Puzzlepieces – October, 2007

StartupCamp Waterloo was last night. I was surprised at the crowd, a number of people came up from Guelph and Toronto, including Mr Toronto DemoCamp.

First up was Ali Asaria (of well.ca), whose honest presentation about his own abilities and knowledge was fantastic. I love when people are real, rather than some fake presentable version of themselves. Ali’s stories of dealing with VCs were great.

This Camp was well-sponsored, which was great. Nothing beats free food. Except maybe the awesome door prize I won, thanks to Tech Capital Partners. I’ve been hearing good things about them (especially their ability to make the right investment choices), and I’m not just saying that because of the prize.

Avery showed us all how easy a Windows app can make installation. I think it made a fool of every single other piece of Windows software. One-click, that was it.

Simon Clark presented on his neighbourhood website (for his and hopefully other neighbourhoods), which was nicely done, and I’m very interested in that sort of thing. Does everyone on a street really need a huge ladder? (hint: the answer is “no”). He also did well by pointing out that it’s not just the technology but needs to be lead by an enthusiastic community member.

I presented to talk about Zimride. Simon was managing the presentations and asked everyone a few things, including what we hope to get out of presenting. My answer of “to turn everyone in the audience into evangelists for Zimride” got a lot of laughs, although that wasn’t really the intention . I was presenting using Jesse’s computer, so there was a mildly embarrassing minute when I went to Facebook and realized Jesse was already logged in. Hopefully I didn’t show anything too sensitive from his or my own .

The Facebook hype (as we all know, of course) is completely insane. Two people immediately came up to me afterwards asking if I could build them a Facebook application. I’m not going to do that, but I think I can find them someone who will. Thats what’s so great about these events, I definitely made some good connections, and may have convinced one or two people to attend the Web Clinic events I run.

Robert Barlow-Busch (of UX Group) proposed some sort of UX Critique Camp, which I and many others seemed to think was a really good idea, so hopefully that will happen at some point.

Monish (link to his startup since he has no site yet) seems to have decided to start a blog listing Waterloo tech events, which is a good idea. There’s no real centralized place for that now, although there are a variety of obstacles.

Lastly, I finally got around to adding a new feature to Quizify, touching the code for the first time in nine or so months. Yay.

I ran into Terrill yesterday at a Waterloo UX group event and it occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything of his lately. So I check and it turns out I wasn’t subscribed to his blog. Whoops. There’s a ton of interesting stuff in the last twenty or so posts that I’ve had the energy to look at.

It makes me think that I should really blog a lot more myself, since I do it so rarely these days. I guess I’m just lazy… a lot of stuff I bookmark on del.icio.us, but most things I just keep to myself, really. Or in some cases I complain to tons of people in person (such as about my school’s LMS software, which Terrill has written a great criticism of).

Terrill actually posted a screenshot of him using Quizify, a tool I made last year (and haven’t properly announced since it’s not quite ready) and keep trying to convince myself I will get back to working on shortly. I really want to, ‘cause it could be so darn useful, and I’ve got pages of ideas for it. I just need to get on it. Since I’ve already got a job (oh, by the way I will be joining Microsoft in Redmond around September), I’m thinking that at some point before then I will probably just open source it, so it has some chance of succeeding… I dunno.

Speaking of getting on stuff, back in March I had an idea for a Web Clinic at the University of Waterloo, where I book a computer lab for a few hours at the same time and place each week, and anyone who works on web stuff (any skill level and specialty) can show up, work on their own stuff, and help each other. Basically there is almost no web community at this school, and thanks to Jesse and a few others who started BarCamp here, there is something now, but I felt it needed a lot more. So this week was the second week of the Web Clinic. I’m proud of myself for actually following through with something (for once), and for trying to start a community (way harder than starting a website for instance). It is still just starting of course, and could easily collapse, but the turnout so far I’ve been happy with.

I’ve already met people I didn’t know at this school who are working on neat things. It’s funny how things come to you once you start things. Someone I didn’t know at all emailed me out of the blue to talk about his startup. I’m getting a couple of inquiries about people looking for employees, volunteers, etc. So hopefully before I finish school in April, this will have morphed into a real thing that can survive without me.