Alcides Fonseca

If you aren’t aware of pixels.camp, it’s a 3 days hackathon in Lisbon, Portugal. This time I’m living 3 metro stops away, so despite not taking days off, I’ll be participating.

One of the bigger changes from previous editions is that a new voting system will be used, based on EXP, a closed crypto-currency on top of the ethereum.

Basic rules:

• If you are at the event, you get badges, each amounting to 100 EXP (I’m ignoring the variance here).
• There are angels who own a lot of EXP’s (25.000).
• There is one lucky guy who may win 50.000 EXP by solving a scavenger hunt.
• Participants can create projects.
• Everyone can invest in projects. The invested money is controlled by the organization.
• At the end of the event (and presentations), all the money invested in all the projects is redistributed proportionally to the 10 “richest” projects. These are the main winners of the event.
• After this, the EXP collected by each project are distributed by the investors proportionally to their investment.

I believe this approach is flawed.

Problem 1: Money is worthless at the end.

Unless you are one of top 10 (out of ~100) project owners or one of the X top investors, you get nothing. There is no actual interest in saving your money, or betting in low-risk investments. You want to hit the jackpot by investing in the number one project, if you are looking for winning the investor prize (I’m assuming the angels are out of the race).

Additionally, if you are the scavenge hunt winner, you should be extra careful with how you spend your money, not to lose it (because that money without investing is useless).

So, you should invest in the best company. The question is when.

Problem 2: Project presentations are in the end of the event.

There are no “investment” rounds here with no incentive for investing early. The best approach is to invest in the end, where you already have an idea of which projects have a chance of winning. What happens if everyone invests in the end? Maybe that’s the most fair scenario, but it is no different than a regular voting system without decentralized coins.

Problem 3: If you are competitive, you should invest in your own ideas.

If you really want to win this, it makes sense for you to invest early in your own project. If everybody does this, then the prize is only decided by the angels. Except if you do the right strategy:

• Get a small team of developers who are interested in doing something useful. Alternatively, create vaporware. Doesn’t matter as long as the angels are interested.
• Get a large team of miners, participants who are not interested in building something, but rather want to collect badges and participate in activities.

This will be the best approach towards winning (unless you have the best project according to the angel’s opinions).

Problem 4: There are no rewards in this Kickstarter.

The project presentation is supposed to work like Kickstarter. The most successful projects on Kickstarter had excellent rewards for investors. Here, unless you are rich, you have no real rewards.

If I end up creating a service as a project, I will give pre-access to the service to whoever backs me. If I am doing a prototype of something that will not last, there is no real reward I can give out (except free hugs).

Problem 4: Work vs Play

You should focus either on working (to get one of the 10 prizes) or playing (and getting badges to be a great investor). I don’t believe a half-way approach is very useful towards winning prizes (Although it might be the best fun experience).

Idea 1: VC-like groups.

Let’s say I invite everyone I know to a VC company. We decide amongst ourselves in which project we want to vote. Only the most voted project gets all the money from the group members. This might seem unfair for members who didn’t vote for it, but in the end it gives that project a better chance of winning, thus making VC members richer.

Btw, contact me in case you want to join Alcides&Friends Ventures, LLC. The larger the VC group, the larges the changes of winning a prize.

Idea 2: Betting

If you have been to previous editions (called Codebits at the time), you might remember the launch of a closed instance of Meo Wallet. It was the same idea, although projects didn’t ran on this. Rui and I won the prize for most money transferred, and came close second for the most money totaled (if only I hadn’t been so generous).

Idea 3: Ponzi scheme.

This was something we also worked on. I’ve known Ponzi schemes to last for months, and we only need it to last 3 days. So contact me as soon as you can to be one of the first to take advantage of the Alcides scheme™.

Don’t get me wrong, this is an interesting idea and we should use these events to play with ideas like this. But I have my doubts it will work in the end like it is intended to.

Coimbra has been hosting several small but interesting events lately ( #1, #2 and #3 ) and one of the organizations behind most of them is the Google Developer Group, of which I am a mostly inactive member.

Google Developer Groups (GDG) are community-run independent groups, which Google sponsors in different ways (mostly event support and some gadgets). Since Google has no client support, nor developer evangelists in most countries, they outsource that job to the community for a very very cheap price. GDG organizers are people who would do something similar anyway, but use Google’s support to bring experts from other countries at a cheaper price. More later on this model.

Google has a budget for certain events, and this late in the year it was time for Devfest. In Portugal, each of the three big cities hosted one. I attended the Devfest Coimbra, and I was surprised how well the team pulled this event together in so little time.

Having a sponsor in Google (and many other local and international companies) allowed to bring people from outside Coimbra, resulting in a speaker lineup with only one local speaker. This is uncommon here, as we usually have local people presenting on technical subjects, given our rich talent pool.

There was a main track with talks, and a secondary track with hands-on workshops, which allows for a diversity that our typical events don’t provide. Almost half of the time I was in the third track: the hallway track.

Developer Stories – José Nunes talked about his two man maker company that builds custom drones. Although there was no business plan talk, he gave an overview of the drone scenario nowadays and projects they are exploring.

Filipe Barroso gave the most confusing talk about git ever. He seemed like he was targetting an audience that knew nothing about git, but expected them to know how it worked from an user point of view. He explained the blobs, commits and objects that are used internally in git, and tried to explain the merging algorithm, without going into details. He should have sticked to one level (beginner/intermediate/expert).

Progressive Webapps with Polymer – This talk had a similar issue. The speaker expected people to already know polymer, which was far from the truth. Thus, there was a big downtime installing polymer (about 45 minutes). Speakers should have access to the profile of registered atendees, in order to better prepare their talks/workshops. Additionally, pen drives with offline installers is also a must for workshops.

Celso Martinho expanded his lessons learned talk from take off with his new job at Bright Pixel.

Finally, Luís Silva gave a ballmeresque motivational speech about having a wonderful job that allows us to put our art in the hands of everyone on the planet. He also talked about his company supporting the code.org in two schools, something I’m a fond of.

Overall it was a good event (free food!). I think better speakers could have been found for some topics, but I’m also to blame, because I was asked for suggestions. Additionally, there should have been beginners/intermediate levels in the talk description.

Finally, while this was not a google tech exclusive event, there is an incentive to organize events around their technology. GDG groups should not have Google in their name, and IMHO they should organize any type of event, and Google would support the ones they have interest in. But giving themselves the GDG group associates them with Google for good and for bad.

For those of you who don’t know, Pixels.camp is the largest geek event in Portugal, the follow up to Codebits. I love the event and I have given talks in previous editions.

The major component of the event is the 48h hacklathon. Participants team up to make any project they want, building up to the 90s pitch. During the pitches, participantes in the audience are voting for the project with a like or dislike.

This is actually a hard task, as authentication is required (to prevent people who are not in the event to vote) and not all the projects get the same number of votes.

So far the organization has used the likes – dislikes as a metric for ranking projects. Marco Amado proposed using the ratio of ( likes – dislikes ) / ( likes + dislikes ). I do not believe this is fair because a project with 5 likes and 1 dislike, ratio of 0.(6), would rank higher than a project with 100 likes and 25 dislikes, with a ratio of 0.6. I would consider the second project to be better, even if only by causing more positive interest. Using just the difference is more interesting in my opinion.

However, I agree that it is a flawed system. I end up dislike every project that, according to me, shouldn’t win a prize. This decision is based on hunches, because voting is real-time and the first projects always end up having higher rankings because there is no comparison at the moment.

My suggestion is to change ranking to have two different votes: like and love. Likes would work like Facebook likes: they would be used to increase the project author’s ego. Loves would be used for the final ranking, unlike likes.

Each user would be given 100 votes, which would be equally divided across their loved projects. Then it is a matter of making the math and ranking the projects.

This approach keeps the simplistic approach of binary voting, it takes into consideration how many votes there are, and it has the advantage of not having dislikes, leading to an happier event!

Some may accuse me of being a Microsoft guy, but using a mac in the past or so, I can’t really say that about me. Nevertheless, I keep an eye on Microsoft Conferences ( and I even got to attend one or two) because really cool stuff come from them. I’m not kidding about this. Let’s see PDC 2008:

Windows 7

I’ve been following Engineering Windows 7 blog, so I was pretty up to date with this stuff, but seeing real screenshots was pretty impressive. I have mixed feelings about the taskbar redesign. While I really liked the old one, I understand that this way it’s more usable in smaller resolutions (say notebooks or even mobile phones, think Shift or Advantage). But in bigger displays, that are cheaper and cheaper each day, the old style was pretty cool.

The vista style of the windows was predictable, but I really hate it. I do! I hope they get a real theming engine, and not make us use some third party software to make them more macish.

One cool surprise was to see that they fixed the horrible wifi icon in the traybar. Linux and Mac did it right years ago, and in Windows up to Vista and even in Windows Mobile it’s a pain to connect to networks.

About the multi-touch? Well, they had it all along with Surface (and Surface SDK), so no big surprise. We’ll see MS release the iTablet before Apple does.

The Cloud Stuff

a.k.a. Windows Azure

Well, startups are going the Cloud way. Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine are just a first step. Microsoft wants Entreprise costumers to join this trend, and be able to have their business in the cloud. I don’t know if this is going to be such as a success and they think. a) real small business don’t want their data on the clould. They want it in their small server in their intranet. b) Large companies that have the need for a cloud server probably can support having their own infrastructure and not relying on Microsoft. Maybe I’m mistaken, but we’ll see.

James Governor has written a really interesting post on this matter and even mentions OpenID in Azure Services.

More Cloud Stuff

a.k.a. Live Mesh

Live Mesh is the Mobile Me for the rest of us. It syncs files P2P or through the cloud and for those, like me, with several computers rocks.

Since the Mac and Windows Mobile clients came out, I guess I’ll have to give it a try some day.

Dale Lane writes about the transition from USB syncing to Cloud syncing. It’s true Google doesn’t provide a offline sync out of the box in the Android, but I like to have the oldschool method available when needed.

Yet More Cloud Stuff

a.k.a. Live Services

Angus got extra points for the shirt and for spreading the social word among the entreprise developers there.

It’s true that Microsoft has a different view form Google and Yahoo that are embracing the OpenID+OAuth way, but this might change in the future. You can already see some little steps being made.

Dynamic Languages

Oddly, the first dynamic language I noticed in PDC was C#. Really! C# is now lightyears away from Java, and is evolving continuously. Version 4 brings a lot of new features and one of them is the ability to integrate dynamic languages directly in C# using the dynamic type. I believe C# is becoming more of a glue language (LINQ, Dynamic Languages, F#) that allows programmers to switch smoothly to other languages.

As usual, I love John Lam’s talk on IronRuby that besides the usual C#, Silverlight and Testing/Mocking stuff, demoed a Visual Studio Plugin in Ruby and Web Services using Sinatra. You should really take a look at it.

Oslo Modeling tools

DSLs are becoming popular in the several business software. and is something Microsoft was looking at a while ago. While I’d say IronRuby was the way to go (see RSpec examples), they took it further and made their own toolkit, Oslo, to develop both visually and textually Models The language they created to achieve that purpose is called M, and right now is supported through the IntelliPad editor.

In fact this editor was what got my interest in this area, since it’s codename was Emacs.NET, and since I’m in the quest for the perfect editor I wanted to take a look. Well, right now it supports the M language, but “you can extend it using IronPython”:hhttp://www.masteringbiztalk.com/blogs/jon/PermaLink,guid,92ec6f1f-45e5-4b7d-b675-548be5131a07.aspx. I’ll wait to see the first plugins to support different languages in the IntelliPad.

In the meanwhile, take a look at the different Oslo sessions at PDC

Mono

Yeah, Mono gets to be one of the main points of this post, as it should also be very important to Microsoft. The work Miguel and the team is doing gives much more value to .NET and Microsoft, than any other technology they presented in my opinion. Since the Mac and Linux worlds are raising their share, it’s important to let developers target those platforms too. And their doing interesting new stuff too, like the C# compiler service, the C# interpreter and even running .NET apps in the iPhone!

So take a look at his talk, one of the best in the whole PDC.

Of course this wasn’t everything PDC was about, but the stuff that I really care about. And I really liked some of this stuff!