Bruno Abrantes

Project Timeframe

September 2008 – October 2008

Motivations

The recently established labs.sapo/ua is Portuguese Internet Giant SAPO’s latest attempt at gaining a foothold in the Higher Education space. The lab is a physical space in the Universidade de Aveiro campus where SAPO supports the development of innovative projects in the Web and Technology fields in tight collaboration with the University itself. In order to promote the initiative building a solid Web presence was top priority. The platform to be developed needed to promote communication with the outside world and shine a light on the various ongoing projects at the lab. With this in mind, me and the rest of the team decided to develop a platform based on Wordpress MU that would support an indefinite number of personal and project blogs. This platform would need to be flexible enough to be deployed nearly as-is in a number of situations, such as other Universities or other SAPO sponsored events (as is the case of labs.sapo/codebits and labs.sapo/summerbits).

(…) more after the jump ›

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!

Yup, labs.sapo.pt/ua finally launched! After a few weeks of hard work, this community driven website is ready for public scrutiny.

It essentially serves as a showcase of most recent work and projects developed at the SAPO laboratory at the University of Aveiro, and believe me, there are already a lot of interesting projects springing up! I myself am involved with the soon to be SAPO Campus, but I promise a more in-depth post about that later.

I was one of the web developers deeply involved in the making of this site, so you can also expect a full-on portfolio post one of these days.

Everyone can comment on the various blogs, but only directly involved people can have a blog and post stuff. We hope that we were able do deliver a well-adjusted product and hope to see it thoroughly used for the next months!

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.