante – Tiago Henriques, @miguels – Miguel Santos, @bpedro – Bruno Pedro, @rifkind – Nuno and Rita Pedrosa

Amongst many others I had a very nice discussion with Armando Alves and João Nogueira about spheres of influence and the ripples we project amongst each other. Is it true that important people influence more people than you and I? This gap is getting smaller by the minute.

I also got to know a little bit of Pedro Pinheiro’s photography work (loved the ufo series). Two words: Kick Ass! ;) He’s a mean Photoshop master also. Props!

Later I stayed for dinner with Pedro Pinheiro, João Nogueira, Tiago Henriques and Miguel Santos. It was a cool dinner with lots of different discussions that went from Chernobyl to Darwin and Evolution, from Arthur Conan Doyle to human traits. I was astonished to discover how intelligent some of this guys really are (as I only knew them online – its not the same) and I was very much impressed with some of the views and arguments about humanity, survival and evolution. Made me want to put my biology/physics/etc up to date. And if only I could find the time…

All in all it was a very cool evening to repeat in July.

Thanks to @armandoalves for the banner and to @ppinheiro76 for organizing it! ;)

Barcamp FCT 2008

May 24, 2008 Event 2 comments

Barcamp FCT

So … I went to Barcamp.

There were a few presentations some nice others so so. By order:

  • Carlos Rodrigues (FireHOL)
  • João Rico (Técnicas de Apresentação)
  • Victor Domingos (service/product/platform comparison)
  • Halfbaked.com
  • Wizi (www.wizi.com)
  • Bruno Pedro
  • Guillaume (point.pt)
  • Guillaume (bookmarklets)
  • Joao Rico (6 meses numa presidencia)
  • Victor Domingues (co-working)
  • Joao Rico (empreendedorismo nas universidades)

Ignite was fun but as we are not used to present stuff in 5 minutes it quickly became presentations as usual.

Half Baked is always a LOT of fun with some crazy ideas.

Lunch was awesome! And as I sponsor it … I’m truly happy about it ;)

All in all it was time well spent.

A few personal thoughts on how I would have organized it (and I did talk about it with Pedro Custódio but we’re also organizing Shift and time is scarce) :

Although Barcamp is a non-conference supposedly without any order at all, it is my experience that there should be an “order” of some kind and rules must be “enforced”. Example: ignite, halfbaked

There should be zones and certain conditions:

  • two rooms, full works (mic, projector, wireless, etc), simultaneous
  • one chill out/networking area
  • Blackboards/paper/pens/pencils/whatever
  • food (morning and afternoon/codebits style/coffee breaks)
  • open area (a garden for instance and if possible it should be an active area with presentations)
  • lunch
  • one day ain’t enough. It should be a two day event and it should be on a conference-free weekend.
  • dinner & night out (helps bonding)
  • at the beginning there should be a meet & greet (as in barcamp coimbra)
  • it should be easy to get to
  • it should be near hotels (couch surfing/hostels are options)

Barcamp 2007 at Coimbra had most of this. FCT‘s missed a few things namely the two rooms for presentations, a two day event and the meet & greet. One other important factor is who goes there and some of the big players couldn’t be there … that didn’t help also.

Later I’ll post an extended article on my way of doing a barcamp to explain why I think all that stuff is really important.

Nevertheless, organizing something like this ain’t easy and it should be always encouraged. I think overall João Moreno and João Rico did a great job and the glory of organizing the first one in Lisbon goes out to them. I’m sure that next one will be better. (Btw … anyone want to co-organize? drop me a line…)

You can check the official site here: http://fct.enses.org/barcamp/app/

You can also check other people’s opinion here (I’ll add as I found them around):

Guillaume Riflet

Vitor Domingos

Celso Pinto

Carlos Rodrigues

Ruben Fonseca

Media:

Flickr

Reboot 10

May 23, 2008 Event No comments

Reboot 10

I’ll be there … will you? ;)

http://www.reboot.dk/

SAPO Unplugged 08

May 22, 2008 Event No comments

Sapo Unplugged 08

So I went to SAPO Unplugged 08 in Aveiro.

The day started at 7am but I did manage to miss the bus by the SAPO crew (due to a friend of mine …). And so I drove 250Km…

I have to say that being on the University of Aveiro’s campus brought some memories from my student years but enough about that… after the usual meet and greet we went to lunch and at 2pm we were at the event.

The keynote

Henning Fischer from Adaptive Path did the keynote and he gave a presentation entitled “Stop Designing Products”. It was a really nice presentation (for those who missed it at Shift). Some notes:

  • Users know who they are
  • Design from the outside in
  • You must have an experience strategy
  • The experience IS the product

(you can also check the similar presentation at Shift 2006 by Peter Merholz over here).

1st Presentation

Óscar Mealha and Florim from the University of Aveiro showed a very interesting project about analysing the structure of a site. Why is it interesting? You’d have to see it because it does so much that I’ll miss some things. But a few pointers:

  • Easy visual interface
  • Every page is a node with a visual reference on mouse over.
  • Very easy to see and interpret user’s paths within the site
  • Many options to customize how you want to see the information
  • Very understandable detection of hotspots and interconnections
  • On hotspots graphics you have a color slider to define its granularity
  • All this from log files ;)

How can this tool be used? In so many ways …

An example… Ask a user to find something and then analyze its behavior: how many times did he return to index (restarted the operation)? how many options he used before he found it? how many levels did he dig into before going to another option?

This can help you to: correct navigation mistakes, reorganize your structure of content, minimize critical paths and so much more …

And all this from logs … (I wish I had a link to it … anyone?)

2nd Presentation

The second presenter was Pedro Branco from the Minho University and it was about facial expression usage as a form of human-machine interaction. I found it interesting enough and it IKEA’s online assistant come to mind. This is surely one area that will have major development in the near future.

3rd Presentation

Bruno Figueiredo (President of APPU) did a very cool presentation about his work as a usability expert on the latest redesign of the SAPO main page.

It was very cool to understand how it was done, what were the main problems with the previous version and how they solve them… just a slight flavor:

  • they moved from 72 channel to more or less 30 by integrating similar channels and killing some unused ones
  • they completely reorganized the publicity display. In the previous version it was (almost) all on one side which led people to believe that all that column was publicity (it wasn’t) and so all of it was basically ignored
  • they created connections between “similar” channels. Ex: channel for babies with channels for women, etc.

4rd Presentation

Ivo Gomes did a presentation on paper prototyping for normal sites and also RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

The idea is to design every screen in paper and have little bits of paper to simulate the interactions. It’s a little like “puzzle meets story”. You put the homepage in front of the testing user/client and he uses his finger to simulate the mouse (starting the story). When he touches a link something happens: either you move to a new screen (a new paper continue the story) or something happens in the same page (you put a new paper over to simulate the animation – a little piece of the puzzle).

I really could relate to some of the conclusions and objectives of that kind of aproach:

  • easy to detect mistakes on the early stages before development in navigation/usability/etc
  • hence a decrease of designer and programmer hours
  • hence a decrease in cost
  • it’s both user and programmer “friendly”
  • it makes it easier to get to the clients’ objectives
  • it makes the communication from client to end designers and developers crystal clear

Bottom line … I have to test it ;)

(You can check a post from Ivo regarding this here)

Last presenter

(There was a funny moment from this presenter… But I’ll get to that later …)

Pedro Custódio was the last presenter at SAPO Unplugged 08. Nowadays he is responsible for the implementation of quality and usability on all of SAPO‘s projects. It was almost the same presentation given at the Usability Seminar 2008 (you can check it here). Nothing new for me here (as I already had seen it) but here are a few pointers:

  • They redesigned the way they do their kick-off meetings so that everyone in the project has the same “view” of the objective
  • They used a faster alternative to extensive focus group testing
  • It’s a never ending cycle that implements usability and quality issues on all stages

Bottom line

It was a good event and I really hope that SAPO continues to do some more of those on other issues: UX, OAuth, microformats, creating APIs, just to name a few I would like to hear about.

The funny (depending on the perspective) moment

As promised before here it is… the funny moment. When Florin was presenting his tool, Pedro Custódio went to get some microphones (I think) and coming down the stairs he “decided” to stumble upon himself. Everything stopped. It was funny from the audience’s perspective because it was a noisy and quite awkward fall but he did hurt himself. Hope you’re feeling better dude…

Related Posts

You can check the “falling star” aka Pedro Custódio notes here.