At Nourish we embraced the Pull Request - Code Review - Merge workflow from the start. And yeah, reviewing code can be boring. But then we found this article on how to improve the code reviewing experience: How animated gif selfies fixed our team’s morale.

Basically, when a team member submits a pull request for review (a new feature or a bug fix), he records a gif selfie and attaches it. The GitHub selfies extension makes it very easy. But there’s also face to gif if you want to get all film director on this.

The result? More than 500 gifs and a whole lot of fun:

Another project I began working on is departamento.co.

I always been a magazine fan, as you can see by my Magpile profile. But living in a corner of Europe means it’s hard to find indie mags in stands. And buying means paying twice for them, due to shipping costs.

So, with the help of João and Cláudia, we started group ordering our favorite magazines to Coimbra. And now we also send them to anywhere in Portugal.

Interested? We announce our magazines on Facebook and the departamento.co newsletter.

After a year building product and an awesome team at Nourish Care, it’s time for a change.

So, what now?

My thinking is, what can I do that has the most impact around me?

Building a successful startup could have impact in Coimbra, specially with a consumer product. But the odds are against me. And I also believe bootstrapped startups provide a better role model for the community.

So how can we foster the right ambition and collaboration in a sustainable way? And what can Coimbra be great at?

I’m betting on talent. Coimbra has a history of great people on the edge of the latest technologies. But the local software companies don’t value their employees. They underpay and hide them inside their corporate structure.

So I thought of a new model. I want to help build specialty shops. Small teams, with deep experience on a specific technologies, working on interesting international projects.

Provide places where recent graduates can grow and build portfolio. And in a couple of years, earn their FU money, to build bootstrapped businesses.

That’s why I started working on Bloco, a new Android shop.

For now, it’s just me as a freelancer with a blog. But now you know what’s the plan.