Bruno Abrantes

Where2Eat is a web application developed by me and three other friends at this year’s SAPO Codebits. Sadly, we didn’t win any of the awesome prizes they gave away, but we still liked the idea, so we decided to keep developing it.

Basically, Where2Eat is an application that, after you tell it where you are right now, finds the nearest restaurants around the area, and shows them on a map. You can then refine your search, by adjusting the amount of area covered, how much you wish to spend or even what you feel like eating.

Right now, the application is in it’s early Alpha stage, and there are a LOT of bugs left to fix and new features to implement. We decided to get it out at this stage because we really want to be involved with the community from the very beginning. We set up a development blog (in Portuguese) so you can check out the latest version features and fixes and also so you can leave your precious feedback and suggestions (believe me, your contribution is really important!).

Finally, some time to breath. This year’s edition of SAPO Codebits was good (although last year’s was better, an opinion shared by all my friends who attended both editions) and, between talks, presentations and rushing to finish my own project within the 24 hour deadline (more on that later, by the way), I didn’t have much time to interact with the outside world. 

The event ended last Saturday, but my forgetful mind made me lose my Macbook charger at the event, so that’s why I’ve been kept silent so far. Luckily, I was able to get it back today. 

With all that said, I leave you with a Flickr set of some photos I took at the event. Not many photos, I know, but since I’m such a pro photographer must of the ones I took ended up blurry :P.

SAPO Codebits is almost here, and they’ve done a good job keeping people excited. They have a Twitter page, which keeps you on top of the latest news, and they’ve been hosting a little quiz event on their blog. So far I’ve only solved the first one, lack of time (and patience!) have kept me from the others.

Some interesting speakers who are already confirmed include Peter Svensson from the Dojo Javascript Toolkit team (although I’m still sad that no one is showing some JQuery loving – yet) and Jan Lehnardt, maker of contributor for CouchDB. Also interesting is the presence of Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, one of the key players in the making of the Chumby multimedia player.

In other news, you can already check out the probable skill distribution of everyone taking part in the event. PHP, Javascript and CSS are obviously the best represented skills, and I’m sad the Ruby population doesn’t exceed the 2.6%. Guess I’ll have to work my way around the crowd!

I just found out that registry has opened for SAPO Codebits 2008! This will be this event’s second edition, and it consists of three whole days of pure programming and web development heaven, happening November 13 to 15. Oh yeah, and last year there was pizza. Lots of pizza. Register now, and don’t forget to spread the word! Me? I am so there.