I’m in Winnipeg all week to help run Microsoft Canada’s TechDays conference (the seventh in a series of eight, with the final conference taking place next week in Calgary) and to host a Coffee and Code. To see more of what I’ve been up to, check out the most recent entries on my tech blog, Global Nerdy.
There’s an ad running in today’s Craigslist Toronto that reads:
8×16 liter buckets of used wrestling jello. (western back alley of queen west/bathurs)
Had jello wrestling last night, don’t know what to do with all the jello the ladies wrestled in. Anyone want it? Its sitting behind the Bovine, you have until I figure out how to properly dispose of it to come and get it.
By “Bovine”, the author of the ad is referring to my old haunt, the charming rock and roll dive bar known as the Bovine Sex Club (which, oddly enough, has its own Wikipedia entry).
I’m not sure what you can do with jello that’s been used for wrestling, but in case that’s your sort of kink, it’s in the alley behind the location marked by the pushpin in the map below.
I’m not sure how well they’d work in actual use, but given the number of people who eat lunch at their desks in offices, these caps for ballpoint pens seem like a pretty clever idea.
With Accordion City’s rapid transit being quite prone to delay and the distance from my home in High Park to downtown being just over 7 km (about 4.5 miles), biking downtown is often just as quick as taking the subway. Biking has the added benefit of “free” exercise in addition to getting me from point A to point B, hence my tendency to get to the core via two wheels whenever possible and practical.
College Street is a good east/west thoroughfare for bikes. It’s mostly level, many parts of it have a dedicated bike lane, there’s lots to see and some good places to stop by if you have the time, and during the day, it doesn’t get as congested as some of the east/west streets further south.
I shot the photo above at the corner of College and University. The eastbound bike lane on this part of College at the time I took it – around 8:30 a.m. on a Friday – is usually quite full. I was at the head of a pack of bikes, with these two cyclists ahead of me and another half dozen or so clumped behind me. Most of the cyclists appeared to be students or people who worked in places with casual dress codes, although I saw a couple of guys in suits with their right pant legs strapped (so as not to get caught in the gears) and with executive-type leather laptop bags slung over their shoulders.
The reason I was biking downtown was to attend Greg Wilson’s weekly nerd breakfast. I first met Greg via email when he was doing some editorial work for Dr. Dobb’s Journal (back when it was still available in dead-tree form) and asked me to write a couple of book reviews, then in person through DemoCamp and various activities he organized when he was one of University of Toronto’s best-loved computer science profs.
He’s since left academia and is working on his own, and that’s why he holds these weekly breakfasts. Escaping the Land of Cubicles and working on your own has many perquisites, but one of the big downsides is the isolation. Greg holds a Friday morning breakfast gathering at Fran’s near Yonge and College as a way of staying in touch with his peers, and it’s become a Friday morning ritual for local nerds both student and professional, indie and corporate.
If you’re a techie local to Accordion City and want to catch one of these breakfasts or become a regular, I’m sure Greg wouldn’t mind if you simply dropped by. We’re usually at the back of Fran’s on Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 9:15-ish.
Last night, I helped my friends at Unspace with the inaugural session of Technologic, their new monthly series of gatherings that’s part cocktail party, part mini-conference, part salon (in the sense of bright people getting together informally to share ideas rather than in the hair salon sense).
The event was held at their office, which is located in Toronto’s Queen West, a neighbourhood that mixes boutique-type shops, resto-bar/night club type-places and a number of start-ups and tech consultancies.
Unspace have strong ties to the Toronto developer community and a reputation for putting on some of the best indie developer conferences around, having set the bar rather high with RubyFringe and FutureRuby. Technologic is but one of their big plans for the coming year, and these plans are going to make Toronto’s developer scene even more interesting. Better still, they’ve invited me to help out with these events whenever I’m available. Looks like I’m going to be the Microsoft go-to guy at these events, as well as someone you talk with about development, the industry, or whatever else you like.
There were no pizzas, box lunches or other food typical of developer gatherings. They did charge a cover, but it went to good use – they got a catering service to make use of their kitchen (Unspace’s office could easily be converted into a very sweet downtown condo) and crank out some excellent hors d’oeuvres: chili meatballs, chorizo sausage, egg rolls, mushrooms and goat cheese in pastry and my favourite: puff pastry filled with bacon custard. I will have to atone for my dietary sins in the gym this weekend.
The photos above and below show the Unspace bullpen. Normally it’s packed with desks and bookshelves, but they cleared the room in order to create a makeshift standing-room-only conference space, with a riser at one end of the room functioning as a stage. With the initial drinks and food served, the attendees were herded here so we could start the presentation portion of the evening.
It started off with a quick intro by Unspace partner and master planner of all events social, Meghann Millard:
And with the quick intro out of the way, Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite took to the stage for the first lightning talk.
Reg’s talk was titled Bullshit, and it was about how many of the popular beliefs held by computer programmers may just be that. Sure, we believe that object-oriented programming makes us more productive than structured programming, but can we actually prove it? Or that you can be more productive or less error-prone or some other superlative in programming language X than programming language Y? Or that pair programming produces benefits other than preventing you from constantly checking your email or idly following Digg/Reddit/Hacker News links?
As you can see in the photo below, taken during Reg’s presentation, the topic gave them considerable food for thought:
Next up was Unspace partner Pete Forde, who talked about one of Unspace’s current projects, a web application that lets people who make TV shows and films find music for the soundtracks based on criteria like style and mood.
The application makes great use of HTML5 to create a slick yet usable user interface that would’ve been all but impossible in web pages only a little while back.
I got called into my role as “Guy who can kill time onstage while the big presenter sets up” and a couple of jokes and a performance of the Oompa Loompa Service Pack 2 song later, Rails core team/Merb Guy/jQuery core team guy Yehuda Katz took the stage for the big presentation, titled Explaining What You Do.
This was a non-technical talk for techies and focused on explaining to laypeople – specifically, the creatives and “suits” with who we work or who are our clients – what it is we do and what the technology we work with does. All too often, we techie types take a techno-snobbish, high-priesthood kind of attitude and expect laypeople to learn about our world, all the while refusing to learn about their work. Yehuda’s talk was about the first step in fixing that relationship and explaining our work to laypeople so that we can work with them better. I certainly hope that it’s not the last time he gives this talk – there are a lot of developers who need to hear this message.
With the presentations done, it was back to the cocktail party / salon aspect of the night, with good food and drink, good conversation and great people to share both with. A number of people asked me for a quick Windows Phone 7 demo, a request that I’m always happy to oblige, and I helped point people with questions about various Microsoft tools and technologies (namely ASP.NET MVC and Azure) in the right direction. It’s also good just to hang out with the folks who make Toronto’s tech scene fun, interesting and motivating.
Kudos to Unspace for putting on a great event! When I find out the details of January’s Technologic, along with the other things that Unspace is planning, I’ll let you know – I’d love to see you there!
Check out their site at technologicto.com, and also keep an eye on their Twitter account (@technologicto) as well as their hashtag (#technologicto).