Claudio Lassala's Blog

I have mentioned about the importance of technical communities for me. This month, I take a moment to reflect upon something I was doing related to communities 20 years ago: in January of 2001, the first issue of RapoZine was released!

Still living in Brazil at the time and participating in a community that craved for content in Portuguese for Visual FoxPro, I got together with two other members of the community to put out this little magazine. Leandro W. and I would each write half of the content, and Nilton P. would take care of the website where people could subscribe.

We’d print out the pages at whichever company we were working at the time, and mail it out to the subscribers. Simple and easy. Nothing fancy needed. The community was craving for content! For that first issue, we also enjoyed an article contributed by Ellen W., from CoDe Magazine.

In its first year, we had about 120+ subscribers.

It was a ton of work to get monthly content written and put out like that. That’s how I got started on technical writing.

The name RapoZine was a combination of “Raposa” (Fox in Portuguese) and “magazine”.

When the printing and mailing costs got too high, we eventually alternated into a digital version. The articles were created in HTML, compiled into a password-protected EXE file, and a download link was sent to the subscribers. I need to dig up some old backup files… I may still find some of those issues here.

With my plans to move to the US in 2002, I didn’t have time to keep the magazine running. Fortunately, the main worldwide FoxPro community at the time, the Universal Thread, which also had their own electronic magazine, UTMag, approached me to join forces, and we merged UTMag/RapoZine for the community. The magazine became free for all, and published in three languags: English, Portuguese, and Spanish! The Universal Thread had a great system to allow translators to collaborate and get the content out. I continued as a co-editor and coordinator for the translation team. About a year later, the Univeral Thread acquired RapoZine, and I stepped away to pursue other goals.

When I was reading Richard Branson’s autobiography last year, and learning about how he started his professional life with Student Magazine, it got me thinking back to RapoZine.