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People, Projects & Startups at Barcamp Portugal

At the last Barcamp in Portugal I did a couple of 30-second video interviews to show some of the faces working on the Web in Portugal. Here’s the video. Feel free to share.

Please add your names and urls in the comments.

Pescadinha de rabo na boca

Esta pergunta é dirigida a todas as pessoas que, em Portugal, pensam que tudo* aquilo porque têm de pagar é demasiado caro à partida.

Conseguem perceber porque vocês próprios não ganham mais?

Foto por Stephanie Booth

* estou claramente a pecar por não incluir as férias, os iPhones, os restaurantes, os carros e os plasmas…

Dynamic Wine Labels on the Google Phone

Last weekend at the Barcamp Portugal I showed for the first time the new Cortes de Cima Dynamic Wine Labels to the community.

Thanks to Luis Abreu who owns the Google Phone you see on the video and Francisco Cabrita help, I managed to produce this small video teaser.

The Dynamic Wine Labels are made out of putting together 3 technologies: QRCodes, the AVIN (the ISBN for Wine) and Adegga’s mobile version.

A propósito da solidão

É pena que tenhas compreendido demasiado tarde que a Internet só é boa para o orgulho; não faz grande coisa pela solidão. (visto no Bitaites)

So true.

My MacBook Stickers

Sometimes people ask me questions about the stickers I have on the MacBook.
Here are all the answers.

The stickers are (with some added link love):

• MyID.is (a friends French startup)
• Star and kid (by Portuguese designer - can’t remember name Hélio Oliveira, see comments) (Inspires me to look up to the stars everyday)
• Eduardo Chillida (one of my favourite and most inspiring artists)
• adegga - My startup
• liftasia08 (a friends great journey of starting a conference in Asia)
• Tarpipe (a great startup with a great concept from a good friend)
• Catavino (good friends and great wine marketers)
• Handivi (Portuguese mobile startup)
• Moo QRCode Sticker experiment (links to Cortes de Cima Syrah 2005)
• Quevedo Port Wine Moo Stickers
• Adegga Moo Sticker

By the way, can anyone tell which one is the most recent? (tip: I got it on my last trip to Porto)

10 Optimization Tweaks to Speed Up Adegga

Adegga moved to a dedicated server a while ago. We took this opportunity and also implemented a couple of other performance tweaks. In this post I’ll explain the things we changed and how they affected performance.

We implemented 10 tweaks that are mostly based on Yahoo’s Web Optimization Best Practices:

• 1. Minimize HTTP Requests
• 2. Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
• 3. Gzip Components
• 4. Put Stylesheets at the Top
• 5. Avoid CSS Expressions
• 6. Make JavaScript and CSS External
• 7. Reduce DNS Lookups
• 8. Split Components Across Domains
• 9. Minify JavaScript and CSS
• 10. No 404s

Results
The graphics below show a waterfall representation of all the requests needed to download the homepage as created by this testing tool. Here you can see the result before and after the modification.

Before and After implementing the tweaks. Click the graphics for more details.

With the changes the page moved from 438KB to 208KB (on a first request) and 64KB to 13KB (on second, cached, request). That’s half the size on the first and six times smaller on the second!

In terms of time speed tests show that the page moved from 13 sec to 4 sec (on a first request) and 1.7 sec to 1.3 sec on the second request. I take this results only as reference to each other. There are better ways of measuring effective page loading time like using Firebug.

The Tweaks
1. Minimize HTTP Requests

Most of the time used to load a page is spent downloading components (images, stylesheets, scripts, etc). If you can reduce the number of components you reduce the number of needed HTTP requests. Amazon and Yahoo load their CSS directly inside each page thus not using another request for this file.

We haven’t included css and scripts inside the page for now (but we worked on them in a different way, however, I thought this point was too important to miss and decided to include it in the this post anyway.

Continue to read the rest of tweaks

Praia do Barril

Photos from the weekend trip to the beach are online on Flickr. Here’s one:

Praia

Praia from andrerib on Vimeo.

Praia is Portuguese for beach. This video was made at Praia do Barril in the Algarve. A visit this weekend brought me good memories of the amazing moments I had while watching the sea and hearing the waves during the summer.

Whitespace in design

Some might argue that passive whitespace is the unconsidered space present within a composition. I disagree: if you don’t consider all your whitespace, that’s just bad design. Passive whitespace creates breathing room and balance. It’s important.

This is a quote from a great article at A List Apart on the importance of whitespace. It’s a must read for all design aware people.

Behind the scenes at Dwell

Dwell is one of my favourite magazines. The articles are good, the design is amazing and the topic is a favourite: architecture of modern spaces.

In the video below Kyle Blue, the Design Director of Dwell discusses his work as the Magazine and how lessons learned about living and working in modern spaces have influenced the organization of the Dwell.