Yesterday took place the anticipated RejectConf SP’07, the first relevant Rails event in Brazil, at the Jacy Monteiro auditorium over at the Instituto de Matemática e Estatística da USP. It was a terrific event, even more so considering the I was the responsible for it (meaning that I am a very amateurish [dis]organizer :-) ). It was a community-driven event, non-profitable, that counted on the support from Caelum and IME, which made it possible for an event without entrance charges. It was well worth it.

All volunteer presenters showed up, the audience was excited, cooperative and interested, which certainly made me happy. There were delays, people was attending even in the middle of a holiday weekend (chaining holidays from last thursday until next tuesday, here in Brazil), hungry, heated but even so they all attended. This surely shows how united and strong our community is.

The event started on mid-day, as scheduled, but instead of going until 6:30PM it was extended until almost 8PM! I was worried that people would started getting bored or tired, but they were relentless until the end. Kudos to the audience for their stamina!

By the way, I was surprised to see how many Macbooks there were. I counted around 10 units, from old iBooks until brand new Macbook Pros! This is Brazil, ladies and gentlemen, this is unexpected!

The room was reasonably equiped. The big screen was good enough, we were able to hook audio directly to the video camera and we spent around 6 mini-DV tapes. Unfortunately there were some pauses to change tapes right in the middle of some keynotes. Lightning was not very good as well, but I hope that not much was lost. There were 2 other people recording video so we do have 2 ‘backups’ from Jonas and Tapajós. I still don’t know when I’ll be able to edit all this but whoever edits first please release the downloads, I don’t care not being the first.

As soon as I have news about the videos I’ll post here. I’ll also post about the keynote files from all the presenters. Stay tuned for updates with all this material.

Just to start, I uploaded the photos into a Web Gallery. Go check’em out and if you took photos you can upload directly to this stream. Marcos Vinicius also published his photos at Flickr !

There’s also Fernando Meyer’s album. Marcos Tapajós, from ImproveIt published his album as well.

I’d like to thank everybody that was attending, even in the middle of the holiday, from many cities.

Thanks to the presenters, some of them came from very far as Felipe Giotto and Eduardo Fiorezi, that came from Paraná:

Master Vinicius and his gang from ImproveIT that came from Rio to show us their experience with XP and Rails:.

Carlos Villela, our man in London, and his friends from ThoughtWorks:

And Carlos Eduardo, from eGenial, were online telling his story to us, directly from a TreinaTom virtual keynote:

At the end, we had a raffle with goodies from Geoffrey Grosenbach who sent me: 5 Peepcode T-Shirts, 5 Peepcode coupons, then 1 JRuby on Rails book and 1 “Repensando a Web com Rails” (by book). Hope everybody enjoyed!

This was a great event. Finally, names were connected to faces e we witnessed our Rails community growing healthy, with an excelent bunch. Next week I’ll be in another university event at UNESP, Bauru, along with Vinicius to continue spreading the Rails word.

Right after that, I’ll be together again with ImproveIT at the Rio on Rails ! Don’t forget, December, 8th! And in the week after that, I’ll be tagging along with Carlos Eduardo and a bunch of people for an online charity event called Rails for Kids 2007.

Lot’s of things happening folks!