Codebits is a programmers/hackers conference that is going to be held in Lisbon during 3 days in the first week of December.
I’ve now talked with a couple of friends and colleagues and many seem not very excited about it and confessed they would most likely not attend. While there can be several explanations for this, I think one of the main reasons is due to the bad PR work the organization has been making. If you go into the main page of the conference you don’t get a clear picture of what will happen, what talks can one expect and what topics will be discussed. As an example of the proper thing see the StackOverflow DevDays page. That’s what you want, a page with speakers, date and topic. Not a blog with pictures of profiles rotating like if you were seeing a dating site.
Having said that I also wanted to say I think Codebits is a great fucking idea and you’d be silly not to attend. There are already some great talks for this year and many of the people there are the enthusiastic developers you probably don’t get to hang around in our daily job, and that can inspire you and renovate your enthusiasm.
Here are some of the talks already announced for this year’s edition*:
- Web Application Development by Kai Seidler (Sun Microsystems).
- Ruby 1.9 VM’s internals with DTrace by Lourens Naudé, independent consultant and a founding member of the Scrooge DB optimization layer.
- MySQL High Availability Solutions by Lenz Grimmer, MySQL Community Relations Team at Sun Microsystems.
- Distributed version control systems, also by Lenz Grimmer.
Some of the talks are summarized based on the full description of what was published in the Sapo Codebits 2009 web site.