Mark and I travelled to Guelph last night to attend DemoCampGuelph1 hosted by Brydon Gilliss from Band of Coders. It was a great turn out, there were about 25 people upstairs at The Albion. The Albion was an interesting place, it had a great private space that included room for demos, a separate patio and 1/2 priced burgers when you buy a beer before 7pm. However, they don’t take credit cards and their ATM machine was broken, jeesh, to top it off my bank card decided to stop working. Nothing like having to bum money, drinks, food from the locals.
There were six “demos”, hopefully someone else will explain this a little more. There were presentations about ProjectForum, about the kiosks in the museum by Barking Dog Studios, accessibility by ZebraSpot (though I hope that people will read Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites or think about hiring Joe, he’s THE EXPERT!), and AideRSS.
The AideRSS was a great presentation. The tool looks fantastic, I’m hoping they come to EnergizeIT. It’s built in Rails and uses hApricot for HTML parsing. They need to do some work figuring out the value they bring to organizations, i.e., how they are going to make money. But it’s a great tool on the right track.
I did not mention Holden Karau’s “classy” presentation. Holden presented AllTheCode a search engine for source code. This kid is a superstar! Wonderful stuff, the web front-end is written in Rails and the search index generation tools are all written in OCAML. I am hoping to connect Holden to Avi and John Lam, he would be a great hire. He’s in the co-op program in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (I think he’s in 2A). Somebody should snap this kid up! I love when we have discussions (even superficial ones) at DemoCamp about Haskell, ML, Scheme, Erlang, OCAML and Ruby and Smalltalk. Great stuff. I’m hoping to see more design that inspire me, I wonder how we’d be best to show or highlight design at a DemoCamp.
Thanks to Brydon for organizing and to Mark for driving. Great fun. I haven’t set a date for the next DemoCampToronto, however, we’re doing a recap of some demos at EnergizeIT on June 16, 2007. EnergizeIT is free (you just have to register) and you can check out some favourites. Until then, you might also want to check out Eli’s next CaseCamp which is happen June 12, 2007.
1) Specialized: Riders Club :: Lessons in building a brand-based community using real, live people who actually care. In this particular case, cyclists!
Chris Matthews of Specialized
2) Love thy Customer: Managing the Customer Relationship Online, Offline and In Person
John Cappella, BMW Canada & Paul Curtin, Cundari
3) The Freshdaily Network, publishers of – BlogTO, Midnight Poutine & Beyond Robson
Tim Shore, Publisher
4) The introduction of reader comments to globeandmail.com
Angus Frame, Editor of globeandmail.com