If you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp-style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local nerds. It’s presented by the Confoo conference (taking place in March 2010) and PHUG and will be hosted by Yours Truly and Jean-Luc SansCartier.

Here’s the schedule:

• 6:30 p.m.: Intro to Career Demo Camp
• 7:00 p.m.: Alex Kovalenko – IT Headhunting and Recruiting
• 7:30 p.m.: Joey deVilla; Better Living Through Blogging
• 8:00 p.m.: DemoCamp Introduction
• 8:15 p.m.: DemoCamp Presentations
• 10:00 p.m.: Networking Session

The event is free of charge! All you have to do to attend is sign up at Career Demo Camp’s Registration page.

Microsoft Canada’s providing the space – we booked the Mont-Royal Centre for TechDays Montreal for two days (December 2nd and 3rd) and we weren’t doing anything with the space on the evening of Day 1. We decided to offer the space for some kind of community event, and Confoo and PHUG put together Career Demo Camp. I love doing developer community events and was only too happy to co-host.

The DemoCamp portion of the evening needs people to do DemoCamp-style demos: 5 minutes of “Show and Tell” where you show your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not to do a sales pitch. Think you’ve got a demo in you? Contact Jean-Luc Sans Cartier or Yann Larrivee and let them know you want to demo at Career Demo Camp!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The next stop on the TechDays Canada cross-country conference tour is Calgary! We’ll be there for most of the week, and the conference itself takes place on Tuesday, November 17th and Wednesday, November 18th at the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre.

After that, we’ve got the following dates in December:

• Montreal (Sold out!) – December 2nd and 3rd
• Ottawa – December 9th and 10th
• Winnipeg – December 15th and 16th

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My friend (and former officemate!) Cory Doctorow is launching his latest novel, Makers, tonight at the Toronto Public Library at 239 College Street (east of Spadina). The fun happens in the Merrill Collection room, located on the third floor at 7 p.m. tonight. Cory will be doing a reading, taking questions and signing books. There will be books for sale at the event courtesy of our local science fiction and fantasy bookstore, Bakka Phoenix.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.

Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.

Then things get really interesting.

It should be noted that while 3-D printers of the sort in Cory’s novel are still the stuff of science fiction, simpler versions exist today. In fact, at the Hacklab, where I spend many a working day, we’ve got a MakerBot Industries “Cupcake” 3-D printer that can “print” plastic objects.

Here’s what the Cupcake looks like:

A computer connected to the Cupcake controls it. The big loop of plastic to the upper left of the machine is the material from which objects are printed. Here’s a closer look at its internals:

We have a small gallery of objects that were created using the Cupcake:

If you’d like one of your own, the fine folks at Makerbot Industries would be more than happy to sell you a kit.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

WinMoDevCamp Toronto, the free workshop where you can learn about Windows Phone Development, takes place this Wednesday at Microsoft Canada’s offices in Mississauga. Come learn about Windows Phone by participating in a development project, and come meet some of the faces (including me) at the local branch of The Empire! (And yes, we’ll serve snacks and dinner.)

WinMoDevCamp is free of charge and takes place this Wednesday, November 11th, from 1 to 9 p.m. at Microsoft Canada Headquarters (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, just off Mississauga Road north of the 401). To participate in WinMoDevCamp, please register.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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.

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.

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:

• at Meta Stack Overflow
• at Geoffrey Wiseman’s blog, Tech Scene

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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.

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.

I’m going to be “booth-bunnying” today and tomorrow at the Microsoft area of the Explore Design fair, which bills itself as “North America’s first design education fair for youth”. It’s an event where young people can find out about the creative, technical and career possibilities offered by the field of design. There’s a wide range of design disciplines represented at Explore Design, including:

• Video/game design
• Furniture design
• Architectural design
• Industrial design
• Textile design
• Fashion design
• Interior design
• Graphic design

Explore Design takes place today and tomorrow (Wednesday, October 14th and Thursday, October 15th) at the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I’m going to be spending most of my booth-bunnying near the XBoxes, where I’ll be talking about XNA and Xbox Live Indie Games.

Depending on the internet access situation at the Convention Centre and how busy it gets at the booth, I’ll be posting dispatches either from Explore Design during the day or in the evening once I get back home. Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the features at the TechDays cross-country conference is the “Ask the Experts” booth, which is staffed all day by speakers (when they aren’t speaking, naturally) and other local tech experts. They’re there to answer attendee questions about Microsoft tools and technologies, tech trends, the industry in general, the local job scene and so on.

While riffling through the photos I shot over the past couple of weeks, I found these ones I took when I passed the “Ask the Experts” booth at TechDays Toronto and saw the trio of Sean Kearney, Steve Syfuhs and Mitch Garvis. I took one look at them, said “Uh-oh, Trouble Incorporated!”, and snapped these pics. I thought you might enjoy them:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays Toronto Wraps Up

TechDays Toronto took place last Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was a success! Over 1200 people registered to attend, and based on the attendee comments I’ve received, both face-to-face and online, people found their experience there both valuable and enjoyable.

As much as we hope the attendees learn at TechDays, we learn a lot at TechDays too. By holding events where you get to meet us face-to-face and talk to us, we learn about what you need to boost your knowledge, skills and career. If you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about TechDays, please let us know! Leave a note in the comments or feel free to drop me a line.

When Halifax got added to the cities in TechDays Canada’s cross-country conference tour, there was some concern about how many people would register. It’s the first time we’ve held a conference of this scale and scope in the Maritimes, but it turns out that we needn’t have worried: as of Thursday, every available seat for TechDays Halifax’s venue has been sold.

Thanks for being so enthusiastic, Halifax techies, and we look forward to putting on a worthy event!

TechDays Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg Coming Up

The early bird pricing – that’s $299 Canadian – is still available for the other TechDays Canada cities:

• Calgary (November 17-18)
• Montreal (December 2-3)
• Ottawa (December 9-10)
• Winnipeg (December 15-16)

With over forty intermediate- to expert-level sessions covering Windows 7, SharePoint, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, Expression Blend, Windows Server 2008 R2, WCF, Visual Studio, Hyper-V, System Center, Silverlight and more, TechDays Canada is your chance to learn about how to make the most of the Microsoft tools and technologies that are available right now. Register today!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As I write this, we’re getting into the final session of TechDays Toronto, which in my track – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform – features SharePoint guru Reza Alirezaei doing his presentation, Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint.

If you ask me the question “What is SharePoint?”, I’d most likely give you a description that sounds like this:

Here’s a more accurate description of what SharePoint is:

Reza’s session takes a look at another aspect of SharePoint: as a platform on which you can build and deploy custom web services that other clients can call upon.

Once his session’s done, TechDays Toronto will wrap up and then the tear-down process begins.

Next stop: Halifax on November 2nd and 3rd!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Right now (at the time of this writing) at the Toronto edition of the TechDays cross-Canada conference, in the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, is Bruce Johnson – “the speaker so nice, we put him on twice!” – talking to the audience about Building RESTful Applications Using WCF.

REST – as in REpresentational State Transfer – while a big thing for a lot of developers, is still only gaining traction in the Microsoft world, in which a lot of resource access is done with SOAP. Since Microsoft is more about interoperability these days, it’s important to get developers building on the Microsoft platform up to speed with REST and different ways to build RESTful services using Microsoft technologies, whether it’s ASP.NET MVC or Bruce’s area of expertise, WCF, Windows Communications Foundation.

Bruce is playing to a full room, which is a good sign – it’s good to see developers interested in learning new things!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This morning’s sessions in TechDays’ Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform focuses on both the ASP.NET MVC web app framework and recommended object-oriented programming practices, namely the Model-View-Controller pattern with Colin Bowern’s presentation earlier this morning and now (at the time of this writing) the SOLID principles in Bruce Johnson’s session, SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications.

Assless Chaps + Twitter = Business Opportunity

You might remember Bruce from the “Assless Chaps” story. The story can be summarized in the three tweets shown below.

First came Bruce’s response to my article about CodeCamp back in April, in which I forgot to mention the session he was doing:

I tweeted him back and then decided to throw in a jokey reply:

My thinking was: Hey, this is a conference of Microsoft developers! Yes, they’re a bright and talented bunch, and I like them, but they’re an older, corporate, more buttoned-down crowd. They’d never go for renaming a session from “Data Binding” to “Data Bondage”.

But Bruce and the Toronto Code Camp organizers surprised me – he changed the name of his session very quickly:

And since he responded to my challenge, I had to fulfill my end of the bargain:

The “Assless Chaps” story doesn’t end there. Yesterday, while we were hanging out by the Windows 7 lounge and the “Assless Chaps” story came up. Bruce told me that our conversation on Twitter about the assless chaps actually landed his company, ObjectSharp, some business. A local developer got curious as to what the “assless chaps” business was all about in Bruce’s and my conversation on Twitter and the ensuing conversation got them talking about ObjectSharp’s services, which in turn became a contract.

The moral of the story: there’s actual business value in Twitter and assless chaps. I may have to go buy a pair (I rented the ones pictured above).

There’s a tamer version of this story in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s Day 2 of TechDays Toronto! and after a hearty breakfast, we’re kicking off the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track – my track, and thus to my mind the best one – with Colin Bowen doing his presentation, Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which takes a look at the new web development framework, ASP.NET MVC. If you’ve done development with Rails, Django, CakePHP or Catalyst, you should find ASP.NET MVC familiar.

If you’d like to learn more about ASP.NET MVC programming, the best place to get started is chapter one of the “Gang of Foreheads” book, a.k.a. Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, which I covered in the article The Best “Chapter One” I’ve Ever Read. This particular chapter walks you  through the construction of an entire site using ASP>NET MVC – NerdDinner.com – from start to finish.

You can get a free copy of chapter one of the Gang of Foreheads book [14 MB PDF] – er, I mean Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 – which is more than enough book to get you started.

Want the source code for NerdDinner.com? Not a problem – it’s an open source project on Codeplex released under the MS-PL license (and yeah, it’s Open Source Initiative-approved!).

Want to learn more about building applications using ASP.NET MVC? Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.

The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework, and Anthony added it to his presentation.

The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:

• Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
• Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
• Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
• Explorer Browser Control
• Shell property system
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
• Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs — (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
• Sensor Platform APIs
• Extended Linguistic Services APIs
• Power Management APIs
• Application Restart and Recovery APIs
• Network List Manager APIs
• Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
• Shell Search API support
• Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
• Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
• Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs

Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s because we have the best obscure pop culture references, as seen in Rob Burke’s presentation on Developing Composite Applications with Silverlight and WPF:

(That’s a photo of my manager John Oxley and co-worker Damir Bersinic, used to illustrate heavyweight layer communication in Prism. If you don’t get the pop culture reference, this article on my Accordion Guy blog will help you.)

Here’s Rob Burke, striking his GQ magazine pose, just before his presentation:

And here’s Rob in action:

And here’s Rob answering a lot of additional questions at the end of his session:

Want to know more about building composite applications using Silverlight and WPF? Check out the Composite WPF site on Codeplex and as well as Glenn Bock’s article on building composite applications with WPF.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Most of you will be heading to FailCamp via public transit, and many have asked how to get to FailCamp’s venue, the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, from Union Station – here’s how!

First, go up to the main level of Union Station, which looks like this:

On the west end of the station – the side with the Harvey’s – you should see a sign marked “Skywalk”. Go down that hall!

Keep going…

There’ll be a slight twist to the left, but keep following the hallway! You’ll get to a tunnel like this:

Keep going! At the top of the steps at the end of the tunnel, it’ll turn left and you’ll see this:

That’s the entrance to the actual Skywalk, which looks like this. Follow the signs to the door on the left that says “Convention Centre”…

…then follow the signs that say “South Building”…

…and follow the arrows that lead you to the TechDays conference. FailCamp is in room 716, which is on the 700 level of the South Building. Note that the 700 level is below the 600 level, not above it.

See you at FailCamp!