Month: April 2006

Last night marked the fifth DemoCamp, Accordion City’s monthly gathering of the tech community where we show off our current projects to our peers. It took place at the University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology; use of the auditorium was arranged by Greg Wilson, whom I wish was my prof back when I was a computer science student at Crazy Go Nuts University. By Greg’s count, we had 141 attendees.

The crowd, with about 5 minutes before the start of the presentations. The place was packed by the time presentations began.

Greg expressed some concern at the small number of U of T students present. C’mon, kids — it’s almost summer, some of you a graduating, and right on campus was this great opportunity to see what’s going on in the working world and meet potential employers. Don’t blow opportunities like this!

The presentations were:

• An announcement by David Crow that we’ve cut a deal with MaRS: they’re letting us use their amazing auditorium space (see the photos in this blog entry) for all future DempCamp gatherings. Three cheers for MaRS!
• A quick announcement by Tucows’ own VP of Marketing, Ken Schafer, to talk about Interesting, a new feature at the Canadian Internet marketing blog, OneDegree.ca.
• A Java-based online message board system for Bell Kids Help Phone, presented by U of T students Yang Lu, Jonathan Lung, Yimei Miao and Andrew Reynolds. This is an impressive 4th-year project — not only is it a true exercise in real-world software development, but it’ll also end up actually being used. I wish my 4th-year project was as “real” as this!
• Super-prolific programmer Chris Nolan.ca (I think he should legally add the “.ca” to his last name) demonstrated RJS templates, a new feature added to Rails 1.1 that makes including client-side JavaScript in web pages easier by letting you code it server-side in Ruby. We had a little religious squabble when an angry Java developer in the audience started ranting about all the hype in Ruby. When the group was asked how many were experimenting with Ruby on Rails and over half the audience raised their hands, he asked “Yes, but are you fulfilled by Rails?” Those of you who aren’t programmers may be surprised to find that yes, we sometimes do get into knock-down, blood-and-guts arguments (and even fights) over programming languages and frameworks.
• David Janes demonstrated BlogMatrix, his platform for structured blogging and microformats. He demo clearly showed the power of structured blogging and its ability to tie together disparate sources of information into something a little more cohesive and useful; I hope this sort of thing catches on. He also demonstrated a BlogMatrix site built for Toyota Canada proving that yes, DemoCamp projects do get actually paying customers — customers who pay well, in fact.
• Local Ruby on Rails heroes Pete Forde and Ryan McMinn from Unspace demonstrated some nice Ajax-y Rails-powered UI: Liva Data Grid and Live Search. If you’re developing new-style web applications, you should give this stuff a look.
• Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton demonstrated DabbleDB and the Seaside Framework for building web apps in Smalltalk. DabbleDB is very interesting to me: it takes spreadsheets misused as databases and converts them into proper database-driven applications. Very clever stuff. This project also deserves mention for being the first app presented at DemoCamp written in Smalltalk.
• Adam Goucher presented Select Access, a website authentication and authorization package in use at Hewlett-Packard. This project also deserves mention for being the first “enterprise” application presented at DemoCamp.

After the presentations, a large number of the attendees converged on the upstairs bar at Molly Bloom’s for beer, wings and burgers. Greg, I owe you some money for my food and beer!