patrícia furtado

It’s been nearly a week ago, and only now am I finding time to write a post about it: Barcamp 08 in Coimbra, organised by the nice people at We Break Stuff.

First I must say I’m totally new to this sort of event. Lately I’ve been realising I live a bit too closed in my shell, and that I don’t know many designers and programmers, which is a very autistic and narrow minded way to design. As I was browsing through some portuguese blogs and sites, and stumbled into this event’s page, I acted on impulse, added my name to the list of attendees, and jumped on a train to Coimbra on my own.

My first motivation wasn’t to attend the all presentations. Interesting as they might be, most of them were, as I’d guessed, a bit too technical for my poor little brain. My aim was to meet people that worked in the same area than I did, who shared interests and language, and that were at least as geeky as I am. As I found out, they were that and so much more.

The first thing that struck me was that in about 80 participants, I could only see one other girl. And if a lack of female geeks was totally predictable, what I didn’t expect was to see so few designers, as most of the attendants were from a programming background. Being a girl designer, more than a minority, I was an alien. To my great surprise, as soon as we introduced ourselves, I started chatting to people who actually knew my work, who had visited my website, many of which I knew from visiting their sites or blogs as well.

The spirit of the event was so informal and spontaneous that I even accepted when I was asked to do a small presentation. I was totally unprepared, of course, specially as I’d left my mac at home, but Alcides promptly lent me his, and so I spent most of the first day preparing the slideshow. Later, I’ll write more about my own little presentation.

As for the few ones I did see… Pedro Melo gave me a good insight into what XMPP is, and how it can be used, but somewhere along the way I got lost in the tech speech. Pedro Custódio had a great presentation about usability, a subject much closer to my experience, and Bruno Amaral shared with us the plan to create the Lisbon Social Media Café (I’ll be there, see you all next Saturday!). I would have liked to see some of the other speakers, but the schedule was running late, and I had a train to catch.

So… thank you Tiago, Fred and everybody at WBS for a great weekend, thank you Alcides for inviting me to do a presentation and letting me fool around with your mac, thank you André and Bruno for sharing cool stuff online, thanks everybody for making me feel right at home, nice to meet you all! Where do I sign up for next year’s barcamp?