Tuesday February 27th
There were beautiful lights this afternoon in the Montreal skyline. It was DemoCampMontreal1 day, and there were more than 40 registrants on the wiki. I knew it would be fun to be there and reconnect with Montreal’s Tech scene, but little did I know that I would see some of the most amazing technologies in about 2 years… This photo is by Simon Law
The previous “Wow!” moment a couple of years ago was right after I typed scaffold :category while following Curt Hibbs’s Ruby On Rails tutorial on O’Reilly’s OnLamp. At that time I wrote an enthusiastic email to the Linux User Group I was in, saying “I’ve seen the future of web apps”. Two years later, RoR use is rocketing and Ruby just entered in TIOBE’s top ten programming languages index – you know the score.
I reached the S.A.T., the “Société des Arts Technologiques”, on St-Laurent early as Fred had asked to help with the T-shirts for BarCampMontreal1 attendants. I tried the door. It was closed. Recognizing Simon inside, I waved to him, smiling. Simon waved back from inside with a warm smile and walked off. Simon is a riot. Have you seen his mysterious and supposedly loosely Software-Engineering-related videos about cooking eggs?
I would have remained stuck outside if it weren’t for a nice smiling lady working at the S.A.T. who said hello as she passed me by. She let me in the room where preparations were underway for the night including testing the triple big-screen arrangement.
T-Shirt Duty
I greeted Simon again and he invited me to build myself a name tag. Our MC, John Kopanas, to whom I had talked briefly at DemoCampCUSEC1, was already on the spot. Fred arrived not long afterwards with a box of T-shirts, telling me: “This is yours!”.
Fred: It’s not in alphabetical order or anything. You’ll be okay?
Josh: Sure, I’ll get to meet people
While Fred was briefing me about the T-shirt distribution…
“Stand very still!”. It was Simon trying to photograph us. We obliged. Time flew.
“Can I move now???” asked Fred after an eternity and threats of cramps setting in, still holding a T-shirt in mid-air in front of me as Simon’s camera wouldn’t focus.
I couldn’t keep the pose anyway as I was laughing.
For about 20 minutes, I was asking people their names and whether they had attended BarCampMontreal1 in which case I handed them a T-shirt according to the size indicated on the list and crossed out their name. I also sometimes prompted them to write their name-tags and guiding them to the DIY coat-check behind me. DemoCampMontreal1 is a type of D.E.Y. event – Do Everything Yourself.
They were a very interesting 20 minutes, since I recognized some of the names from the Montreal Tech blogosphere. I recognized Austin Hill and Alex Eberts from the extremely fun Python-wrangler recruitment video for their Montreal startup code-named Project Ojibwe. Alex told me they had had thousands of views the last time he checked. Seth Godin links to the entry with a few thoughts on the process.
When Ben Yoskovitz introduced himself, I said “Instigator!” and handed him his T-shirt. I even recognized his voice since his recent foray into podcasting, the Passion Podcast. Ben launched a recurring event for Tech Entrepreneurs in Montreal. The first episode was a resounding success.
I chatted with Heri of MadMedia, whom I’ve been in contact with by email recently, and a nice lady named Tamu. Heri has launched a blog where he focuses on news about startups and entrepreneurship in the Montreal Tech scene with a quick analysis on each item – it’s called The Montreal Tech Watch.
Roberto Rocha, from The Gazette, also fetched his T-shirt and we swapped a few words. Roberto is covering news about the Montreal Tech scene with his freshly-launched blog, TechnoCité. Roberto informed me by email today that the blog had been renamed from ‘Montreal Tech Scene’ to ‘TechnoCité’.
I exchanged a few words with a seemingly very happy and perpetually smiling attendant, who was in fact the only one with whom I swapped business cards right there and then at the table while I was on T-shirt duty. I made a mental note to later check back with David Fugère from Code Genome to see what it was exactly that made him so happy and smile all the time.
Some of the presenters also dropped by the T-shirt table, and that’s how I met Evan Prodromou and Raj Vadavia who were presenting first and last respectively. Tom Sweeney of Garage Technology Ventures Canada asked me if Austin was there already. I replied affirmatively and it was easy to spot Austin in the audience through his hip beret. Tom Sweeney is photographed by Simon Law.
Opening
Things sped up from there. John took the microphone to introduce the concept for DemoCampMontreal1 and captured somebody’s iPod for his girlfriend’s 23rd birthday despite Simon’s warning to the gullible audience member not to trust him while Evan was getting ready, followed by Austin who duly thanked all the sponsors of the event: RadialPoint, Tom Sweeney and Garage Technology Ventures Canada, Project Ojibwe, and of course, our hosts, the S.A.T.
Introduction by John Kopanas
Austin Hill thanks the event’s sponsors
Demonstrations
1. Evan Prodromou – MediaWiki extension for OpenID
OpenID is a protocol which enables single sign-on across a growing number of sites supporting the protocol. Evan creatively tried to circumvent DemoCamp’s ‘no-Powerpoint’ rule by displaying the Wiki documentation for OpenID.
Unfortunately, Evan had some technical issues during his demo which were pinpointed to probable DNS problems. This could have projected the wrong impression about the benefits of OpenID, and it did to some extent, but fortunately a member of the audience asked about this, which enabled Evan to explain that the demo wasn’t functioning as expected.
It could have been stressful to open DemoCampMontreal1 in front of a 60-people strong audience and realize that the machines are never going to cooperate fully, but Evan took all the technical difficulties in stride with good self-derisive humor.
Notes:
- Have a backup or offline solution for your demo in case of network issues
- Humor helps alleviate a demo which deviates from your expectations
- The ‘no-Powerpoint’ rule should really be a ‘no-slide’ or ‘no-documentation’ rule
2. Growwwing – Daniel Haran and Thierry Poitras
John was in his usual what-do-you-want-to-get-out-of-your-presentation form which helped focus the Growwwing team’s minds on their goal. Their objective for demoing at DemoCampMontreal1 was to have a deadline to progress on their project. Use DemoCampMontreal as a milestone for Project Management and self-motivation… Fair enough – That’s quite a creative use to a DemoCamp!
Growwwing is a web service which helps small business owners easily set-up a website for marketing their products or services through the use of several already available web APIs. Daniel demonstrated how they could access the Flickr API easily and choose pics with a Creative Commons License and also do basic in-place image editing for a user’s website.
When they encountered a small glitch in the demo, Daniel explained in perfect English that he had been refactoring the code very recently since their main Ruby on Rails developer was on paternity leave. Later on, when replying to a question in French, his reply was in impeccable French. Well done, Daniel.
Growwwing uses RubyOnRails.
Although their objective was really self-motivation at reaching a deadline, the team has blogged that they were told about partnering and financing opportunities among the benefits they derived from presenting at DemoCampMontreal1.
Notes:
- You can use DemoCampMontreal as a way to mark a milestone in your project
- At DemoCampMontreal, there are opportunities to meet potential partners and investors.
Fred has a post about DemoCampMontreal1 wrap-ups on his blog.
