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:
image originally from 2.0 webmania related post
