After the MWC in Barcelona I moved my working place to Valencia for a week, a little further south. That is already a while ago, but still I wanted to write a little bit about all the experiences. Not last because I very much want to thank all the people who I have met, who introduced me into the spanish community and made all this so much fun. Thank you very much first and foremost Rosa – you rock! Thank you Xavi, Jaume, Jorge, Luis, and … fuck I am so bad with names :(.

Coworking in Valencia

My week in Valencia started out to look very quiet and just pure work. I tried to contact some JavaScript/mobile/web guys in this area before hand, but somehow didn’t really succeed. Some tweets went around but I didn’t really reach anybody. But I made sure I have a great place to work at, which was Coworking Valencia, Rosa Montesa runs this place with so much passion – wow. And I just had to think of the Combinat56 Coworking space in Munich where we normally go, which is run by Sina with an equal lot of passion. Just great girls!

So I arrived there Monday morning to do my work, and off it went. I chatted a while with Rosa and some other coworkers and from there I couldn’t stop it. At the end of the day my calendar was filled with lunches and meetups. I met a lot of interesting people, first Rosa had organized a small come-together the next day with the company Brainstorm from right above, mainly hackers too, so we had quite some stuff in common. There I met Jorge who introduced me to more geeky people, thank you so much!

Spanish way of life

So the week went on and I tried to work a little bit, but I was basically so happy to live the spanish way of life a little bit. In the morning you don’t buy a take away coffee, actually you don’t see the busy people running around with their coffee mugs in there hands. I also just did that the first day, after that I adopted the spanish way, which is sitting down in a bar (also if it just for five minutes) and have a coffee. A lot of people there have a carajillo in the morning but that was not appropriate for my mornings :).
For lunch (later than normal for me, around after 2pm) we mostly went to some place outside, since it was at least 20°C, beautiful sun just perfect. And then on the way home you just take some tapas maybe a beer in the bar around the corner and late at night (normally after 9pm) we had dinner. For me working there felt really comfortable and easy going. But I have also heard that normally working in Spain is not normally that relaxed.

The real geeks

On Thursday I went to the BeCode guys’ office in the nice Barrio del Carmen. The first thing after I arrived was “let’s go for a coffee” :). That is the spanish style! We exchanged the ideas of how we work and the kind of projects we do. Xavi the daddy of BeCode (scnr) told me that they are an incubator and try to have people come in and realize their ideas, pretty cool stuff. Was so refreshing and forward-thinking, I felt home.
Funny enough that day I learned about Jasmine there, they used in a project. Unfortunately we had no internet that day, so I was pretty much offline until the afternoon, which was somehow good, but not when you really want to get some things done. So I promised to be back the next day and then the office was also really crowded and I got to meet all of the BeCode team. In the evening I joined my first coding dojo, this one was held in the offices of OpenFinance. We were given the task to write a roman to latin numbers converter in whatever programming language you like. You are given half an hour and try to get as far as you can, I joined forces with Jaume we got it easily done in the half an hour time, we simply used the webtestsuite as our testing framework since I know that one best and of course we wrote the converter in JavaScript :). As a second Kata you could hack the conversion the other way around. Jaume and I felt that this would be just another hacking it the other way job was, so we looked for a new challenge and we said let’s just use the google search engine for converting it for us and we just grab the result from there. We looked at a couple of APIs, at YQL but there was no real solution, so we went the scraping route. We got it almost done :). But as you can see and read we had lots of fun and enough beer!
Of course we went for dinner later and were still hanging out some time around Valencia and in the BeCode office later. There the guys told me about an Code Retreat which is going to take place somewhere near Valencia “en el campo” with Paella cooking and hacking, I hope that some of us uxebus may join, hope to find out details soon.

All in all a big thank you to all you guys and I can just say I had a great, though also really exhausting, two weeks in Spain. Hope to see you soon!