Since I’m in town for TechDays Winnipeg, I thought I’d stay an extra day and host a Coffee and Code there. I’ll be at the Second Cup at 100 Osborne Street from 11:00 a.m. until at least 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 9th, the day after TechDays. Come drop by, talk about Windows Phone 7 or any other topic that comes to mind!
Creative Commons photo (coffee cup) by Ballistik Coffee Boy.
Most of the DPE team (including boss-man John Oxley) are in Winnipeg this week to run TechDays. In between my responsibilities as the guy in charge of the developer sessions, I’ve been running around snapping photos and thought I’d share some with you. Here are my pics of the presenters in both developer tracks, "Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” and “Optimizing the Development Process”, with some extra shots of the hallways between sessions.
We had Mike Diehl presenting Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing:
Meanwhile, in the “Local Flavours” track, D’Arcy Lussier talked about Windows Phone 7 development:
And over in the “Three Screens” room, Kelly Cassidy showed his audience how to Jump into Silverlight and Become Immediately Productive.
For the second session of the day, Mark Arteaga shared his Windows Phone 7 knowledge in the first of a two-part series of sessions on Windows Phone.
And in the back were these troublemakers:
Out in the hallway, Rick Claus and Damir Bersinic chatted with Jason Miller:
Over in the “Optimizing” track, we had Aaron Kowall dropping TFS science on his audience:
Rick and I walked the lunch audience through Windows Phone 7’s features:
After lunch, Miguel Carrasco showed people how to Build Web Sites Fast Using Visual Studio 2010:
Should “Tron Guy” ever retire, I nominate David Wesst to take his place:
Here’s Dylan Smith, talking about Branching and Merging Practices:
Dylan was followed by Bruce Johnson, who covered Getting Your Return on Investment with Microsoft .NET Framework 4
David, who was still wearing the PowerGlove, talking about Windows Azure:
Amir Barylko covered the Top Ten Mistakes in Unit Testing:
And at the same time, my coworker John Bristowe presented Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks:
We Microsoft Canada evangelist types love a good cause, and we can’t think of a better cause than feeding people, especially during the holiday season. That’s why we’ve had food drop-off boxes at all TechDays events, including TechDays Winnipeg, which takes place tomorrow and Wednesday. Bring a non-perishable food item to TechDays, and we’ll collect it and give it to Winnipeg Harvest, the local food bank.
Better still, we’ll sweeten the deal: if you drop food off at our donation box, we’ll give you the much-in-demand “I Have Standards” IE9 t-shirt! Do some good, and get some swag – that’s a pretty nice deal, isn’t it?
Wikimedia Commons photo courtesy of "Wpg Guy". Click to see the original.
This week, the gang and I will be in Winnipeg for TechDays (Tuesday, December 7th and Wednesday December 8th) to bring the knowledge from TechEd North America 2010, MIX10 and PDC and to catch up with our developer, IT Pro and manager friends.
If you’ve been meaning to meet the “field specialists” on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, TechDays Winnipeg is the perfect time and place to do so, because all the evangelists will be there:
We’re also holding a Coffee and Code on Thursday, December 9th at the Second Cup at 100 Osborne Street from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.. Come on down, meet up with me, talk Windows Phone 7 or anything else that comes to mind!
We’re looking forward to seeing you there!
With Accordion City’s rapid transit being quite prone to delay and the distance from my home in High Park to downtown being just over 7 km (about 4.5 miles), biking downtown is often just as quick as taking the subway. Biking has the added benefit of “free” exercise in addition to getting me from point A to point B, hence my tendency to get to the core via two wheels whenever possible and practical.
College Street is a good east/west thoroughfare for bikes. It’s mostly level, many parts of it have a dedicated bike lane, there’s lots to see and some good places to stop by if you have the time, and during the day, it doesn’t get as congested as some of the east/west streets further south.
I shot the photo above at the corner of College and University. The eastbound bike lane on this part of College at the time I took it – around 8:30 a.m. on a Friday – is usually quite full. I was at the head of a pack of bikes, with these two cyclists ahead of me and another half dozen or so clumped behind me. Most of the cyclists appeared to be students or people who worked in places with casual dress codes, although I saw a couple of guys in suits with their right pant legs strapped (so as not to get caught in the gears) and with executive-type leather laptop bags slung over their shoulders.
The reason I was biking downtown was to attend Greg Wilson’s weekly nerd breakfast. I first met Greg via email when he was doing some editorial work for Dr. Dobb’s Journal (back when it was still available in dead-tree form) and asked me to write a couple of book reviews, then in person through DemoCamp and various activities he organized when he was one of University of Toronto’s best-loved computer science profs.
He’s since left academia and is working on his own, and that’s why he holds these weekly breakfasts. Escaping the Land of Cubicles and working on your own has many perquisites, but one of the big downsides is the isolation. Greg holds a Friday morning breakfast gathering at Fran’s near Yonge and College as a way of staying in touch with his peers, and it’s become a Friday morning ritual for local nerds both student and professional, indie and corporate.
If you’re a techie local to Toronto and want to catch one of these breakfasts or become a regular, I’m sure Greg wouldn’t mind if you simply dropped by. We’re usually at the back of Fran’s on Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 9:15-ish.
Last night, I helped my friends at Unspace with the inaugural session of Technologic, their new monthly series of gatherings that’s part cocktail party, part mini-conference, part salon (in the sense of bright people getting together informally to share ideas rather than in the hair salon sense).
The event was held at their office, which is located in Toronto’s Queen West, a neighbourhood that mixes boutique-type shops, resto-bar/night club type-places and a number of start-ups and tech consultancies.
Unspace have strong ties to the Toronto developer community and a reputation for putting on some of the best indie developer conferences around, having set the bar rather high with RubyFringe and FutureRuby. Technologic is but one of their big plans for the coming year, and these plans are going to make Toronto’s developer scene even more interesting. Better still, they’ve invited me to help out with these events whenever I’m available. Looks like I’m going to be the Microsoft go-to guy at these events, as well as someone you talk with about development, the industry, or whatever else you like.
There were no pizzas, box lunches or other food typical of developer gatherings. They did charge a cover, but it went to good use – they got a catering service to make use of their kitchen (Unspace’s office could easily be converted into a very sweet downtown condo) and crank out some excellent hors d’oeuvres: chili meatballs, chorizo sausage, egg rolls, mushrooms and goat cheese in pastry and my favourite: puff pastry filled with bacon custard. I will have to atone for my dietary sins in the gym this weekend.
The photos above and below show the Unspace bullpen. Normally it’s packed with desks and bookshelves, but they cleared the room in order to create a makeshift standing-room-only conference space, with a riser at one end of the room functioning as a stage. With the initial drinks and food served, the attendees were herded here so we could start the presentation portion of the evening.
It started off with a quick intro by Unspace partner and master planner of all events social, Meghann Millard:
And with the quick intro out of the way, Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite took to the stage for the first lightning talk.
Reg’s talk was titled Bullshit, and it was about how many of the popular beliefs held by computer programmers may just be that. Sure, we believe that object-oriented programming makes us more productive than structured programming, but can we actually prove it? Or that you can be more productive or less error-prone or some other superlative in programming language X than programming language Y? Or that pair programming produces benefits other than preventing you from constantly checking your email or idly following Digg/Reddit/Hacker News links?
As you can see in the photo below, taken during Reg’s presentation, the topic gave them considerable food for thought:
Next up was Unspace partner Pete Forde, who talked about one of Unspace’s current projects, a web application that lets people who make TV shows and films find music for the soundtracks based on criteria like style and mood.
The application makes great use of HTML5 to create a slick yet usable user interface that would’ve been all but impossible in web pages only a little while back.
I got called into my role as “Guy who can kill time onstage while the big presenter sets up” and a couple of jokes and a performance of the Oompa Loompa Service Pack 2 song later, Rails core team/Merb Guy/jQuery core team guy Yehuda Katz took the stage for the big presentation, titled Explaining What You Do.
This was a non-technical talk for techies and focused on explaining to laypeople – specifically, the creatives and “suits” with who we work or who are our clients – what it is we do and what the technology we work with does. All too often, we techie types take a techno-snobbish, high-priesthood kind of attitude and expect laypeople to learn about our world, all the while refusing to learn about their work. Yehuda’s talk was about the first step in fixing that relationship and explaining our work to laypeople so that we can work with them better. I certainly hope that it’s not the last time he gives this talk – there are a lot of developers who need to hear this message.
With the presentations done, it was back to the cocktail party / salon aspect of the night, with good food and drink, good conversation and great people to share both with. A number of people asked me for a quick Windows Phone 7 demo, a request that I’m always happy to oblige, and I helped point people with questions about various Microsoft tools and technologies (namely ASP.NET MVC and Azure) in the right direction. It’s also good just to hang out with the folks who make Toronto’s tech scene fun, interesting and motivating.
Kudos to Unspace for putting on a great event! When I find out the details of January’s Technologic, along with the other things that Unspace is planning, I’ll let you know – I’d love to see you there!
Check out their site at technologicto.com, and also keep an eye on their Twitter account (@technologicto) as well as their hashtag (#technologicto).
You could watch the Silverlight Firestarter (Today at noon Eastern / 9:00 Pacific) alone at your desk on your own computer, or you could watch it with other developers in your community if you’re in the Ottawa, Montreal or Toronto areas!
In Ottawa, you can watch the Silverlight Firestarter event at Microsoft’s Ottawa office (World Exchange Plaza, 100 Queen Street, Suite 500). Silverlight MVP Colin Melia and Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair will be there to watch the keynote along with you and discuss the event and answer questions afterwards. If you’d like to attend the Ottawa event, you don’t have to register – just come on down to the Microsoft office at 11:45 a.m..
The Montreal event also takes place at the Microsoft office (2000 Avenue McGill College, 4th floor) and will be hosted by MVP Guy Barrette. If you’d like to attend the Montreal event, bring a lunch and show up at the Microsoft office – the event runs from noon to 2 p.m..
The Toronto-area event will take place at the Ajax Community Centre in Ajax (75 Centennial Road, Admiral’s Room) and will be hosted by local .NET hero Chris Dufour. You’ll be able to catch the entire Firestarter – the Toronto event starts at 10:30 a.m. and runs until 8:00 p.m.!
Creative Commons photos courtesy of Vince Alongi, redjar and “L”