Category: It Happened to Me

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Setting Up TechDays Ottawa

Ottawa was the sixth of the seven cities in the TechDays cross-Canada tour. We’ve settled into a pretty good groove and the setup process for the conference has become second nature; I’m sure that we can all do it in our sleep now.

The Hampton Inn Conference Centre is a pretty nice venue, with lots of balconies for overhead shots like this one:

01 overhead

Here’s one of the larger rooms, which met with Christian Beauclair’s approval:

02 118A

This is one of the smaller lecture halls, featuring a more classroom-like setting, as seen from the lectern. You can see:

  • The presentation machine, a laptop with a large screen on which the PowerPoint presentations are run. The large screen makes it easy to read any speaker notes.
  • The “confidence monitor”, which shows the speaker what’s being displayed on the big screen. That way, you know what the audience sees without having to break eye contact with them.
  • The countdown timer, which displays the time remaining for the presentation, along with three lights: “Go on”, “Wrap up” and “Enough already”.

03 110

Here’s the dining hall, where breakfast and lunch are served. In the far corner, you can see the Windows 7 lounge:

04 dining hall

Here are IT Pro Evangelists Rick Claus and Rodney Buike, along with speaker Steve Syfuhs, getting ready to set up the internet access stations:

05 rick steve rodney

…and here are the fruits of their labour. It’s our dream to be able to provide wifi access to attendees, but with conference venues typically asking for hundreds of dollars per wifi user per day, it’s prohibitively expensive. We’d rather keep the cost of admission to TechDays low – a mere $299 for early-bird registrants – which is why we decided to provide internet access at the conference this way:

06 internet stations

Here are Christian and Rick setting up the Windows 7 Lounge. In case it was unclear, they’ve taken steps to let you know that they indeed are geeks:

07 geeks

Every TechDays attendee gets a “lunchbox” full of swag, literature and promo material. Here’s the stack of lunchboxes behind the registration desk:

08 lunchboxes

One of the ways we show our appreciation for the TechDays speakers is by taking them out to a nice dinner. In Ottawa, the speaker dinner was at In Fusion Bistro in Glebe, where the food and service were fantastic. I had the squash and maple soup to start, the rack of lamb for dinner and the chocolate-and-berry empanada for dessert – it was one of my favourite meals of the tour. Thanks to Rick for choosing this restaurant!

09 speaker dinner

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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It Happened to Me Work

Ottawa Road Trip Diary, Part 2: The Flying J Truck Stop

When we got to Napanee, it was time to fuel up both the car and ourselves, and we did both at the Flying J Truck Stop. We thought that it would be a nice change from the usual fast food joints: a real-life honest-to-goodness place that catered to truckers, without whom our stores, from the most indie retailer in Kensington Market to the biggest of the “big boxes”, would go unstocked.

Here’s a photo of our booth:

01 flying j table

The folks who the the Flying J know a marketing opportunity when they see one. That’s why the placemat doubles as advertising for their store specials, which naturally are for accoutrements that one would need on the road: jumper cables, Bluetooth headsets, ratchet wrench sets and energy drinks…

02 flying j matClick the photo to see it at full size.

I remember old restaurants having jukeboxes in the booths. If you’re living on the road, being able to get in touch with your loved ones trumps having music, which is why these booths sport phones instead. I haven’t used a pay phone in a very long time, so I was surprised to find out that local calls are now 50 cents.

03 flying j booth phone

Damir went for the chopped steak and mashed potatoes, but I went for the real down-home option: the buffet. I picked out what I thought might be an authentic road meal, based on all those episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives I’ve seen:

  • Shepherd’s pie (featuring cut-up beef, not ground meat)
  • Macaroni and cheese
  • “Oven-baked chicken”
  • Sausage and peppers

04 flying j buffet lunch

They’re not going to win any Michelin stars soon, but it was filling.

After lunch, I decided to check out the store. I spotted the audiobook aisle:

05 flying j audiobooksClick the photo to see it at full size.

The “Mark Dalton: Trucker/Detective” series caught my eye. Should I buy this on the way back? Let me know in the comments!

06 mark dalton trucker detective

There’s no escaping this guy! That smug know-nothing face really needs a solid pimp-slapping:

07 glenn beck

Of L. Ron Hubbard’s books, I’ve read only two: Battlefield Earth (I considered it so-so at age 14) and Dianetics (ridiculous). My guess is that his pulp titles shown below – Spy Killer, The Great Secret and Under the Black Ensign – aren’t anything to write home about:

08 l ron hubbard

Nothing spruces up the cab of an 18-wheeler like a plush white tiger:

09 tiger

And if you’re pressed for space and your truck can’t accommodate the body of a giant cat, you can always opt for the head:

10 lion tigers heads

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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It Happened to Me Work

Ottawa Road Trip Diary, Part 1: Slow Going

Once again, Damir and I are road-tripping to a TechDays conference. This week, the destination city is our nation’s capital, Ottawa. With the wet snow and being boxed in by trucks (see the photo below), the going’s a little slow:

02 boxed in

Here’s a trucker who’s a big fan of just-in-time compilers. Or is it just-in-time manufacturing?

01 go jit

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Microsoft’s Open Source Party in Montreal

Here’s a little hint: if you ever get an invitation to a Microsoft party from High Road Communications – they’re Microsoft Canada’s PR firm – accept it. They’re always in great places, have great tapas and drinks and they always invite interesting people. You’re guaranteed to have fun, and that guarantee is doubled if I’m there.

The W’s “Extreme Wow” Suite

On Thursday, right after the end of Day 2 of TechDays Montreal, my fellow developer evangelist Christian Beauclair and I made our way from Centre Mont-Royal (the TechDays Montreal venue) to the W Hotel. That’s where we were holding a little party to which we invited a number of local open source developers, some of who were at the previous night’s Career Demo Camp Montreal.

w hotel montreal

Montreal’s W hotel is a building that has undergone a radical personality change. It used to be the Banque du Canada building, the home of one of our federal government’s most stuffy, buttoned-down organizations. W hotels tend to be the exact opposite: everything about them suggests that they were designed by people who usually design nightclubs, what with DJ booths in their lobbies, electronica and funk music piped into every nook and cranny, dimly-lit hallways with lighting straight out of Blade Runner and other little touches that make it seem as if you’ve somehow managed to get into one of those secret clubs in New York City’s Meat Packing District. Simply put, it’s a pretty good place to hold a swanky cocktail party,

Christian and I followed the directions to the “Extreme Wow” suite that High Road had booked for the party. Here’s what we saw when we entered the room:

01 empty suite 1

The suite was located on the top floor of the W. It was one large room with a 20 foot-high ceiling and an equally high set of windows revealing a balcony looking out onto Square Victoria and a good chunk of Montreal’s skyline. I had a sense of deja vu and soon realized that the place reminded me a little bit of Tony Prince’s swanky condo in the videogame The Ballad of Gay Tony, minus the mobsters to whom Tony owed money and wanted him dead.

02 empty suite 2

Near the back of the suite was the bathroom, which in the spirit of open source, was itself open concept and had nothing to hide. Rather than being tucked into a separate room, the shower, tub and sinks were poised on a split level four or five steps above the rest of the room, with the shower stall being a glass-and-brick enclosure in the middle of it all, looking like the monolith from 2001. The tub was recessed into the floor beside it and covered with a sheet of plywood for the party, either in order to prevent people from falling into it or to prevent me from attempting to start a party hot tub:

03 shower

(Thankfully, the toilet had its own separate “water closet” room, just off to the side.)

The room had been rearranged to better suite a party than overnight guests. The bed had been removed and replaced with a hybrid couch/chaise lounge:

04 shower and chaise

Just about everything in the room could be commanded via the master remote control, which Christian found. It controlled lights, the TV, sound system and even the curtains and skylight blinds (which could be opened and closed via remote-controlled servos):

05 christian and remote

Here’s a view of Square Victoria from the balcony:

06 view from balcony

Christian also found a table centrepiece that reminded him of an M.C. Escher image that I had used in my slide presentation at Career Demo Camp Montreal:

07a christian

For reference, here’s that M.C. Escher piece:

07b escher

Having checked out the place and taken my first set of photos, I did what I always do in such a setting: I got got a drink from the bar and made myself comfortable.

The Presentations

It wasn’t just cocktails and conversations at the party. We had some presentations as well, starting with Nik Garkusha, part of Microsoft Canada’s Open Source Strategy team. He talked about how Microsoft views open source, as well as the work we’re doing in order to make Microsoft and open source work better together.

I split his presentation into two videos. Here’s the first…

…and here’s the second:

Brendan “Digibomb” Sera-Shriar, developer with Optimal Payments, WordPress evangelist, founder of PHP Toronto and WordCamp Toronto and organizer of WordCamp Montreal, talked about his experience working with The Empire: “They’re actually doing open source!”, his use of Windows and the Windows Platform Installer and how open source and Windows can work together:

Yann Larrivee, developer, founder of PHP Quebec, FooLab and the upcoming ConFoo conference, spoke next. He talked about how he enjoyed Make Web Not War 2009, the importance of “playing well with others” both inside and outside the world of open source and how Microsoft is participating in ConFoo:

Marc Laporte, developer of TikiWiki, and among other things, talked about PHP running under IIS. It’s in French, and if anyone would like to give me a hand translating, I would appreciate it greatly!

The Party

As nice as the photos of the suite above are, the place looks far better when it’s filled with guests:

08 full suite 1

09 full suite 2

10 full suite 3

11 full suite 4

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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This Week: Ottawa!

ottawa

Last week, I was in Montreal, this week I’m in Ottawa. Once again, I’ll be road-tripping with my coworker, Damir Bersinic, IT Pro Evangelist and supreme field commander for the TechDays Canada cross-country conference. Watch this space for reports from both Ottawa and the road!

If you’re on the Toronto-Ottawa route and would like to join us for a coffee, let us know, either via email or in the comments!

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TechDays Montreal, Day 2

Day 2 of Techdays Montreal began with the A/V techs (and yes, me) ooh-ing and ahh-ing at presenter Maxime Rouiller’s Alienware laptop, He showed us the utility for controlling its backlighting colours:

01 alienware

Once set up, the Building for the Microsoft-Based Platorm track’s acting host Laurent Duveau introduced Maxime, who then presented Introducing ASP.NET MVC.

02 maxime and laurent

Maxime will present the same session in Ottawa, so if you’re there, you too can get a look at that Alienware. Wonder what it would take to get Microsoft to assign me one of those babies.

Continuing the morning’s ASP.NET MVC theme, Simon Laroche took to the lectern:

03 simon 1

Simon presented SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which used the refactoring of an ASP.NET MVC application to demonstrate the SOLID principles of object-oriented design in action:

04 simon 2

Next came lunch, once again held on Centre Mont-Royal’s fourth floor:

05 lunch

Here are Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus preparing for the lunchtime presentation:

06 christian and rick

07 christian

And here they are doing that presentation, in which they show off some of the new features in Office 2010. I rather the like the goodies in PowerPoint 2010:

08 christian and rick

In the meantime, some of the attendees hung out in the Windows 7 lounge, trying out the touchscreen machines and playing games – including the indie hit I MAED A GAME WITH Z0MB1ES!!!1 – on the XBox 360:

09 windows 7 lounge

Mario Cardinal led the first session of the afternoon:

10 mario

His presentation was on Building RESTful Applications Using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Mario knows his stuff, and as a seasoned presenter, had no problem crossing the stage and doing part of his delivery far away from the lectern and any speaker’s notes:

11 mario and audience

Mario will also present the same session at TechDays Ottawa.

Some of the staff saw me walking around with Rick’s DSLR camera and asked me to take their picture. I was happy to do so – TechDays doesn’t happen without their help:

12 staff

One nice thing about Centre Mont-Royal is that there’s plenty of “hanging out” space. If you’re not spending at least a little time in these spaces between sessions, getting to know the other techies in your community, you’re not getting all you can out of TechDays:

13 break

14 break 2

The final session in my track had Francis Beaudet speaking:

15 francis 1

He presented Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint:

16 francis 2

Day 2 wrapped up at 4:00 p.m., at which point we quickly dismantled the machines we’d set up on Tuesday and packed them up for shipping to Techdays Ottawa. Some of the team stayed to do the end-of-conference review, which Christian and I had to run to catch the Microsoft open source cocktail party at the W, which I’ll cover in the next blog entry.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Career Demo Camp Montreal

career demo camp montreal

On Wednesday, a mere hour or so after the end of Day 1 of TechDays Montreal, came Career Demo Camp Montreal, a community event that combined presentations on job-hunting and career-building with demos of projects by Montreal-area developers.

What’s With All These “Demo” and “Camp” Events and Techdays?

techdays canada For this year’s edition of TechDays, we decided to try something new. TechDays is a two-day cross-Canada conference taking place in seven cities – Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg – and all the conference events take place during the day. There are no events scheduled for after 5 p.m., which means that on the evening of Day 1, the venues are ours – and unused. Since they’re already set up for presentations and it costs relatively nothing to hire an A/V tech for a few extra hours, we decided to make our venues open to local developer community events. We even lent a hand in helping put the events together.

This year, we opened our space to four such community events:

The Career Portion

People started milling in at around 6:00 p.m.:

02 audience

The evening began with Alex Kovalenko, Director of Operations at the tech recruiting company Kovasys. His presentation was all about what smart job hunters do, how to write a good tech resume, and the elements of a successful tech interview.

01 alex kovalenko

Alex was joined by a couple of his coworkers at Kovasys for the Q&A session, which included the question “What kind of salary can a PHP developer command in Montreal and Toronto? If I recall correctly, their answer what that in Montreal, they’ve seen a range of CDN$55k for starters to CDN $90k for leads. Salaries are 15% higher in Toronto, but with that comes a commensurate increase in the cost of living.

03 kovasys

Next came my presentation, Better Living Through Blogging, in which I talked about how having a blog has improved my life in a number of way, not the least of which was to help land me the last four of my jobs.

04 yann and joey

Blogs, I argued, were probably the most effective way for you to have control of your online identity and therefore to put your best foot forward to potential employers and customers. Among that stats and opinions I cited in the presentation were:

  • 77% of recruiters surveyed by ExecuNet said that they use search engines to check out job candidates.
  • According to CareerBuilder.com, 1 in 4 hiring managers say that they use search engines to research potential employees.
  • SearchEngineWatch.com reports that there may have been up to 50 million proper-name searches in 2006.
  • Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun: “If someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I’d see that as a big negative.”

goku and vegeta

That was followed by a quick presentation by my coworker at Microsoft, Open Source Strategy guy Arun Kirupananthan, who used Dragon Ball Z as a metaphor for Microsoft (as Vegeta) and Open Source (as Goku) and how they can work together and talked about the Make Web Not War conference, which will take place in Montreal in May 2010.

The Demo Portion

The first demo was by Brendan “DigiBomb” Sera-Shriar, who presented WPTouch.

05 brendan 01

“With a single click,” he said, “WPTouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with Ajax-based article loading and effects when viewed from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or Blackberry.”

06 brendan 02

Next up: Patrick Lafontaine, MySQL developer and DBA:

07 christian and patrick

His presentation was on how to back up your MySQL databases effectively and for free-as-in-beer.

(I have to give Christian Beauclair kudos for volunteering to be his mic stand. It’s not easy holding a mic in a single position for ten minutes!)

08 patrick

Then came Sylvain Carle of Praized:

09 sylvain 1

Sylvain talked about the Praized API, which lets you harness their “white label” local search platform fro finding people and services in your local community.

10 sylvain 2

After Sylvain came Marc Laporte demoing TikiWiki, a Full-featured open source multilingual all-in-one wiki with content management and groupware features, written in PHP. It’s our plan to make TikiWiki one of the apps included in Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer:

11 marc

Bruno of DokDok did the next demo. DokDok is a way to share, track and version files of any size, and it’s done using an interface that everyone understands: email.

12 bruno

Then came Marc-André Cournoyer and Gary Haran of Talker. I liked the Ruby pseudocode that they displayed on the big screen:

13 talker

Talker is a group chat application that is particularly good for collaborative work. I may have to give it a try soon.

14 marc-andre and gary 1

Testatoo – I think it’s a pun on “tests à tout”, or “tests for everything” – was the next presentation, which was given by David Avenante.

16 david

Here’s a closer look at Testatoo in action:

17 testatoo

The final demo was Pierre-Luc Beaudoin’s L’Agenda du Libre du Quebec:

18 pierre-luc

L’Agenda du Libre is an online calendar of Free Software events in Quebec and was implemented in Django in under 30 hours:

19 agenda du libre

The Aftermath

stewie griffin

This was the first DemoCamp-style event where the presentations were some presentations were done in English while others were done in French. I felt like a Family Guy character listening to Stewie Griffin during the French presentations: I got the general gist, but missed out on the subtleties. Guess I’m going to have to work on my French!

With the demos done, all that was left to do was to award an XBox 360 Arcade to the presentation that the audience liked most, based on their applause. Marc-Andre and Gary of Talker won, and in a very generous move, decided to donate it to the Salvation Army so that some kids who’d otherwise never get the chance would get a video game console this Christmas. Nicely done, gentlemen!

No DemoCamp-style event is complete without a trip to the pub afterwards, so about 35 of us moseyed down to the 3 Brasseurs on Avenue McGill College and St-Catherine, where Microsoft bought the first round of pitchers.

21 3 brasseurs 2

A few brave souls, Arun and I kept the party going at Benelux where we continued to chat and drink until 2 in the morning, after which I had to scurry back to the hotel in order to get some shut-eye for Day 2 of TechDays Montreal.

I’d like to thank the following people for Career Demo Camp Montreal a success:

  • All the presenters, for putting in the time and giving great presentations. It’s not possible without you!
  • Jean-Luc San Cartier and Yann Larrivee for helping us put it together on the Montreal community end.
  • Christian Beauclair for his invaluable assistance with the A/V setup.
  • Matthew the TelAV A/V guy for his work and for staying late.
  • TechDays head honcho Damir Bersinic for giving me the latitude to use TechDays’ space for community events.
  • Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy team of Nik Garkusha and Arun Kirupananthan for helping to put this thing together on the Microsoft end.

(By the way, if you’ve got an open source project and are wondering what Microsoft can do for you, you’d do well to get in touch with Nik and Arun, shown below!)

20 3 brasseurs 1

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.