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The “Ignite Your Career” Webcasts Start Tomorrow!

ignite_your_career

What is Ignite Your Career?

Ignite Your Career is Microsoft Canada’s webcast series on making the most out of your high-tech career. Hosted by my co-worker Rick Claus (Senior IT Pro Advisor) and Shane Schick (Editor-in-Chief of IT World Canada), it’s a series who goal is to provide you with information to help you make the best decisions for your high-tech career and answers to your questions. For the next four Thursdays starting tomorrow, Rick and Shane will take to seasoned pros from the IT industry about various topics, ranging from where the industry seems to be heading to maintaining your skills portfolio to “marketing yourself” to becoming a better leader.  

You could call Ignite Your Career “platform-neutral”, as the topics covered apply to all developers and IT pros, whether or not they work with Microsoft tools and technologies. If you have a career as a developer or an IT pro, or a mix of the two, or if you manage developers and IT pros, this webcast is for you!

What’s the First Webcast About?

Tomorrow’s webcast, the first in the series, is titled Industry Insights and Trends. Here’s the abstract:

In this webcast, we are revisiting one of the most popular topics we’ve had on the ongoing Ignite Your Career webcast series to kick of this season. Industry Insights and Trends. The nature of Technology is one of continual change; a fact of life for professionals in the ICT Industry. As a result, you need to be on top of what is happening in the industry in order to position yourself and your organization to benefit from these trends. This panel discussion will arm you with the information you need from experts in the ICT industry in order to stay on top of your game.

The panel for this webcast will consist of Richard Campbell (host of .NET Rocks!), Jay Payette, Lorie Baddock and Lee Jacobs.

For this webcast, we’re offering a choice of time slots:

  • Session 1: Thursday, September 10, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Eastern (9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Pacific) [register]
  • Session 2: Thursday, September 10, 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Eastern (12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Pacific) [register]

For more details or to register, see the Ignite Your Career site.

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Toronto Girl Geek Dinner with Sarah Prevette of Sprouter – September 29th

girl_geek_dinner

What are Toronto Girl Geek Dinners?

Toronto Girl Geek Dinners are a Toronto-based offshoot of the original London Girl Geek Dinners, whose goal is to make technology accessible and interesting to all age groups and all people, especially women. They’re informal gatherings that usually feature a guest speaker who presents a short talk on a technology for a topic along with dinner and socializing. They’re a great way to get to know the other women in Toronto who either work in or have an interest in technology. A couple of co-workers from my days at Tucows, Leona Hobbs and Heather Leson, help put these events together.

sarah_prevette

What’s Happening on the 29th?

There’s a Toronto Girl Geek Dinner happening on Tuesday, September 29th featuring guest speaker Sarah Prevette, founder of Sprouter (formerly known as RedWire). She’ll talk about start-ups, strategy and her own experiences. Here’s some info about Sarah from the Toronto Girl Geek Dinners site:

Sarah Prevette has captured attention as a passionate and pioneering web entrepreneur — an exciting voice from inside the online community revolution. Sarah’s nontraditional and multi-faceted approach to branding and promotion provides actionable insight to those looking to build communities, truly engage their audiences and leverage the full power of the web. An entrepreneur long immersed in the start-up community, Sarah has robust familiarity with the common pitfalls of early stage start-ups and the tips and tools that foster success.

And here’s some info about Sprouter:

Sprouter, in private beta, is an online collaboration tool facilitating knowledge exchange between start-ups and business leaders. Augmenting the online tool with community networking events, the Sprouter team is currently touring North America with Sprout Ups. You can request invite codes to Sprouter.com from their twitter account and sign up Toronto’s Sprout Up.

Event Details

  • The date and time: Tuesday, September 29th, from 6:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. (event agenda starts around 7:00)
  • The location: Fionn MacCools at 181 University (at Adelaide)
  • The cost: $10.00, a nominal fee that reserves your spot and pays for your first drink
  • Where to register: You need to register at the dinner’s Meetup page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Social Software Venn Diagram

Yeah, that’s about right:

social_software_venn_diagram

And better yet, it’s available as a T-shirt!

venn_diagram_t-shirt

[Found via Kevin Kelly.]

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Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver: Less Than a Week Away!

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14 - 7:00 p.m. - Vancouver Convention entre

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.

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The Ultimate Steal: Office Ultimate for $64!

Package for Office 2007 Ultimate: "$64.00 (Canadian!) for students / Glossy reflective table not included)"

Here’s a great “back-to-school” deal — if you’re a student at an eligible Canadian university or college, you can get the top-of-the-line edition of Microsoft Office 2007 for CDN$64. That’s the fullest version of Office that you can get, which means you get:

  • OneNote (Note-taking software par excellence, the Office app I personally use the most, which is why I listed it first. I am the OneNote king.
  • Word (Word processor)
  • Excel (Spreadsheets)
  • PowerPoint (Presentations)
  • Outlook (Email, calendar and task management)
  • Publisher (For producing publications, whether print or online)
  • Access (The little database that could)
  • Groove (Collaboration and file sharing)
  • InfoPath (For making and filling out forms)

The Ultimate Steal The program through which you can get all this software for around the cost of three cases of beer is called The Ultimate Steal, and it’s quite simple:

  • You have to be a student actively enrolled in one of the eligible Canadian universities or colleges. The simplest way to prove this is to use your school email address; there are other ways to prove you’re a student, and they’re explained on the site.
  • You have to have a course load of at least 0.5. If you’re enrolled, it shouldn’t be too hard to qualify for that.

The super-deluxe, all-singing, all-dancing version of Office for CDN$64. That’s a pretty goal deal.

Thanks to my coworker Christian Beauclair for pointing this out on Canadian Developer Connection!

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TechDays Vancouver’s and Toronto’s “Developer Foundations” Track!!!

If you’ve looked at the TechDays Canada 2009 site this week, you might have noticed the addition of a new track: Developer Foundations. At that point, you might have asked yourself these questions:

  • What’s the Developer Foundations track all about?
  • Why! Do! The! Session! Descriptions! Have! So! Many! Exclamation! Points?!!!

I’ll answer the question about the exclamation! points! first! It’s because the people in charge of the track, Justice Gray and Peter Ritchie, are really exciting about the opportunity to have a track that they really believe in and have been putting heart, soul and viscera into this project. They’ve done a lot of work under an extremely tight schedule in order to have the track ready in time for TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto. The only way to truly capture the enormity of their task is with…a montage!

While most of TechDays’ tracks concern themselves with Microsoft’s tools and technologies, the Developer Foundations track takes a step back to first principles, concerning itself with how you can be a better coder. It’s about writing elegant, maintainable, working code. You’ll learn techniques that get short shrift or don’t even get mentioned in the Teach Yourself X Over Your Lunch Break books. You’ll probably encounter a lot of exclamation! marks!

There are four sessions in the Developer Foundations track:

  1. S-O-L-I-D: The Five OO Principles That Will Change Your Life Forever: “Can’t believe you just got passed over at the club – again – because you didn’t know real object orientation? Thought that the sure-fire way to third base was knowing how to write a constructor? Thought you had the evening all figured out because you read an example of Cat inheriting from Animal? Think again. Annoyed by all those homely elitist jerks that still score all the time because people say they are OO masters? Well, it’s time to turn the tables and learn object oriented programming the way real men and women do it – the SOLID way!”
  2. Going from 0 to 100 Dollars with the .NET You Never Knew: You’ll learn “How generics can be used for more than just collections, the true power of lambdas and anonymous methods, the ins and outs of LINQ to objects, proper error handling beyond try-catch-finally and the importance of regular bathing.”
  3. Layers, the Secret Language of Architects: “Come to the presentation that will show you how to become “the man”! Seams? Design by contract? Services that aren’t prefixed by “web”? Repositories? Anti-corruption layers? (Gasp!) Domain-Driven Design? Do you know how that guy or girl at your office was able to negotiate foot massages and a daily breakfast buffet into their contract? They knew all of these terms and how to use them to build flexible and maintainable systems – and after attending this presentation so will you!”
  4. Refactoring for Fun and Profit: “Are you ashamed of your application? Does your architecture make you want to go home and weep in the shower? Heck, would it be nice if your application seemed to have architecture? This is the presentation for you! Come see how the art of refactoring can help fix your code, fix your house, and maybe even fix your dog! We’re going to show you how to TAKE CONTROL of your codebase without simply tearing everything down and starting over!”

We added this track in response to a call from developers like Justice and Peter for sessions that cover good programming practices. We’re gauging the response to it – if people attend and give it positive reviews, we’ll make it a regular TechDays track. I’d love to see this happen.

We’re calling this “the track so nice, we’re running it twice!” The sessions in Developer Foundations will run on Day 1 and repeat on Day 2! If you’re a developer attending TechDays Vancouver or TechDays Toronto, you have no excuse for catching at least one of the sessions in this track! And thus ends this article and the exclamation points! Ciao!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Your First Warning: Vancouver, September 11 – 18

Photo of downtown vancouver at night, captioned: "September 11th - 18th / Vangroovy", with arrow pointing to Fairmont Waterfront hotel

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

"Monkey" latte art

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 2009 Canada banner

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.

Demo Ignite Camp banner

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

Launch Party Vancouver logo 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.