by Joey deVilla on November 4, 2009
This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!
(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)
There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Coffee and Code,
Halifax
by Joey deVilla on October 30, 2009
TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities, starting in Halifax!
I, along with the rest of the TechDays team will be in Halifax and places nearby starting this weekend and for most of next week:
- We’ll be around on the weekend doing setup and rehearsals for the TechDays conference
- The TechDays conference itself will take place on Monday, November 2nd and Tuesday, November 3rd at the World Trade Convention Centre Halifax.
- On Wednesday, November 4th, I’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code event at the Just Us Cafe (1678 Barrington Street) from 2 to 6 p.m.. That means I’ll be working from that cafe – drop by and chat!
And don’t forget that TechDays Canada is also visiting these cities:
- Calgary: November 17th and 18th
- Montreal: December 2nd and 3rd
- Ottawa: December 9th and 10th
- Winnipeg: December 15th and 16th
Tickets are a still available for these cities.
In case you’ve forgotten the TechDays formula, here it is again:

See you in Halifax!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Coffee and Code,
Halifax,
TechDays
by Joey deVilla on October 26, 2009

On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number of volunteers (in fact, there were too many; the conference typically “overbooks volunteers in anticipation of a drop-off, but every volunteer who signed up showed up!).
It was a fun conference, and I was honoured to be selected as a speaker for the event. It was good meeting Joel again (it’s been a number of years now) and speaking on the same stage with some good local friends (Reg Braithwaite and Greg Wilson) as well as some new ones (Jordan Baker and Ralph Whitbeck).
At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

For the benefit of all, I’ve posted the slides from all the presentations below:
ASP.NET MVC: Barry Gervin and Joey deVilla
Our presentation followed Joel’s opening keynote and was centred around a live-coding demo in which we built a quick-and-dirty ASP.NET MVC-based clone of RunPee.com, a site that lets you know at what times you can take a bathroom break from a movie in a theatre and not miss any crucial plot points.
I’ll admit it right now: this presentation could’ve been much better, and as the one who gets paid to promote Microsoft’s tools and technologies, I assume full responsibility for this one (Barry’s a great presenter who volunteered and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to do this). Watch this space for a "lessons learned" post, as well as some ASP.NET MVC posts that take the material from the presentation and explain it a little better.
Python: Jordan Baker
Jordan’s presentation was an introduction to Python by way of a walk-through of Peter Norvig’s How to Write a Spelling Corrector exercise, which comprises 21 lines of Python 2.5 but in those few lines, covers a lot of the Python programming language.
jQuery: Ralph Whitbeck
Ralph’s presentation was a walk-through of jQuery’s features, and how it will make your web applications sing. I need to get more familiar with jQuery (I’m far more acquainted with Prototype and Scriptaculous), so Ralph’s was the technology demo that was the most useful to me.
Academic: Greg Wilson
By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of "let’s change the world" vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions. This presentation got a lot of applause, and deservedly so — there’s nothing like a great topic delivered by a great presenter.
Ruby: Reg Braithwaite
Reg Braithwaite’s talk — made up of slides consisting entirely of Ruby code (or Ruby pseudocode, where appropriate) — wasn’t so much about Ruby as it was about metaprogramming, with Ruby examples. Following the quip about a man (one account says it was Winston Churchill) who is chastised by a woman for being drunk who then retorts "Yes, but in the morning, I will be sober and you will still be ugly", he encouraged the audience to "turn ugly problems into drunk ones".
Other Writeups
There are a couple of review of the conference:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
conferences,
DevDays,
slides,
Stack Overflow
by Joey deVilla on October 22, 2009
I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:
Photo by Barnaby Jeans.
Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.
Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.
I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Tagged as:
Microsoft,
Photo,
Steve Ballmer
by Joey deVilla on October 19, 2009
On Wednesday, November 11th, we’ll be hosting the Toronto-area WinMoDevCamp at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters! It’ll be the fifth in a series of worldwide “Camp” style workshops focusing on developing applications for Windows Mobile (including the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5).
WinMoDevCamp – short for Windows Mobile Developer Camp – was inspired by events like BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse and the original iPhoneDevCamp. It’s a free-of-charge get-together where mobile developers, web developers, .NET developers, UI designers, testers, device manufacturers and Canadian mobile carriers gather, team up and work in ad-hoc mobile development projects for the day.
You’ll get to:
- Create new applications for the Windows Mobile Platform
- Meet and work side-by-side with people from the Microsoft Mobile Developer Experience team
- Migrate existing mobile apps from the iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre to the Windows Mobile platform
- Create applications to support Windows Enterprise Applications
- Meet with representatives from Canadian mobile phone companies, including Bell, Rogers, Telus and WIND
- Test and optimize applications for Windows Mobile 6.5
The event is free-as-in-beer (in other words, it costs nothing to attend), and you’ll be able to sign up to attend soon – watch this space!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Camps,
free as in beer,
mobile,
Windows Mobile,
WinMoDevCamp,
workshops