Metaduck

I was fortunate to have been selected to participate in the codebits 2010 event. Codebits is all-is-free invitation-only event occurring in Lisbon. I also went in 2009, and by then I was blown away by the quality of it all.

We had great speakers (portuguese and international) on four parallel tracks, one main stage and 3 secondary ones.

We had lots of things to play with like gaming consoles, arcade consoles, retro old computers and gaming consoles, hardware (arduinos, boards, soldering irons, etc.).

There were bean bags laying around on the floor (with some sleeping on them towards the last days), a lounge and a separate sleeping areas.

And the venue space and aesthetics are impeccable. No sunlight comes in, these green light projectors everywhere give it an I’m-in-a-sci-fi-movie feeling.

The food was free. Last year they mainly had pizza - which I overdosed in -, but this now they also added some salads. This year they had “proper” food only at lunch and dinner hours, not 24/7 like last year - otherwise they had snacks. But hey, it’s free! And this year, unlike 2009, there were a lot of restaurants in the area, so you had alternative.

There were also a lot of tables around where you can sit and open your laptop, hopefully to co-work on the project contest - groups have 48 hours to develop a project from scratch, and then, on the last day, they have 90 seconds to present it.

Last year I entered with my friend André Gonçalves, and finished 7th place with the Cyclops project, but this year, since I had to focus on the talk and didn’t have the energy to do any code.

Then there was the project showcase where, as I said, each project had just 90 seconds to make it or break it. Lots broke it, as usual, but I think people are getting more used to the concept and getting better than previous years.

I loved Ruben Fonseca’s team “Map Crowd Reduce” project, which is like a SETI-at-home-like infrastructure for massively distributed cpu-intensive jobs based on HTML five workers and node.js for distributing the tasks. To setup a task you have to provide 4 things: a payload, a slicing function (used to slice-up the payload), a map function and a reduce function, and then, when users with WebWorker-enabled browsers connected, they would automatically contribute to the task. The code is here. Very cool.

And I laughed my lungs out with “sex’o’clock” project presentation.

The winner “Light Bits” showed that a well structured presentation can go a very long way. They also had a beautiful result and great engineering.

Overall, the organization was impeccable, and Codebits was a truly amazing experience. I’ve heard they are repeating it next year, so I can’t wait! If I’m accepted…