Codebits is over

I’ve got to say that it was really a good experience: the atmosphere was really cool, the talks were very, very interesting (I did not attend more just because I could not be in two places at once!) and the projects contest was really fun.

The talks:

• Think before you develop — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/82
  • Many small but great tips about things you should consider when developing (web apps). I found this one of the most interesting talks, nothing very complicated but very useful.

• Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/83
  • I was late for this one, but I still heard some interesting notions about version control systems in general and the advantages for team work of using a distributed system like GIT. Lenz Grimmer likes Bazzar the most
• Programar para Android — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/76
  • I did not attend this one as I’ve seen it already before My friend, Diogo Júnior, aka drjunior, presented the general overview of the tools necessary to program for Android and the project structure.
• MySQL High Availability Solutions – Best practices and commonly used HA setups for MySQL — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/55
  • I did not attend this one either, but I really wanted to. I will see the video though.
• Map Reduce — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/91
  • Very interesting talk about distributed programming for giant amounts of data. Interesting for me because the only real experience I have with distributed programming is with Open MPI. During the talk, examples where given which turned the talk even more interesting
• Dynamic Language VMs: Inside Ruby — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/58
  • The one that made me feel stupid lol. It was simply about too advanced topics for me. Compiler stuff, semantic trees, things about my compilers course were never my strength
• Becoming a lockpicker — http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/61
  • Amazing! I did not know those things. I feel like I can open any door now!

Regarding the projects, me, Diogo Júnior and Filipe Correia developed something called CinemaDroid. During more than 24h we developed an Android application that shows the covers of movies in theaters near your location on the faces of a 3D cube.

The app uses Sapo WebServices to get the movies and all its details. We used OpenGL ES to render a 3D cube and apply the covers obtained from the web using the links in the XML returned by the Sapo service.

We’ve managed to get it almost fully featured in 24 hours…

But I swear I won’t use Java SAX parser ever again. Really, too much flexibility can be a bitch sometimes. Specially if you have only 24h to code, and a very strangely structured XML file. Now I think I should’ve used JDOM for the job…oh well…

We did not win anything but still it was a good experience. At least I’ve managed to take a bean bag home

Hope I can be there next year