This past weekend was the first Puerto Rico Startup Weekend. You may have caught my live tweets from the event. I had never been to one of those events before and it was great to meet other forward thinkers from the area. I was actually impressed by the number of awesome programmers that turned out for the event. 4-5 ideas were generated from the event and I actually joined one of the teams.
The idea of Startup Weekend is to try and launch a company during the weekend. While I don't think any company decided to incorporate, the team I joined already has a website set up to help us gather some data. In fact, now that you are reading this we are looking for fluent English and/or Spanish speakers to help us rate some words. I would really appreciate it if you could spend some time rating some words once you are finished here. I can't tell you much yet about the purpose of it, but you'll know soon (and no, it's nothing that competes against IBM 
).
One of my biggest challenges was getting up to speed with the code. All the developers were PHP/MySQL gurus. That's an area that I'm just learning. Being a huge Eclipse fan, I installed a plugin and set up my PHP development environment on Eclipse on the Mac (BTW, 75-80% of the computers at the event were Macs AND 50% of the PCs crashed at the event, while only 15% of the Macs crashed).
I also set up a MySQL development environment on my Mac following these instructions. The networking that I got to do at the event was great too. It's been a while since I've done some face-to-face "social networking". Oh, and I also got to talk about Lotus Connections and developing rich client applications on the Eclipse/Expeditor framework and get some people excited about that.
In my opinion, the event was great given that it was the first one here. Looking forward to next year's (and stay tuned here to learn more about what we are coding on our free time). More pictures from the event are here.