Last night’s Demo Ignite Camp was a success. We got a decent-sized crowd, a bunch of great presnetations on all sorts of projects by Vancouver-area techies and hopefully inspired the local nerds to get together and do "show-and-tell" events more often.

Demo Ignite Camp came about thanks to a couple of lucky circumstances. First and foremost, Vancouver is lucky enough to have a guy like Boris Mann, who is a technologist, entrepreneur and David Crow’s West Coast evil twin. He was able to rally the local techies to come out to a gathering on short notice on a week packed full of techie-oriented events (including "Launch Party" this Wednesday, which we’ll be attending).

The other lucky break comes as a result of the TechDays Vancouver conference. TechDays is a two-day conference, and we booked the Vancouver Convention Centre for it. We had no evening events, which meant that the conference halls were going to be empty and unused on the first night of the conference. We decided to make the space available for some kind of free community event; I thought of hosting a DemoCamp-style event and immediately thought of getting Boris’ help.

Last night’s presentations – all which of were quite good — were:

1. Clamato — Hot Smalltalk on JavaScript action by Avi Bryant
2. TransitDB – Carson Lam’s online guide for Vancouver Transit users that won the PHP FTW contest earlier this year
3. RestfulX Framework – Dima Berastau’s framework for bringing Rails-esque goodness and RESTfulness to Adobe Flex and AIR development
4. PhoneGap and Ayogo’s use of it for iPhone Game Development
5. Joyent’s Smart – Joyent’s cloud platform
6. Walruz — Ruby framework for managing complex authorization policies

We didn’t have time to get around to Mobify’s presentation, so I’m going to make up for it by writing an article about them and give them lots of link love (I’ll be emailing you guys soon!).

Once the presentations wrapped up, we took the attendees to the Lions Pub where we pulled out the Microsoft American Express corporate card and bought a round for everyone.

And now, the photos, courtesy of John Bristowe. You can check them out in the slideshow below or view them on Flickr:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Vancouver’s got some great people doing some very interesting tech work, and we’d like to make sure that it gets nurtured with events like Demo Ignite Camp and other community-building gatherings. If there’s anything we can do to help – because a healthy tech ecosystem, regardless of the technology is also good for Microsoft – please let us know! Drop me a line in the comments or email me!

I’d like to thank Boris Mann for helping put this event together, Barnaby Jeans and Damir Bersinic for offering up the space, Angie Lim, Nik Garkusha and Arun Kirupananthan for providing the during- and after-refreshments – but most importantly, the presenters and attendees!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you live in Vancouver or are going to be there on Monday night, don’t forget that Demo Ignite Camp, the show-and-tell event for the bright lights of the Vancouver tech scene, is taking place that night at the Vancouver Convention Centre!

For more details, see my earlier post on Demo Ignite Camp or visit its event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

1. Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
2. Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
3. Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
4. Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
5. The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs,  LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found.  But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada.  Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What Is Demo Ignite Camp?

Think of Demo Ignite Camp as an evening of “show and tell” where the bright lights of Vancouver’s high-tech and startup scene get together to present their projects and ideas. It’ll feature two kinds of presentations:

Demos: By “demo”, we mean a demonstration of 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 give us yet another marketing spiel.

Ignites: An Ignite presentation on a tech-related topic with some constraints to make it interesting: you’re allowed only 20 slides, and they’re set to automatically advance every 15 seconds. It requires you to keep the text on your slides to a minimum and your presentation to be focused. It’s a true test of your presentation-fu.

Demo Ignite Camp will take place at Vancouver Convention Centre on Monday, September 14th at 7:00 p.m., a little bit after the first day of Microsoft’s TechDays Vancouver conference wraps up.

Demo Ignite Camp @ Vancouver Convention Centre

“Very Nice. How Much?”

Admission is free! As in beer, which we’ll be going out for after Demo Ignite Camp.

Want to Present at Demo Ignite Camp?

Have you got a project you’d like to show as a demo or an idea that you’d like to present as an Ignite? Drop me a line or leave a comment on Demo Ignite Camp’s event page!

Who’s Involved?

So far, we’ve got Avi Bryant booked for one of Demo Ignite Camp’s 8 presentation slots. He’ll be doing a demo and we’re incredibly pleased – he works on some really cool projects, and we of the Toronto DemoCamp crew still consider his demo of DabbleDB to be one of the best demos in our 21-event history. We’re looking forward to seeing his presentation, which I suspect will be on Clamato, which is equal parts Smalltalk, JavaScript and the future.

Demo Ignite Camp wouldn’t even exist without the efforts of the Bee Man:

Actually, that’s @bmann, as in Boris Mann, blogger, technologist, entrepreneur and go-to guy for Vancouver’s tech scene:

He’s helping pull this event together in record time and playing the part of co-host, in spite of his very packed schedule.

Microsoft played a part in making Demo Ignite Camp happen: they provided the venue and the AV system free of charge. The Vancouver leg of their conference, TechDays Canada 2009, takes place on Monday, September 14th and Tuesday, September 15th, which means that they had the facility on Monday night, during which nothing was scheduled. The TechDays organizers decided that they’d make the room available for some kind of community event.

I’ll be helping out as well. I’ll be co-hosting, and I was the guy who emailed Boris and said “Hey, dude, if you’ve got the camp, I’ve got the venue.”

Want to Know More?

There are more details on Demo Ignite Camp’s event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.