If you’ve been following this blog for the past little while, you already know my destination: Ottawa, where I’ll be living for the summer to immerse myself in my new job as tech evangelist for the startup Shopify. The trip takes about five hours and is pretty simple — east on Highway 401, the north on Highway 416.
I like listening to audiobooks on long car trips. My selection for this one was Tina Fey’s Bossypants, read by Ms. Fey herself. It’s quite funny and entertaining, and it made the long, rain-soaked drive seem like a quick run around the block:
Yup, that’s a Zune HD — I’m a former Microsoftie, after all — and that’s what I used to play Bossypants. It’s my highest-capacity portable MP3 device, so it’s the one I use for long trips. It’s the best media player you’ll never buy.
I arrived in Ottawa in the late afternoon. I don’t really know my way around the city other than bits of downtown and the Market. I’m going to be rather reliant on the Garmin when driving and on my phone while cycling or walking about. The only other time I make such heavy use of a GPS is when I’m playing Grand Theft Auto IV:
That’s the Garmin, which is suction-cupped to the windshield, and below it is the satellite radio. I switched to it when I pulled into town, just in time to catch a Beastie Boys special on Alt Nation — the perfect welcome to my new, if temporary, home.
Every Microsoft office has a “touchdown area”, a place filled with cubicles where visiting or mobile workers can work. I avoid these like the plague.
Thanks to all the work I’ve done in cafes or coworking spaces, I prefer to set up in Microsoft’s “kitchen” spaces. The wifi is just as accessible there, but the lighting is natural, the tables are larger. the fridge with all the free Diet Coke is nearby by and it doesn’t feel so boxed in. Unlike cafes, you can leave your stuff at the table when you go for a bathroom break.
So, when I hung out in Microsoft’s Ottawa offices on Friday while waiting for my coworker and travelling buddy Damir to finish his meeting, I eschewed the touchdown cubicle and set up shop in the kitchen. These photos show what my “office” looked like, and believe me, it’s a lot nicer than a veal-fattening pen-like cube.
A lot of office workers might balk at the idea of working in a kitchen space, but consider this: people have been working in kitchens for millennia. Its centralized placement in homes and workplaces as well as its layout and design are the product of countless generations doing work that sustains life.
On the other hand, the modern office has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. Its design is based on the concept of employee as interchangeable production unit and the hypothesis that people are naturally lazy and must be coerced into being productive.
Hence in the absence of a workshop-like environment (such as the Hacklab, where I often work), I opt for the kitchen.
The TechDays conferences that we’ve been holding across Canada span two days and have no evening events. This means that the venues are “lying fallow”, with plenty of A/V, presentation and demo equipment doing nothing on the evening of the first day. That seemed like a waste.
“Why not,” we thought, “open up our venues to community events on the evenings of Day 1?”
We were able to do this in four out of the seven TechDays cities this year:
We put together each event with local people in order to make sure that each one had its own “local flavour” and fit the needs of the local audience. For Ottawa, we decided to approach two very different groups: the Ottawa IT Community, which comprises a number of .NET user groups, and Startup Ottawa, who are the Ottawa analogue of DemoCamp Toronto.
The event had two hosts: Glenn Schmelzle, from Startup Ottawa:
and Colin Melia, representing Ottawa IT Community:
The first presentation of the evening was This is My Language by Charles Wiebe and John Hansen, who showed us their programming language, Jetfire, which is built on top of the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime:
Next up were Scott Lake:
…and Craig Fitzpatrick:
…who presented Swix, their social media marketing metrics system. It looks both useful and beautiful (its UI shows the sort of rich interfaces you can build with jQuery), and Christian Beauclair and I both agreed that we could make us of it in our developer evangelism work.
After the Swix presentation came Islam Gomaa, who took us into the land of enterprise IT by talking about implementing ISO 27001 security:
The event went smoothly thanks to Christian, who once again provided invaluable assistance by helping the presenters get their machines hooked up to our A/V setup quickly:
Scott Annan talked about Techdrifters, a system for road warriors, cafe coders and people who work in coworking spaces to find an interact with each other. I must admit that it’s a topic close to my heart:
Jean-Rene Roy did the final presentation, a look at Microsoft’s Sync Framework – nope, not the car audio system, but the file synchronization system that bears the same name:
With the presentations wrapped up, we made our way to the Clock Tower brew pub on Clarence Street, where we enjoyed good conversation and a few drinks, including a round bought on my corporate card.
I’d like to thank Colin Melia, Scott Lake and Glenn Schmelzle for providing all the local help in getting Demo Night in Canada together, the presenters and the attendees who made it out to the event, in spite of all the snow. Let’s do this again soon!
No matter how much planning you put into a conference, there will always be things that you just have to roll with. For starters, when you’ve got an event in December in Canada, there’s always a chance that the first major snowstorm of the year will happen on the very same day.
Here’s a look at Coventry Road, on which the Conference Centre is located. Even at 7:00 a.m., it’s already pretty busy, thanks to the combination of snow and “In too early, out too early” working style of government towns. The building in the background is the RCMP headquarters:
In addition to the snowstorm, there was another little problem that fell outside of our contingency planning. I’ll let the video below explain:
Someone in the crew of workers in the garage accidentally knocked out a sprinkler valve, setting off the fire alarms. The staff did the right thing by leading an orderly evacuation of the centre…and into the snowstorm. Luckily, we found out that there was no fire very quickly and the evacuees didn’t have to stand outside for longer than a couple of minutes.
With the annoyances out of the way, it was time for Day 1 to start in earnest.
Day 1
The first speaker in the track for which I am lead, Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, was Colin Melia, who did the What’s New in Silverlight 3 session:
He spoke to a packed room and an attentive crowd:
With the first sessions safely under way, Damir and I made a quick run to get some cables, a replacement keyboard and some much-needed Starbucks. I decided to shoot some video during our run:
Next up was Peter Henry, whose session was Expression Blend for Developers:
The lunch session featured Rick Claus (in the hat, on the right) acting as referee between Pierre Roman (representing IT pros in the Montreal Canadiens jersey) and Christian Beauclair (representing developers in the Ottawa Senators jersey) having a showdown to see who can do the better Windows 7 demos. Christian, as the representative of developers, won handily:
According to the feedback forms, the lunchtime demo showdown was a popular event:
The afternoon sessions featured Daniel Crenna (shown in the photo below) on Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight, followed by Colin Melia talking about Optimizing Your Applications for the Windows 7 User Experience:
The day closed with a set of bonus sessions. Rodney Buike and I did one on IIS/PHP interoperability. Rodney’s been promising revenge on me since I farted during our session in Calgary, nearly messing up his concentration and forcing him to stifle his laughter.
I’m still getting static about that incident. I swear, you “cut the cheese” once on stage, and you’re branded for life…
Day 2
I’m pleased to see that ASP.NET MVC has turned out to be a very popular topic at this conference. The demand for the MVC sessions is such that we’ve been switching to a larger room for them:
The first session, Introducing ASP.NET MVC, was given by Maxime Rouiller, who once again wowed everyone with his snazzy Alienware laptop (which I featured in an earlier blog entry):
Daniel Crenna’s session covered the SOLID principles as applied to ASP.NET MVC:
“Dependency injection”: you’d better get used to that phrase:
Here are Christian and Rick, preparing to do some announcements over lunch:
I really enjoyed Mario Cardinal’s rendition of the Building RESTful Applications with WCF:
My original plan was to just catch the first ten minutes of his presentation, but I got drawn into it. Just another ten minutes, I thought to myself, and in that ten minutes, he and I did a little back-and-forth about open source and Microsoft approaches to protocols, after which I thought Okay, maybe another ten minutes. Christian, with whom I was supposed to catch up and take care of some stuff, ended up phoning me to remind me that I couldn’t stay for all of Mario’s session.
The final session was Francis Beaudet’s, which was on Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good shots from that session.
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.
Here’s one of the larger rooms, which met with Christian Beauclair’s approval:
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”.
Here’s the dining hall, where breakfast and lunch are served. In the far corner, you can see the Windows 7 lounge:
Here are IT Pro Evangelists Rick Claus and Rodney Buike, along with speaker Steve Syfuhs, getting ready to set up the internet access stations:
…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:
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:
Every TechDays attendee gets a “lunchbox” full of swag, literature and promo material. Here’s the stack of lunchboxes behind the registration desk:
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!
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:
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…
Click 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.
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
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:
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:
Microsoft Ottawa’s Kitchen. It has a decent view.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
