Kick-starting

In the latest months (or perhaps one or two years), I've read lots of interesting stuff and met some very interesting persons. Also, I've gained a lot of personal and, above all, professional experience in the areas of software development (both Web and standalone), teamwork, management and related.

I don't think I could ever list everything that influenced and inspired me during that time, but along with the Project Management Laboratory class I took last semester and my experience at JuniFEUP, two events played a major role lately: TakeOff 2007 and BarCamp Portugal 2007. The key factor was the diversity of interesting and inspiring people that I met there (or simply watched and heard, in some cases).

There are quite some reviews around, but since TakeOff is probably old news, I'll just leave a link to Alcides' Blog, which has the most complete review of BarCamp I could find, split through several posts. I agree with most of what he wrote and I like that he has a mostly impartial view on what happened -- it's in Portuguese, since this was BarCamp Portugal :P

And there I did it: went to BarCamp, had an active role there, and blogged about it! [These were the rules I remembered when I finished reading the concept of BarCamp] What was the active role? I made a presentation about CodeIgniter and my experience using it to build OncologiaPediátrica.org. Details will be posted shortly at the BarCamp wiki.


The above are most of the main reasons that compelled me to restart my blog. The reasons that prevented me from doing it until now are gone (fear of not having anything to write about, mainly) so, it was natural evolution, I guess :)

Also, this date is quite meaningful, since it was exactly two years ago that I wrote the last post here. The old posts are still available, but they're in Portuguese and not related to anything that will follow.