Some of you noticed that with yesterday’s update, we added some information about something we’ve been thinking about for a long time - Barcamp Portugal. Many of you emailed already asking for information and willing to get involved. For those of you who did, and everyone else that was caught wondering, we created a mailing list for discussion.

Why Barcamp, why Portugal?

Barcamp is an exciting environment for innovation. People are invited to join Barcamp (which is free) and participate actively by presenting, doing demos or just keeping an active conversation. For those of you who’ve never participated in one, here’s the loose definition of Barcamp:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. (from Barcamp.org)

Portugal needs this sort of event to get the masses speaking, thinking and creating. It also needs people who are willing to dedicate some time to stimulating innovation - and Barcamp gets that kind of people together. We’re playing our part in the equation by curating Barcamp and giving the kick off - we’re expecting the rest of the portuguese community (which we’re a part of - many readers think I’m still in California) to follow.

Get involved!

So I wont bore you anymore. August 25th and 26th are the planned dates - even though everything’s up for discussion -, and we want you to be present. If you’re portuguese, we expect you to come along, participate and have fun; If you’ll be joining us from the rest of the world, drop us an email so we can help you organize your trip. Get involved - Join the mailing list and be heard.

I haven’t posted for a while for several reasons. However, to redeem myself I come bearing news. We’ve relaunched our website, moved the blog URL and we’re about to launch Goplan publicly.

Our new website:

Being constantly unhappy about what I produce for myself (ourselves in this case), I keep thinking about whether our site is effective in terms of design, content findability and navigation. This forces me to consider our website a perpetual work in progress. However today we’ve launched what I believe is a pretty good update from the previous “version”.

We’ve dropped the old CMS I had developed and moved to a Ruby on Rails solution using RadiantCMS - a choice I am quite happy about. Also, I’ve tweaked the design and layout to facilitate content discovery, and added some new content related to our work and more importantly, how we do it. If people are interested in how the site was setup, I can post something a little more in-depth. (more…)

Railsday 2006 is over, and right before I go to bed and fall asleep for countless hours (to compensate for the fact that I haven’t slept at all during the last 48), I need to talk about what Railsday (a competition to develop a web-application, using Ruby on Rails, in 24 hours sharp) proves in terms of web development and innovation.

The power of small, agile teams

It is amazing what you can actually build in 24 hours with enough will and some prior knowledge of the technology (in this case, Ruby on Rails - which we’ve been using here at Webreakstuff since the first public release). All you need is a good idea, getting used to the constraint that you have 24 hours to develop it, and manage the project at a microscale. In this situation, management becomes a subsconscious concept - it’s not present, and development happens organically.

Webreakstuff is a 5-people team at the moment and 3 of us built WeRateStuff (mind the name, it does say “rate”) for this years edition of Railsday. We decided upon what to actually build about 2 hours before the competition began, and planned it over nachos and iced tea. Sometimes even the most gruesome of preparations can create pristine results. When the 24h clock started ticking, things started rolling more or less naturally, and the truth is, now that the time is up (and the application is done), we’re positively surprised with the result.

Innovating on strange constraints

When you think about the constraints for innovation, you usually don’t think of time. As a matter of fact, the amount of times you’ll be in a rush to create something brilliant in your life will hopefully be few or none. Innovation takes time, it evolves out of something as simple as a necessitity for someone.

Coming up with everything around a web-application in 24 hours (including planning, design, development and testing) isn’t that difficult. The tricky part is to go all out and create something amazing in that time (which is why I’m definitely waiting to see what comes out of this years’ batch of deliveries - and can’t wait to see what people think of our little app).

What we did, and why we’d do it again

As I’ve said previously, we built an application called “WeRateStuff”, which is (in just a few words), a social review-anything web application. It isn’t a novel idea, it isn’t completely new, but I for one don’t really like any of the current offers (which was one of the reasons why we did it).

“WeRateStuff” will be available online as soon as we get the time, outside of our client and consulting work, to polish it into a state we’re happy about - and if we get a good host for it (can you help? Get in touch, and thanks in advance). Meanwhile here’s the screenshot of how the application looks after our 24h journey of Railsday:

For a detailed screenshot, see our Flickr page. Now, I think I can say with some degree of certainty we’d do this again anytime (well, maybe not tomorrow because we’re so tired we can’t recognize ourselves in mirrors). And the reason is, constraints are good - and we were quite happy about the result of working under the right kind of creative pressure during 24 hours.

Railsday 2007, we’re ready. As for this years edition, we’re looking forward to seeing what other people came up with.

Here’s something that just lightened my mood. I was checking Technorati and something blew up in California. Seriously, because their whole site is talking crazy-talk! This has got to be the longest error message I’ve seen in a long time. Well, now that I think about it, that’s not an error message at all, but an invitation to insanity! Here’s the message Technorati was showing me 2 minutes ago:

“The Flying Spaghetti Monster has arrived and we have all been taken to planet Zeus 94 to kneel before Zod. All this is a little much for us to handle at the moment so come back later please. And leave a quarter in the collection tray on your way out.”

Honestly, that made me forget that there was an error in the first place - it didn’t say much about the mental state of the people over at Technorati either, but you know what I mean. When I talked about “Web 2.0″ error messages in the first place I wasn’t really thinking “go insane”, but it sure as hell works.