Upcoming Geek Events in Accordion City

Lots of things are happening in Accordion City’s high-tech scene over the next month:

DemoCamp 5.0: Tuesday, April 25th

DemoCamp is Toronto’s monthly gathering in which people from the high-tech community demonstrate their projects in front of their peers. You’ve got ten minutes and a “no PowerPoint, just demo” rule to make your presentation, after which anyone in the gathering can ask questions and make comments. This is a popular event — 140 people attended the last one.

This month’s DemoCamp takes place at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology (on the University of Toronto campus) on Tuesday, April 25th from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., followed by a gathering for dinner and drinks at a nearby pub. For more information, visit the wiki.

Toronto Ruby User Group Hackathon: Saturday, May 6th

TRUG — the Toronto Ruby User Group — is doing its part to improve the Ruby library and Tucows is glad to host the hackathon where they’ll be doing it. This hackathon’s goal is to implement the functionality of libarchive and libtar as both a pure-Ruby versions and as Ruby/C bindings to the libarchive and libtar libraries.

The Hackathon will take place on Saturday, May 6th, from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Tucows offices. Ruby local hero Austin Ziegler will provide the pizza. Sign up on the wiki!

Drupal Camp: Friday, May 12th

Drupal Camp’s goals are to:

• Introduce new programmers/developers and consultant to the Drupal platform
• Allow for intensive skill sharing among established developers/consultants
• Give back to the Drupal project with a sprint to fix bugs and improve documentation

For more information, consult the wiki page.

Toronto BarCamp 2.0: Saturday, May 13th and Sunday, May 14th

First, there was the invitation-only Foo Camp started by O’Reilly and Associates. BarCamp was created in response (“foo” and “bar” are often used as example names of programming constructs). The first Toronto BarCamp took place in November 2005, and the next one happens next month.

BarCamp can be described as:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

All attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen.

BarCamp takes place on Saturday May 13th and Sunday, 14th in the Liberty Village area of Toronto. See the wiki for more details.

Mesh Conference: Monday, May 15th and Tuesday, May 16th

From the conference site:

You will hear from thought leaders, connect with peers, and get a better understanding of the impact of new developments online. mesh brings together people who are passionate about the potential of the Web to change how we live, work and play. Meet the next generation of Web ideas, leaders and companies at mesh.

The Mesh Conference — of which Tucows is a “supporting sponsor” — takes place on Monday, May 15th and Tuesday, May 16th at the MaRS Centre. For more information, visit their site.