Global Nerdy

A couple of weekends ago, I had the good fortune to being able to stop in and help out at not one but two “hackathons” – programming marathons – where the people taking part were writing software for the common good and which made use of open data. They took place on the same day and were still well-attended, a good sign that the geeks here in Toronto aren’t like the self-absorbed self-interested ones chronicled in Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish. These people gave their time and talent for a good cause and asked for nothing but to be fed – I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Open Data Hackathon

On Saturday, December 4th, Microsoft’s open source initiative guy, Nik Garkusha, organized a hackathon at Microsoft Canada headquarters in Mississauga where developers would work on a project that would be based on Halton Region open data and would serve the public interest.

The event coincided with International Open Data Hackathon Day, an event shared among 63 cities in 25 countries whose goals were:

1. To help raise the awareness of open data and why it matters
2. To help foster communities of techies, active citizens and others who care about open data
3. To have fun using the technology we love to create open data solutions that contribute to the public good

And of course, being a Microsoft event, we also set up an Xbox with Kinect so that participants could take a break, get away from the computer and move about“

Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK, pronounced “rock”) also took place on Saturday, December 4th and stretched to the following day. Think of it as the intersection of developers and other assorted geeks meeting up with tech-savvy do-gooders to develop software to help people and make the world a better place. It’s a joint initiative among Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, and the actual legwork is done by volunteers who gather to hold hackathons in cities all over the world.

Here’s the story of how RHoK got started, according to Wikipedia:

Random Hacks of Kindness grew out of an industry panel discussion at the first Crisis Camp Bar Camp in Washington DC in June 2009. Panel attendees included Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft, Phil Dixon of Google and Jeremy Johnstone of Yahoo!. They agreed to use their developer communities to create solutions that will have an impact on disaster response, risk reduction and recovery. The idea was for a "hackathon" with developers producing open source solutions. The World Bank’s Disaster Risk Reduction Unit and NASA’s Open Government team joined the partnership and these "founding partners" (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, NASA and the World Bank) decided on the name "Random Hacks of Kindness" for their first event.

I attended as both a sponsor’s representative and judge for submissions at the Toronto RHoK, which was organized with the help of my former co-worker at Tucows, Heather Leson, who’s one of our local Crisis Commons representatives. Joining me on the panel of judges were:

• Stephanie Ashton-Smith from Plan Canada
• Ben Lucier from Tucows
• Will Pate from the World Bank
• Adam Thody from Architech Solutions

This was the first RHoK to take place in Canada and had 52 participants collaboration on eight projects. Our group gathered in rooms on the 4th floor of University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Worldwide, about 1,000 participants in 20 cities joined in the RHoK project and worked on some kind of software for a good cause, and many of these events were linked together via streaming video.

The RHoK participants had the weekend to come up with a software solution to a “good cause” problem, implement it and present it at the end of the final day. Many of the participants haven’t had much practice presenting, so while some people kept working on their applications, Will Pate gave a quick tutorial on making technical presentations, which I captured in the photo below:

At the end of the second day, we all gathered in the main room to watch the teams present their applications. The session opened with Heather Leson providing the introductions:

…and the Melanie Gorka adding some details…

…and with Melanie done, it was time to start the presentations!

Person Finder

This was the first presentation. At an RHoK event last year, a team had put together a web application that made it simple for people to submit requests for information about missing friends and relatives in a disaster. This team decided to extend its capability by creating a RESTful API for the application, enabling people to develop specialized client applications that would access the original as a service.

Payout to Mobile

In developing countries, farmers often buy cheaper, lower quality seed out a fear of being having their crops wiped out by drought or flood and not having any cash reserves to survive afterwards. If they had access to some kind of insurance for their crops, they could afford to buy better seed and potentially triple their yields.

Payout to Mobile is the technical portion of a solution that allows these farmers to get their crops insured. When a farmer goes to buy seed or fertilizer, the vendor uses SMS to get a set of insurance quotes – “kind of like Progessive” – for policies that get sold along with the farmer’s purchase. If a weather event specified in the policy occurs, the farmer gets a payout.

Population Centres

This was a project that took online population data and turned it into visualizations that would allow disaster planners to better determine appropriate assistance based on population and population densities.

We Are Helping

In a disaster, it’s easy for aid groups to coordinate outside agencies. However, local people who also have the skills to lend a hand (and oftentimes, a better “feel” for the local area and culture) can be left out. This is a classic “access to information” problem, and this application lets local responders self-organize. The people behind this project discussed the possibility of tying this in with other projects being developed at RHoK hackathons, including Tweak the Tweet and I’m Not OK.

Is This Bike Stolen?

Here’s something that would appeal to anyone who’s been a victim of Igor Kenk, Toronto’s notorious bike superthief. This is a web application that lets you check the serial number of a bike you’re about to buy against the Toronto Police’s database of serial numbers of stolen items.

Where Not to Rent

This web application might come in handy if you’re looking for a place to rent in Toronto. It makes use of a Toronto Open Data store that track reports of rental property deficiencies, including the hot topic of the moment: bedbugs! By the time you read this, the app should be live at http://wherenottorent.refactory.ca/.

Tweak the Tweet

This application combs through Twitter in search of actionable data for emergency reponse teams, making use of location tags.

City Budgets

The Toronto city budget data is buried within a monolithic 600-page PDF report and some Toronto Open Data files. This application, inspired by what the British paper The Guardian has been doing with open data, takes all that information and turns them into more comprehensible interactive charts and graphs.

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We judges retired to our secret chambers and after some deliberation, declared these projects the winners:

• Third place: Payout to Mobile
• Second place: Tweak the Tweet
• First place: Is This Bike Stolen?

We also declared participant Jon Pipitone as the “MVP” of the event for being a leader, participating in more than one project and mentoring people.

If you wanted to find out more about the Toronto RHoK event, check out these other articles:

• Heather Leson’s RHoK Toronto and Global Wrap-Up
• Global News’ report, Hacking for Humanity
• Mark Kuznicki’s Hacking for Good
• Melanie Gorka’s RHoKing Out in Toronto

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What is AzureFest?

• AzureFest is an event where you’ll see how quick and easy it is to develop and deploy cloud applications with Windows Azure.
• We’ll show you how to set up an Azure account and then take a traditional ASP.NET application and turn it into an Azure application.
• AzureFest is run by ObjectSharp with the assistance of Microsoft Canada. ObjectSharp is a Toronto-based company that specializes in building software for customers and training developers (and they‘ve helped us a great deal with TechDays!). ObjectSharp is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. They’re also very personable, very funny people.
• AzureFest happens this Saturday, December 11th at Microsoft Canada’s Mississauga office (1950 Meadowvale, off Mississauga Road, just north of Highway 401), and there are two sessions:
  • Morning session: 9:00 a.m. to noon
  • Afternoon session: 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
• Azurefest is FREE! Just visit the AzureFest page for registration details.

What Will You Learn?

• How to set up your Azure account
• How to take a traditional ASP.NET application that would typically live in an on-premises server or at a hosting service and deploy it to the Azure cloud
• How to publish applications to the Azure Developer Portal
• How to set up the Azure SDK and Azure Tools for Visual Studio on your laptop
• How to use AppFabric

What Will We Provide?

• The tools you’ll need to install on your machine to prepare yourself for Azure
• Hands-on instruction and expert assistance
• Post-event technical resources so you can continue learning afterwards and take your skills to the next level
• Power and network access
• Snacks and refreshments

What Do You Need to Bring?

• Your own laptop, which should be capable of running Microsoft’s developer tools (A machine with a decent processor and RAM running at least Windows Vista, or preferably, Windows 7)
• A credit card – the event is free, but activating an Azure account requires a credit card, even if you’re setting up for a trial period.
• Some experience building ASP.NET applications and services

What’s This About a Bonus for My User Group?

• For each Azure account activation by a member of a Microsoft/.NET user group at AzureFest, we’ll donate $25.00 for that person’s user group. So invite all your friends from your user group to come to AzureFest and give your user group some extra funding! (When you register for AzureFest, the registration page will ask them which user group they belong to, so we’ll know how much to give each user group.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For most people, TechDays ends after the last speaker has finished his or her presentation, the requisite goodbyes have been said, the last of the cookies has been taken from the snack tables and everyone has shuffled out the door and back into reality.

For us, TechDays stretches on a little longer. Even though we’ve got support staff like Starshot, our event planning team, and AVW-TELAV, our A/V specialists, we do a fair bit of the legwork ourselves, which includes setting up and tearing down the demo machines in all the session rooms, the internet access stations spread throughout the conference and the “Ask the Experts” and computers and Xbox in the Collaboration Lounge.

For Starshot’s perspective of TechDays, see their article Microsoft TechDays 2010: Calm at the Centre of a Perfect Storm.

Pictured below are Developer Evangelist John Bristowe playing the part of “Teamster Foreman”, supervising new Developer Evangelist Frederic Harper and IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus as they put the computers into their shipping cases bound for the next destination, TechDays Calgary.

Once the machines have been put away, it’s time for the Day 2 post-mortem meeting, which is attended by both the TechDays organizers (which includes Yours Truly) and the Starshot folks.

Here are Fred checking his mail before the meeting starts, as Jenna Prada from Starshot chats up the rest of us:

John captures the moment on his phone as Damir Bersinic and Fred do some last-minute social networking:

And so begins the post-mortem! Here are Damir, Rick and Fred, each listing what worked, what didn’t and what could be improved. We do this at the end of each TechDays in each city, because if you’re not getting the most out of TechDays, we’re not getting the most out of TechDays either.

Here’s Jenna throwing in her two cents:

With TechDays Winnipeg wrapped up, we’ve got one city left: Calgary, which we’re visiting next week. TechDays Calgary takes place on Tuesday, December 14th and Wednesday December 15th at the Roundup Centre in Stampede Park. See you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As one of the people behind TechDays, I have become a machine that turns caffeine into conferences:

Here are Dana Epp and John Bristowe chilling out in the speaker lounge:

At TechDays, we have a little post-mortem meeting at the end of each day to assess how the day went, what needs fixing, and to make notes for the next city.

TechDays Winnipeg wouldn’t been possible without our friends at Imaginet. Not only did they provide a large number of speakers (many of whom did more than one presentation), they also held an after party on the evening of Day 1. Here’s John Bristowe tearing up the dance floor playing Dance Craze – he’s making the “Superman” move to the tune Soulja Boy:

Here’s David Wesst talking about Visual Studio 2010 and web deployment:

Here’s the scene in the “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track, where Aaron Kowall talked about Entity Framework 4:

Day 2 brought the second part of Mark Arteaga’s presentation on Windows Phone 7 development:

At the same time, Dave Harris presented on build automation with Visual Studio 2010:

The halls were busy with activity between sessions:

Here’s Damir Bersinic striking a rather Buddha-esque pose onstage at lunch:

Rick Claus did his usual excellent job MCing at lunch

Here’s D’Arcy Lussier practicing his Intimidating Luchador Look after his session on webforms and ASP.NET 4:

Francis Beaudet talked about making the best use of Expression Blend:

Aaron Kowall tossed T-shirts to people who correctly answered his pop quiz questions on web load testing:

Sitting at the back of the “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” room, these guys looked as if they were up to no good:

…but Jason The ignored them as he talked about SharePoint development for ASP.NET guys:

Final session of the final day! John Bristowe took the reins in the “Optimizing the Development Process” track with Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks:

While Evan Hutnick schooled the audience on ASP.NET MVC:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.