Nos dois dias do evento algumas coisas me chamaram bastante atenção. A primeira delas foi, sem dúvida nenhuma, a quantidade de participantes. Foram mais de 500 pessoas, todas envolvidas com Rails de alguma maneira e muitas delas trabalhando profissionalmente com a plataforma. Uma comunidade predominantemente paulista, mas com vários representates de outros cantos do Brasil, como o Charleno Pires, do Piauí; o André Fonseca, de Minas Gerais; o Ozéias Santana, do Paraná e o incrível Elomar França, do Rio Grande do Norte. 

Por incrível que pareça, grande parte das apresentações (a minha inclusive) não abordaram Ruby ou Rails diretamente, mas sim outros temas que fazem parte da filosofia em torno de Ruby on Rails. Sim, coisas como pragmatismo, testes, empreendorimo e técnicas de deployment e dimensionamento foram abordadas em várias das palestras dos convidados estrangeiros, como Chad Fowler, David Chelimsky, Ninh Bui e Obie Fernandez e de brazucas como George Guimarães, do PageStacker; Vinícius Teles, da Improve It e eu, Ronaldo Ferraz e Fernando Vieira, da WebCo (BlogBlogs & Brasigo). As palestras dos brasileiros não deixaram nada a desejar se comparadas com as dos gringos e, acredito que, inspiraram quase todos que as assistiram. Eu vi a do George Guimarães e gostei muito!!! Ele até citou a famigerada Lei de Amdahl (speedup) de meus tempos de faculdade.

Em nossa palestra, abordamos os desafios que encarei quando me aventurei sozinho a empreender (graças ao Rails) o BlogBlogs. Recordamos toda a evolução do site, desde o fatídico dia em que o Fenônemo Cicarelli mostrou que o BlogBlogs poderia ser um negócio de verdade, até os desafios atuais em manter um site com mais de 5 milhões de pageviews e 45 milhões de widgets servidos mensalmente. Tudo isto partindo de um pequeno servidor compartilhado e evoluindo para um cluster com mais de uma dúzia de máquinas dedicadas. Depois de falar de como foi esta aventura, o Ronaaaaaldo Ferraz e o Nando Vieira entraram a fundo em problemas mais recentes que temos enfrentado. Um pouco sobre como estamos organizando a arquitetura do BlogBlogs e do Brasigo para permitir uma maior produtividade e re-uso de componentes, desafios organizacionais e também sobre como estamos encarando Scrum e Testes na WebCo.

A apresentação está disponível no SlideShare, mas você também pode vê-la aqui:

Depois do evento, recebemos algumas ilustres visitas na WebCo. O David Chelimsky, o Chad Fowler e o Dr. Nic vieram bater um papo com a gente e ver o que estamos fazendo. Foi um dia bem gostoso com muita papo sobre Rails brincadeiras sobre o inglês do Dr. Nic. Depois nos despedimos deles com um almoço num restaurante indiano e voltamos para a WebCo para receber a visita do Elomar. Aqui todos são fãs do Elomar, hehe.

Agora é colocar mãos a obra para concluirmos o BlogBlogs 2.0 que será lançado ainda neste ano e aguardar o Rails Summit 2009, que tenho certeza que já está tirando o sono do Akita.

Hey Ho!!!

Como o BlogBlogs está passando por uma nova onda de engenharia e desenvolvimento, aproveitei para fazer uma apresentação que chama a atenção para alguns pontos que serão atacados no BlogBlogs 2.0. Aproveitei também para convidar o pessoal para participar do processo, ajudando nossa equipe a definir os métodos necessários em nossa nova API Pública. Se você é um fã dos mashups ou um desenvolvedor casual, dê uma olhada na apresentação e mande suas sugestões para os emails que estão na apresentação (para mim ou para o Manoel Netto). É isto… até a próxima.

Mas sempre dá para achar um tempinho, correto? Para começar estou reorganizando o blog para que os artigos e a interface estejam em Português do Brasil, já que quero escrever para outros brasileiros interessados em tecnologia, internet e empreendedorismo. Tentarei manter uma freqüência mínima de novidades.

Vamos lá, Hey Ho!!

Deixei a apresentação disponível para visualização e download no SlideShare e você pode ver ela aqui mesmo.

This movie represents the amount of queries containing the word felix on a big search engine from August, 12 to September, 9 last year. Each yellow dot raising from the globe’s surface represents a query realized by an Internet user on Yahoo’s search engine. The brighter the dot (or the closest to magenta) the bigger the amount of queries realized on that hour (each movie frame represents 1 or 2 hours).

It could be just a fancy visualization rendering of some nonsense statistical web dataset, but it shows much more than that. It actually shows how the society reacted on the web during the manifestation of a massive natural disaster, the Hurricane Felix (2007). Yes, it is big, but still a single representation of a very ephemeral phenomena on the living web. That makes me think and wonder about the complexity and beauty of that. Somehow the web is probably one of the most representative environments of the modern society and its behavior. Its actually a real extension of ourselves on the network. More and more we can’t explore the world without touching the web and that way it looks like, to me, that the society is pulsing on the web. Every single event that touches our lives is immediately manifested on the web.

Yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Internet penetration and usage is getting higher, but that is nothing if compared to the potential of mobile applications under the same point of view. If today it take us some minutes (or hours) to reach a computer after witnessing an event on the streets and then sending the stimulus to the living web, it will take seconds for dozens, hundreds or thousands of people to beam the stimuli from their mobile phones to the net.

And then its time to go crazy and wonder even further. What if those stimuli sent from us to the web could also be relayed back to us? What if the net be sufficiently intelligent to handle all that information to, immediately, give us the feedback from what it is felling? What if we start to mix our real lives to the digital live with augmented reality tools? What if?

But those are ideas for another day. It is time to go to bed and try to sleep.

BlogBlogs SoHo

That’s true, after a long time flirting with the Internet and the Web I decided that it was about time to give up of my job and be fully dedicated to my Internet projects and dreams. That recalls when I first used a networked computer in the old times of dial-up BBS and how amazed I got about the possibilities of that kind of things. Later in the Computer Engineering School I had the chance to witness the emerging of a brand new thing called Web Browser. It was mid 1993 when the gray scale monitor of an old Sun SPARCstation SLC X-Terminal first opened the Mosaic browser window to me and also a huge halo in my mind: “Hundreds of kilobytes of information traveling from Japan to Brazil in just a few minutes! Wow, that’s awesome!”

Yep, it sounds nostalgic and almost from the mesozoic era, but that was the seed of a passion. However I never had the chance to really engage professionally on the Internet market. I hovered 15 years around lots of different computing and engineering areas such as high performance computing, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, health information systems, distributed systems, network security and transactional systems, but never with the Internet as the main focus. Then the inevitable happened and I started an almost parallel life (and I’m not talking about Second Life) on the Internet. Since my first website still in the childhood of the Web as the webmaster of my department at UNICAMP to several voluntary activities in Brazil and Europe towards digital democracy, that passion was getting bigger and bigger.

Then in March (or April) 2006 a wave started to take form when I first heard about a technology called Ruby on Rails from one of the developers of my team while being the director of R&D for Hypercom in Brazil. It was like discovering the sorcerer’s stone for web development. immediately I started to sketch what would be my first application developed in Rails. The first idea was to build an online dive logbook (another of my passions), but it rapidly became too complex for a first application. Then I sketched another thing that was supposed to be a simple blog directory and then I named it BlogBlogs. After a few days reading documentation on the Internet and coding the first version of BlogBlogs was ready. It was almost a real application, but it was lacking two very important things: content and users. Then I forgot about sleeping for a few more days and coded a rudimentary web crawler specialized on gathering new blogs written in Portuguese. Later , in a trip to the US, I released the spider running on my notebook plugged to the hotel broadband connection and left to the movies. A few hours later I got back and found the spider still running and for my surprise it had already discovered 40.000 blogs. After that I setup an website for BlogBlogs and get in touch with some key bloggers from the Brazilian blogosphere and they got enthusiastic with the service. From that to the first thousand of users it was a matter of time. With a very special help from Leonardo Faoro and Edney Souza the BlogBlogs news was rapidly spread on the blogosphere and soon became a local hit with hundreds of blog posts about it and more and more users signing up. Almost two years later the BlogBlogs became the largest and most important blog indexing and searching platform for the Portuguese speaking blogosphere. It reached the Alexa Top 5000 globally and is among the Top 150 highest traffic websites in Brazil.

And that is it, now I’m fully dedicated to the BlogBlogs and also another Web 2.0 project already in the oven for the Brazilian Internet. It is time to pursuit my dreams.

Hope to see you soon on our next big thing.

Tchau!