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/major-changes-in-real-life/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=major-changes-in-real-life http://blog.joaomorais.com/major-changes-in-real-life/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:07:58 +0000 João Morais http://blog.joaomorais.com/?p=500 For quite some time that I don’t write anything here. Contrary to what may seem this is not due to lack of ideas about what to write, but due the lack of time that I’ve been feeling.

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.