This year's codebits edition is over and it finished with the promise of it taking place yet again next year. I think I said it last year but I'll repeat it again: it was awesome! Congratulations to everyone at SAPO for pulling it off. One thing I noticed was that the audience was (or seemed to be) younger than last year's edition, which can only be a good thing.

I'd also like to thank SAPO for accepting the applications for everyone at 7syntax and inviting us to give a couple of talks. VD was there talking about AWS and I gave an overview of the tech we're using to build handivi. My slides are available on slideshare so you can view them if you want:

My project, a topic detection tool, didn't win anything but I'm cool with that, in the process I found out someone was working on a similar problem so, in spite of wanting to stay at home due to coming down with a flu, I ended up showing up for the last day, presenting my creation and being introduced to the Programming Collective Intelligence book which is awesome too. Thank you Paula!

But that wasn't my only hack :-) A few days before the event I had challenged everyone at 7syntax to show up with a mustache. Alas, only Nuno and me did that. Thanks to Alexandre my looks for the duration of the event have been made timeless on flickr:

Pretty out of whack stuff, but cool nonetheless. All I wanted was to have a 60's UNIX hacker look, instead I was called a mexican, a drug lord, a 70's porn star, a heavy metal fan, a chopper rider and James Heltfield-clone. Daniel was really keen on the mexican thing and he was supposed to get me a sombrero for me to wear during my talk but didn't. I would use it, definitely!

Another cool thing was Rock Band, man the game's amazing! I teamed up with Mário, Paulo and a guitar player who shall remain nameless because he doesn't want the internet to know who he is ;-) to play a couple of oldies: Detroit Rock City by KISS and Run to the hills by Iron Maiden. I had to bail out on Friday before the battle of the bands contest due to the flu worsening and becoming exhausted from having only slept about 1:30, 2 full hours the night before but I heard they did well even though some other band won the contest.

Finally, I had the pleasure of spending some time with the massive from up north and meeting Jan and Peter face-to-face.

Combining Codebits and SHiFT it's easy to see how SAPO and it's people have already done more, way more, than anyone else in fostering a creative environment in Portugal. Hats off to them once again!