As promised in an earlier article, here are the scans of my handwritten notes from Hacks/Hackers Ottawa:

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

The Ottawa chapter of Geek Girl Dinners took place last night at Vittoria Trattoria in ByWard Market. Although I am not a geek girl, I was present as the representative of Shopify, who sponsored the event with some prizes (the winners of the raffle took home a much-coveted Shopify T-shirt and six months’ worth of free online store) and to get in touch with Ottawa’s women techies and designers. There were about 50 people present, filling the Vittoria Trattoria’s upstairs room.

The Geek Girl Dinners are get-togethers of women in business, tech and design over dinner, where they can get to meet their peers, share ideas and hear presentations delivered by women with some particular expertise on a given topic. They usually have a theme, and last night’s was entrepreneurship. Here’s their description of the theme:

Have you ever thought, “Why work for somebody else when I can work for myself?”

Easier said than done, but anything’s possible! From flowers to clothing, to writing and painting, entrepreneurship opens the doors to anyone with a dream and a passion.

On Wednesday May 11th, please join us for an interactive discussion about the entrepreneurial journey of three Ottawa women who have turned their business dreams into realities.

If you’re a woman in the Ottawa area with geeky tendencies and you’re looking to meet others like you, have a nice meal and see some interesting presentations, you should keep an eye on the Geek Girl Dinners Ottawa site, watch for their hashtag on Twitter (#ggdottawa) and come out to one of their events!

My thanks to the organizers, Kelly Rusk, Veronica Giggey, Melany Gallant and Samantha Hartley for putting on a great event!

My Notes

I took notes and photos during last night’s presentations and present them below. If there are any inaccuracies, they’re mine; I was furiously scribbling them into a Moleskine as they were delivered. Free free to copy them and use them however you wish!

Vivian Cheng, Blend Creations

Vivian’s Bio

Vivian Cheng is an industrial designer and one-half of the creative force behind Blend Creations. She and her husband, Eric Jean-Louis (a graphic designer) combine their divergent design approaches to create a contemporary jewelry line that is clean and modern in aesthetic, yet also blends their respective cultures in East meeting West.

Presentation Notes

• Trained as an industrial designer
• "Didn’t want a ‘real’ job" after graduation
• Started company in September 2005 with her husband, Eric
• It was a bare-bones site, especially by today’s standards, hand-coded with PayPal buttons and a very basic shopping cart
• She sells her jewellery almost exclusively online
• Online store tips:
  • Look at other online stores and learn from them
  • Find out who your competition is
  • Take a look at Etsy and find out whether it’s for you, and why (or why not)
  • Etsy started after Blend Creations, and they decided not to go with it because they didn’t want to be a "stall" in a sea of thousands of stores; they wanted to be their own store
• Their jewellery is a blend of modern and traditional, industrial and organic — steel with mahjong tiles, bamboo or coral
• The jewellery is handmade, by them
• They bootstrapped the business with less that $5000
• The mandate:
  • Eric, then a full-time graphic designer, would continue at his job and pitch in
  • If the business went well, they’d continue on this path
  • If it didn’t, she’s have to get that ‘real’ job
• If 2006, they were contacted by Real Simple magazine to have their jewellery featured on a full page
• Had they tried to take out a full page ad in Real Simple, it would’ve cost about $60K
• Real Simple found out about them via a design blog
• To be featured on the page, they had to offer a special deal on a necklace to Real Simple readers
• Real Simple asked "Can you handle 1,000 orders?"; the only answer was "Yes!"
  • (She was 7 months pregnant at the time)
• The money resulting from the Real Simple deal allowed them to buy better equipment: a CNC router [here's a link one that routs wood] and a laser cutter
  • "We could cut circles now!"
• They continued with magazine ads
  • Good, but during a recession, they’re not as effective
  • Magazine ads have a 4-month lead time
  • Problematic in 2008, during the econopocalypse
  • Generated only a handful of sales, what with the belt-tightening
• During the economic crisis of ’08, the US was hit hard, and 98% of their customers were American
• They had to refocus and hit more local markets
• They couldn’t just do print ads
• Their first foray into social media was Facebook
  • Their first activity on Facebook: a giveaway
  • She tries to say something on Facebook every day
• They have a monthly give-away on their blog
  • Facebook’s rules make it difficult to do a monthly giveaway on their site
• She initially didn’t "get" Twitter (they’re @blendcreations)
  • Discovered that Twitter is all about the interactions
  • She even designed jewellery specifically for their Twitter followers (such as one shaped like an @ sign; jewellery with your Twitter handle on it)
  • Her husband, Eric, doesn’t get the appeal of "The Twitters"
• The thing about any design is that people either love it or hate it
  • The important thing is to get people talking about it, love or hate
  • If you offer a service, make it a service so good that people talk about it
  • If you offer a product, keep innovating with it
• "With social media, you have to do something, even if it’s small"
  • "Blogs are the new magazines"
  • They’re the source of many customers
• Their customer breakdown by region:
  • 60% US
  • 40% Canada and the rest of the world (mostly Canada)
• Why did I go into jewellery?
  • "I’m an industrial designer, we’re trained to make things"
  • Went with jewellery because of higher perceived value
  • That can be a problem in hard times
• She and her husband’s design backgrounds let them "do it all":
  • Product design
  • Product photos
  • Ads
  • Site design

Hana Abaza, Wedding Republic

Hana’s Bio

Hana Abaza is the co-founder and CEO of Wedding Republic, an Ottawa based start up allowing couples to set up an online, cash, wedding registry in a way that works for them and their guests. With an incredibly diverse background, Hana has pulled together her broad skill set in order to navigate the start up world. When she’s not in front of her laptop with armed with a large cup of coffee, she can usually be found teaching a kickboxing class. Self described as slightly ‘type a’ with a dose of ADD, although some say it’s just an unrelenting curiosity.

Presentation Notes

• Wedding Republic is a cash gift registry for people getting married
• A couple getting married may want stuff, but sometimes, they’d much rather have the cash
• The idea came to her and her business partner in 2008 while they were watching the Superbowl
  • James (her business partner) has a sister who was getting married
  • Always a stressful situation
  • Online registries for gifts were still few and far between
  • There was no way to register online to give a cash gift
  • The original idea was for a big general wedding registry; it got refined over time
• Questions you need to ask when starting an entrepreneurial project:
  • Who is your target market? Who will use your product?
  • Does your product fulfill a need? Or a want?
  • What are the current alternatives to your product exist? What are the options?
    • What are the pain points for these alternatives and options
• They talked to all sorts of people: couples, couples getting married, wedding guests to get more info
• They hired a developer and were able to take advantage of government programs to help fund the project
• Advice:
  • Surround yourself with the right people; people who are smarter than you are
  • You can’t do it on your own; make sure you have a support system
• Wedding Republic went beta in February 2010
• It was a stressful time
  • Once you’ve opened to the public, you get feedback, opinions, suggestions, complaints about issues
  • But opening to the public gives you a customer validation process
• You have to listen to your customers, but:
  • You have to know what to ignore
  • You have to know what to take to heart
  • Focus on what you’re good at, and don’t get derailed by customer feedback
• They were contacted by Saatchi and Saatchi
  • Someone at Saatchi and Saatchi saw their site
  • They were intrigued by the idea of Wedding Republic and invited them for a meeting in their Toronto office
  • They offered to do a rebrand
  • On big companies working with small companies:
    • They may be bigger than you, but once you’re working together, you’re on par
    • Meet as equals. Don’t bed over backwards just to please them
• There’s a lot of back-and-forth between Saatchi and Saatchi and the developers; she "translates" between the two
• Relaunched in January 2011
• More advice:
  • Keep yourself in check (having a business partner will help)
  • Execute! Many people don’t think they can do something, so they don’t try.
• One challenge with this business: few (if any) repeat customers
  • Considering expanding the concept to baby registries
• How they make money:
  • The couple getting married doesn’t pay anything
  • The guests pay a transaction fee
  • That’s not bad, considering the 7% markup for registries at The Bay
  • People pay for services that save effort: "I’d gladly pay $5 to not leave my couch"
• Possibility of expanding outside North America:
  • Looking at it, but wedding customs vary all over the world
  • For example, in China, cash gifts come in red envelopes. Can’t do that with a cash registry.

Amy Yee, Eventbots

Amy’s Bio

Amy Yee is an entrepreneur and strategy consultant specializing in technology, engagement and collaboration at start-up and high growth companies. Among a wide variety of projects, Amy is currently the CEO at the second company she has co-founded: EventBots – an award-winning technology solution for public engagement. Amy has a Bachelor’s of Electrical Engineering from Carleton University.

• Eventbots are devices that can record video or photo messages at events
• [Showed video of people who recorded messages at the Mesh conference]
• Think of it as being similar to the "Speakers Corner" at CityTV in Toronto
• How they got started:
  • They had friends who were getting married
  • Had heard of some Toronto-based service where they set up devices where people could record messages
  • Her husband was an industrial designer: "I could build that"
  • He built the machine, she turned it into a business
• The current, sleeker version is version 2
• The first version was bulkier and made of wood
• The device has to fit into their car, a Mini Cooper
• They’ve taken the eventbot to events in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal
  • They can only serve areas within a reasonable drive of Ottawa
• The sales process is online
• Even if an eventbot gets only 5 video recordings at an event, there’s still always one that stands out as head and shoulders abover the others
• Their current eventbot was so slick that a Japanese ambassador insisted that the device was from Japan
• People call them "iPodzillas"
• Advice:
  • Don’t fear change; change is a competitive advantage
  • Don’t worry if you have to modify your idea
  • Bet on the team, not the idea
  • Community support is important!

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

Just a reminder: there are a couple of Coffee and Codes this week…

• Ottawa: Join developer/trainer Colin Melia and IT Pro Evangelist/destroyer-of-technology Rick Claus as they set up office on Thursday, October 14 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Bridgehead Coffee House at 109 Bank Street (at Albert). They’ll have some WP7 devices that you can deploy apps to, and you can ask them questions about Windows Phone 7. Colin will field the developer questions while Rick will handle your “How does this fit into the enterprise?” inquiries.
• Toronto: Join yours truly, Joey deVilla, at the Starbucks at King and Yonge, where I’ll be on Thursday, October 14 from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.. I’ll have a WP7 device you can deploy apps to, and if you’re working on an app and think you have have it done by Monday the 18th, you will really want to drop by and talk to me!

Come on down, see a real live Windows Phone up close and personal and deploy your apps to it!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’ve been meaning to take up Windows Phone 7 development but didn’t know where or how to get started and you’re in the Ottawa area, this event is for you! Join Microsoft Developer Advisor Christian Beauclair and DreamDigital’s Colin Melia as they present a hands-on lab this Saturday where they show you how to write apps for our new phone.

At this lab, you’ll:

• Learn how to develop apps for Windows Phone 7 in Silverlight and XNA
• Follow along at a workstation as Christian and Colin walk you through WP7 development
• Get familiar with the software tools: Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone, Expression Blend and the WP7 emulator
• Have an opportunity to try out a real live Windows Phone

This training lab will take place at Algonquin College (1385 Woodroffe Avenue, Ottawa). It’s free of charge, but you must register in order to be able to attend.

This is a hands-on lab, so space is limited – if you want to attend, register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This week, we’re having Coffee and Codes in Ottawa and Toronto! Coffee and Code is where we work out of a cafe so that we’re easy to find. Come and talk to us, ask us questions about Microsoft tools and technologies, the industry, career, whatever! We’re also here to help you deploy apps to Windows Phone 7: we’ll have a real live Windows Phone 7 device that you can deploy apps to.

Wednesday, September 22 in Ottawa

Colin Melia and Rick “Claus” Claus from Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team will be at Bridgehead Cafe (224 Dalhousie Street) from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. to host a Coffee and Code there. Drop in, say hi, have a coffee, ask questions and if you’ve got an app, try deploying it to a real live Windows Phone 7 device!

Thursday, September 23 in Toronto

Join Kate Gregory and me as we host a Coffee and Code at the Starbucks at King and Yonge (4 King Street West) from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., where we’ll merge with the Coffee and iOS group who are coming in at 4:00 p.m.. Want to find out more about WP7 or iOS development? This is the time and place!

See Kate’s blog entry about this Coffee and Code

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Update (Sept. 21 @ 6:15 p.m. EDT): Made some corrections to the schedule.

We’re out there, and we want to help you with your Windows Phone 7 development by giving you a chance to deploy your apps to an advance-release Windows Phone 7 device for testing! We’ll be in the following cities on the following dates:

Wednesday, September 22 in Ottawa (Coffee and Code)

Colin Melia and Rick “Claus” Claus from Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team will be at Bridgehead Cafe (224 Dalhousie Street) from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. to host a Coffee and Code there. Drop in, say hi, have a coffee, ask questions and if you’ve got an app, try deploying it to a real live Windows Phone 7 device!

Thursday, September 23 in Toronto (Coffee and Code)

Join Kate Gregory and me as we host a Coffee and Code at the Starbucks at King and Yonge (4 King Street West) from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., where we’ll merge with the Coffee and iOS group who are coming in at 4:00 p.m.. Want to find out more about WP7 or iOS development? This is the time and place!

See Kate’s blog entry about this Coffee and Code.

Wednesday, September 29 in Montreal (Coffee and Code)

Join “les bons gars”, Christian Beauclair and Guy Barrette, who’ll be holding a Coffee and Code at Le Café de la Cité on 75 Queen. They put on a professional appearance, but we all know qu’ils vont ecrire des «fart apps»! They’ll be doing it in both official languages: Silverlight and XNA!

Thursday, September 30 in Montreal (Deployment Clinic)

Deployment clinics are a little more formal than Coffee and Codes. You can book an exclusive timeslot to deploy and test apps to a Windows Phone 7 device, and there’s one taking place all day at Microsoft’s Montreal office (2000 Avenue McGill College, 4th floor) on the 30th. Email Christian Beauclair to reserve a time slot.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Microsoft Ottawa’s Kitchen. It has a decent view.

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.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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 had Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver in September
• followed by Failcamp Toronto 3 in Toronto, also in September
• and then Career Demo Camp in Montreal a couple of weeks ago
• and just this past week, we had Demo Night in Canada in Ottawa.

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!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Annoyances Beyond Our Control

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 what the parking lot of the Hampton Inn Conference Centre looked like at 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday, Day 1 of TechDays Ottawa:

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.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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:

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!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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:

Click 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!

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

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:

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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:

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re a techie in the Ottawa area and want to meet fellow techies and see what projects they’re working on and what tech they’re using, you’ll want to check out Demo Night in Canada, which takes place this Wednesday night at 7:00 at the Hampton Inn Conference Centre (200 Coventry Road). It’ll be an evening of demos and presentations by Ottawa-area developers, organized by Ottawa IT Community and Startup Ottawa.

It’s also a chance to get your geek party on! After the demos, we’re heading down to the Market to have a little celebration.

Come to Demo Night in Canada! It’s free to attend – all you have to do is register.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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!

Demo Night in Canada

The “DemoCamp”-style event happening in Ottawa next week (which coincides with TechDays Ottawa) has an official name: Demo Night in Canada! It’ll take place in the Hampton Inn Conference Centre (200 Coventry Road, Ottawa ON)  on Wednesday, December 9th at 7:00 p.m..

Demo Night in Canada is a free-as-in-beer event where the bright lights of the Ottawa tech scene can talk about their favourite technologies and tools or about one of their development projects. It’s also an opportunity for techies in the Ottawa area to meet other members of the community, network, make friends and even strike up a collaboration. It’s all up to you!

The presentations at Demo Night in Canada will be:

1. Scott Lake (SWIX and ThinkSM): The first ever public demo of his new social media metrics app.
2. Jean-Rene Roy (Technologies SoftDesign Inc.): Microsoft’s Sync Framework.
3. Scott Annan (Mercury Grove) Techdrifter, a never-before-demo’ed co-worker discovery tool.
4. Charles Wiebe (TrackerRealm) and John Hansen (Jetfire): "This is My Language", which will showcase Dynamic Language Runtime.
5. Ivan Paramonau (Itteco) Itteco Development Platform.
6. Joël Hébert (Opulent ASP Development) The Boo Programming Language.
7. Islam Gommaa: Implementing ISO 27001 .
8. Mark Stephenson and Kareem Sultan: UnRealDecoy Bot Challenge

Registration for Demo Night in Canada is FREE! All you have to do is sign up at the registration page.

Apres-Demo Night Celebration

Geeks! Beer! Whoo!

After Demo Night in Canada wraps up, everyone attending is invited to the Startup Ottawa holiday party, which will happen in a to-be-determined location somewhere in the Byward Market. There’ll be much merriment and perhaps a pint or two tossed back in celebration.

Want to attend Demo Night in Canada? Click here to register – registration is free!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Mark Wednesday, December 9th on your calendars: that’s when Ottawa’s having it’s next DemoCamp! This one’s a special edition, with the space provided by Microsoft (it’s the venue for the Techdays Ottawa conference, which isn’t being used in the evening) and the presentations gathered by both Ottawa IT Community.ca and Startup Ottawa.

This DemoCamp will take place at the Hampton Inn and Conference Centre (100 Coventry Road) on Wednesday, December 9th at 7:00 p.m. and running until around 8:30. Attendance is free-as-in-beer, and there are plans to do some holiday celebrating once the demos have finished.

There will be two kinds of presentations at this DemoCamp:

• Demos: These are straight-up, five-minute demonstrations of the presenters’ current projects. The only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen is your project in action – no slides allowed! The idea is for the audience to see working products explained by the people who helped build them, not pitches by marketers.
• Ignite Presentations: When something won’t work as a demo – say, an explanation about a specific technology or idea – it’s time for an Ignite presentation. These are slide-assisted presentations with a twist: you;re allowed only 20 slides, and they must auto-advance every 15 seconds for a grand total of 5 minutes. It’s a test of your knowledge of the topic and your presentation skills!

I’ll post more details about the presentation once I get all the details – watch this space!

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.

The Ottawa IT Community Awards Night takes place tonight (Tuesday, June 30th), and if you want to attend, you’ve got until 4 p.m. to register!

It’s hosted by these four groups:

• OttawaSQL.net
• Ottawa .NET Community
• Ottawa Windows Server User Group
• Ottawa Code Camp

The event will honour the partners and members of the groups who helped make 2008/2009 another great season for developers, IT pros and DBAs. It’ll have free food, some great competition and draws for prizes,

It takes place at the Yuk Yuk’s in downtown Ottawa (292 Elgin Street, under Hooley’s) and runs from 6:00 p.m. until about 9:00 p.m.. If you’d like to attend, you need to register.

I’m going to be in Ottawa this week doing a presentation on web accessibility, so I’m taking advantage of my being there and declaring a Coffee and Code event for this Thursday, June 18th at the Bridgehead Cafe at 109 Bank Street (at the corner of Bank and Albert). It’ll run from 12:00 noon to 5 p.m..

I will be joined by my fellow Microsoft evangelists from the area, the guys I like to refer to as “Les Bons Gars”:

• Christian Beauclair
• Rick Claus
• Pierre Roman

Come on and down and join us at the Bridgehead for some coffee, food and conversation! We’ll be there to answer questions, hear your comments, show you what we’re working on and even hook you up with a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

This would be a good time for you Ottawa-area Developers and IT Pros to come and give us your suggestions for the upcoming TechDays 2009 cross-Canada conference, a two-day deep-dive conference covering what you can do with Microsoft Tools and Technologies. TechDays will stop at Ottawa on December 9th and 10th, and we’re picking out our topics and speakers. Come by Ottawa Coffee and Code this Thursday and let us know what you’d like to see and if you’d like to present at TechDays 2009!

(Creative Commons photo of the Peace Tower at Night taken by the Poissant Family.)

Creative Commons photo by 416style.

If you’re in the Ottawa area and want to sharpen your .NET development skills and meet other .NET developers, you’ll want to come to the Ottawa Code Camp taking this place this Saturday at Algonquin College. The Code Camp will feature three tracks, spanning twelve sessions in the agenda:

• Advanced C# “Birds of a Feather” Session
• Building Applications Faster by Using Dynamic Access Modifiers
• The Busy Developer’s Guide to .NET 3.5 SP1
• Doing “It” with Team Build 2008
• How to Start Developing for Sharepoint
• How and When to Use Agile Methods in a Dinosaur Organization
• Introduction to IoC with Entity
• The Microsoft Sync Framework
• Mono EC2
• Tools and Techniques to Debug Live .NET Applications
• Top 10 Umbrellas
• Windows Services Down and Dirty

For details about the sessions and when they’ll take place, see Ottawa Code Camp’s Sessions and Agenda pages.

Like the other Code Camps, the Ottawa Code Camp is an event organized by and for the developer community, and registration is free – all you have to do is sign up to attend. Whether you’re an experienced .NET developer or just curious about Microsoft’s developer tools and tech, you should be at Ottawa Code Camp!