2010 was a nice year, on a personal level it was quite ok ’cause I managed to acomplish most of my 2009 main goals:

1st. Buy house in Lisbon
2nd. Attend PHP Summer School
3rd. Attend Sapo Codebits and develop a fully working project in the 48 hours programming contest
4th. Finish my Master Thesis

Looking back…

I’m currently living in Lisbon, and drastically reduced the time spent travelling to/from work, significantly improving my quality of life. Now I can wake up thirty minutes before going to work, instead of two and half hours, like I used to do when I was still living in Setúbal, wich is really cool.

Because I’m living in Lisbon, it becomes quite easy to attend to more events that take place there, specially the ones described on 2nd and 3rd goals, ’cause they last several days.

Last September I finaly had the chance to attend PHP Summer School – Advanced Topics. To be honest, I must say that it didn’t exactly correspond to what I had in mind. Because of it’s name I was expecting some more advanced lectures… However most of my course colleagues, which participated in the intruductory version, were very happy. In my humble opinion, at least one new version of the course should be created, probably named “Ninja Topics” and built based on feedback from Portuguese community.

In November I attended Sapo Codebits, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. This is one of the biggest events, if not the biggest one, that takes place in Portugal. I got there with @hiphip, one of my colleagues at DRI, and we managed to develop a Web application related with bets and social interactions. Although our project didn’t won any prize, we felt like “mission accomplished” when it was selected from a large set of projects to be presented on the main stage.

Finally my master thesis, this is the only goal that I could not accomplish… I had to get it done by the end of last September and unfortunatly I barely started it due to several aspects that aren’t worth to talk about.

With this in mind, my main goals this year will be:

1st. Finish my Master Thesis
2nd. Attend Sapo Codebits 2011.
3rd. Attend more events, national and international like PHP Barcelona Conference 2011!
4th. Become a Zend Certified Engineer, this one is optional since it requires time to study and the amount of time available will depend on my Master Thesis evolution.

Lets hope that in one year from now, I can mark them all as acomplished!

]]> http://blog.joaomorais.com/2010-the-year-in-review/feed/ 0 http://blog.joaomorais.com/first-online-hotel-booking-service-experience/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=first-online-hotel-booking-service-experience http://blog.joaomorais.com/first-online-hotel-booking-service-experience/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:34:59 +0000 João Morais http://www.blog.joaomorais.com/?p=641 Now that 2009 is gone, I can write a review about my first online hotel booking service experience.

Until last December 12, I had never used such services. So I chose to do a search for online booking agencies, which gathered the following conditions: Had several customers reviews, seemed to be reliable and the best relation between cost/quality.

After this I chose Hotelopia, an online booking agency who aims to help you find and reserve the right hotel at the right price, from a wide range of good quality accommodation.

Thanks to Hotelopia I’ve spent my New Years Eve in Albufeira, in a nice and cheap resort without the common problems of trying to find an apartment for rent in this time of year for a short time period.

Certainly the next time that I will need this type of services I’ll use Hotelopia again.

Ironically the last post was about time management and the wonderful advices of Randy Pausch. Even with these advices in mind and trying to put some in practice it becomes difficult to perform miracles when our days have twenty hours instead of the normal twenty-four.

This reduction in hours is due to some recent major changes in my life. Although I haven’t finished my Master degree yet (still missing one course and the Master Thesis) and as you may have noticed in a previous post, I’ve decided to look for a job. To be honest all the spare time was driving me insane.

At the moment I’ve returned to my homeland and left Évora behind. So I’m currently working in Lisbon and living in Setúbal (temporary solution, I hope), which are distant about 40 km’s and make me lose roughly four hours a day just on travels.

But not everything is bad, in fact, this must be the only “not so good” thing because I’ve managed to get exactly what I wanted, and that was:

1. Find a great business company in Lisbon.
2. Work in Web Development with Open Source technologies.
3. Try to make my final Master Thesis integrated in the business company that I’m in.
4. Learn new things with more experienced people while working as a team.

Now about the place that I’m working in.

It’s name is DRI – Open Solutions for Open Mind and we work as an Open Source integrator which delivers low cost technological solutions with high quality and efficiency. If you want you can read more about us at our company’s blog or website.

One thing that got me amazed is the work environment which is surprisingly relaxed and informal.

So far I had the opportunity to work with SugarCRM, ExtJS, jQuery and Zend Framework. Some of these tools were already known, others less so, which in itself is a big plus to who wants to leave it’s comfort zone and learn new things.

Another interesting point is related to my final Master Thesis. If the proposal which was suggested at DRI is approved, my goal will be to develop a specific module for SugarCRM in order to automate some of the processes at our company, I’ll talk more about this in another post.

In summary and at the time the balance is very positive.

Randy Pausch was a Computer Science Professor at CMU. Before he died of cancer in July 2008 he presented a couple of lectures about different topics some of which became very famous.

The video embedded presents a few tips on how to manage your time from the perspective of someone who had very few time left. Although it is a huge video, I think it’s worth to spend the time needed to watch it.

This morning before I went to the scene where I was going to be interviewed for a job offer, I walked into the nearest coffee shop to spend some time and add some caffeine in the system to be able to wake up properly.

In the meanwhile I went to the bathroom, it was a really small bathroom.. one square meter in maximum, not good for claustrophobic people.

A couple of minutes after, I’ve tried to unlock the bathrooms door with no success. It was impossible, the key stopped working! After looking carefully I’ve realized that it was broken inside the locker.

I stayed ten/fifteen minutes stuck in there, till someone noticed I was knocking at the door and opened it from the outside with another key.

Lesson learned, next time I’ll go to the bathroom only after the interview.

In conclusion and for what matters, although It was almost time I managed to arrived on time to the interview.

It was a small adventure ~20km in a spectacular place: Parque Natural da Arrábida.

Hope to get there again as soon as possible. If you’ve never went there, you really should think about it.

Next step: fill the application forms for the Master degree.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve read something about a documentary that talks about the effect/usage of steroids on sports, and I got curious of what this documentary was all about.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to watch it, it’s name is Bigger Stronger Faster and it’s rated with an 8/10, in my opinion the score is well deserved.

It talks about steroids and how they can affect a person’s life, supplements, how the “before & after” commercials are made, politics and the hypocrisy of being an American.

There are two sentences reported in this documentary that made me think, maybe they will make you think too.

“Is it still cheating if everyone’s doing it?”

“The side effects of being an American.”

Last Monday was my last day at Algarve, unfortunately my vacations are almost ending. The few days that are left will be spent in my hometown.

Like I’ve planned I went to Albufeira and Alvor, unfortunately I didn’t had time to visit Lagos which is a really nice place to visit, with great beaches, night activities and restaurants.

Although I didn’t planned I’ve also visited Portimão and Armação de Pêra which are also great places.

In these trips I’ve visited two touristic attractions that are worth to talk about.

In the past Saturday I went to Fiesa which is a sand sculpture festival, this year the theme is related with Hollywood. There you can find your favorite characters, such as: Spiderman, Batman, Silver Surfer, Wonder Woman, Hulk, Freddy Kruger, The Simpsons, The Muppets, etc.

If you have the opportunity to go there don’t hesitate, the ticket is a bit expensive but I really think it compensates.

You still have a lot of time to visit it since the festival will be running till October 22nd.

The second touristic attraction was Slide & Splash, it was my second time there. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s Water Slide Park, there you can have a different day with a lot of pool related activities, the only turn off is the waiting lines that are a bit long.

And that was it, my vacations were short and I didn’t rest like I wanted to, but I had fun, and that’s what matters.

One note that I will keep in mind in my next vacations: Do not travel with your GPS with an outdated software, sometimes it is not 100% reliable and makes you perform 30km instead of 5km.