I think by now everyone's heard of the hard time the guys up in Queensland, Australia are having because of the recent floods. People have lost their lives and many others have lost their homes and businesses, product of years of hard work. As a result of this massive disaster the Queensland Government decided to run a telethon to encourage donations to help the flood victims. The Telethon aired last Sunday, 09/01/11, on Channel 9 and lasted for 2 hours.

Now several months after I announced my odyssey to obtain my Australian work visa, the time has finally come! I'll be flying to Sydney next week, April 15th, and as you can probably guess, I'm excited as hell! :) This starts an important new page both in my life and my career, but that's not what this post is about. It's about sharing the experience of living for over two years in Europe.

Next week the RuPy Conference 2009 will be held in Poznan, Poland and I was planning to talk there. My talk had been approved and everything was looking good - I was gonna talk about JRuby in the Enterprise - until my move to ThoughtWorks became a reality less than a month ago. This move led to a lack of support and time from my current company. I was counting on it to go there but since I'll be leaving soon, that wouldn't be possible.

{% img /assets/images/rs2009.jpg %} Rails Summit finished a few days ago and I have only one word to describe it: Awesome! I met some really cool people, discussed a whole bunch of technical subjects and managed not to get so nervous in my first presentation ever - I'm not counting internal presentations I've done for my team... My slides and source files can be found here. Feel free to contact me with questions if you got any.

Once more my life is taking a huge turn. I've been pretty quiet for the past month and honestly don't know how I managed to hold in my excitement. I've just accepted an offer from ThoughtWorks to be based at their australian offices, either in Sydney or Melbourne, depending on where my 1st project will be. For those of you who don't know, ThoughtWorks is a global IT consultancy that is really well known in the software development community.

So here I am! Alive and kicking!!! Just got back from vacation. Brazil was awesome and so was xmas in Norway! Lots of food in both places! Need a diet! :p Warming up for new year's now. But the reason for this post is the last comment on my Rails 2.0 scaffold post, quoted here: Hi Leonardo, I am extremely grateful for your info altruism. I thought maybe I could show my gratitude with a small donation but I don’t see anywhere on your site to do so.

UPDATE: By next friday I meant this friday, december 5th. Tks Pillip! :P This will be a really quiet month on my blog. The reason? Next friday I'm going to Brazil for vacation and right after, in the end of december, I'm going to extend my trip a bit and spend xmas in Norway. Just hope to come back alive from Brazil! My friends are promising a real blast!!!!! :D

Besides the fact that I am a software developer, I do eat. I even enjoy doing so. Specially when I'm traveling. That's why i decided to put up a new weblog only for this kind of stuff - it's called Travel tips - food & stuff. Basically for friends and whoever else might be interested. There I plan to share some nice restaurants I've been to. At least to start with.

It's been some time since my last post but here I am! Where? In Spain, of course! Having a great time, I must say. I arrived last week in Madrid and the past 2 weeks before that I spent basically packing my stuff. There is still some paperwork going on but everything is flowing well. Besides this little feedback, I was reading this week's issue of the excellent series This Week In Ruby, from my friend Antonio Cangiano.

Some of you may know. Some of you may not. Some of you may find weird. And most of you probably have no idea of what I'm talking about but the thing is: This is a year of big changes for me. I've been hired by Mirai, a Spanish company located in Madrid, to work as a Software Engineer. Yes, it does mean I'll be moving there. Sooner than later.

Next week I'll be at QCon, in London, so if any of you are going to the conference and would like meet up for a couple of beers and a tech talk, please don't hesitate to drop a message. For those of you who have never heard of QCon before, it is a really nice event to play along with some of the most popular names in the software engineering community.

At least, dumb for the companies hiring them. The old dream is still for sale out there: Build a "I do everything framework" and hire a bunch of dumb programmers - monkeys? - and you shall make money easily! Just put some button pressers and a full featured enterprise system will be waiting on the other side of this "machine"! C'mon, I thought this dream was over! We've had enough proofs that this doesn't work!

Well, talking with some friends, I decided that, from now on, I shall only write in english on this blog. Of course some of you may not like it. But I think it has more advantages than the other way around. I have some friends around the world, including people from the U.S., Spain, Italy, China, India and Australia. This way, they can also enjoy the content of this blog and help me improve it.

Pois bem, saí do Rio hoje rumo a Madrid, com escala em Lisboa. A essa hora já estaria por lá.... mas no momento estou no aeroporto de Lisboa esperando o próximo vôo, visto que perdi a conexão! Acontece até na europa! :p Em teoria o embarque é daqui a 1h:30min... Os portugueses são muito atenciosos btw! Até a próxima!