Vancouver Events

Vancouver PHP Conference 2007

Rasmus Lerdorf KeynoteIt's time for the 2007 Vancouver PHP Conference!

It was a full house this morning for Rasmus Lerdorf's keynote speech. I'm a member of the conference committee so I didn't get a chance to watch the whole thing. What I did catch was quite interesting. His discussion of the reason people contribute and happy hormones was quite entertaining. He demo'ed Pipes, of course, which has the coolest web interface. Rasmus has put the slides from his presentation on the web, but I didn't manage to copy down the URL.

This conference scored some very good presenters. I enjoyed the sessions I managed to catch. And thankfully the day went quite smoothly. There were some minor hiccups but no major disasters. Except for having to get up at 6am, the first time in a long time, it was a great day.

Vancouver TechFest 2007

I thought February was supposed to be a slow and boring month. Another technology related event for consideration:

vancouvertechfest.com

"TechFest's are about the community at large. They are meant to be a place for developers AND IT Professionals to come and learn from their peers. Topics are always based on community interest and never determined by anyone other than the community."

Speaker list available on their website

Vancouver Django Jam

Django (www.djangoproject.com) is one more popular Python web frameworks, and is used by the likes of Google and the Washington Post. There's a couple of Python user group events happening over the next week if you're interested in learning more:

Introduction to The Django Web Framework: Sunday, February 4, 2007, 1pm-4pm
Adrian Holovaty: The Django Web Framework: Tuesday, February 6, 2007, 7pm-9pm

Complete information at http://www.vanpyz.org/Djangojam/

January 2007 League of Drupalers Meeting

Drupal MeetingThursday's Drupal meeting set an attendance record. It's hard to tell from the picture but around 30 people turned out. The meeting notes I took for posterity are hot off the press at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2553.

A sizable number of people adjourned to a local watering hole afterwards. This is the first technology group I've been involved with that regularly attracts the people who are sponsoring the projects as well as the people they hire to implement them. I love hearing how people are using technology in general and Drupal in particular to meet their goals.

Embracing My Inner Moose - Northern Voice 2007

Northern VoiceNorthern Voice is one of the few local technology conferences not focused on technology. It's less about the technical fiddly bits of the technology and more about the social stuff enabled by the technology. Anyone that knows me knows I love the technology fiddly bits, but fiddly bits are pretty sterile unless they're doing something. Northern Voice is about the doing something part!

More importantly, Northern Voice has a great energy. Not only have there been good presentations but the majority of the people attending are passionate about what they're doing, creating a nice, positive vibe. And the diversity of people makes for a terrific melting pot. I loved seeing all of the different purposes, methods, ideologies and techniques. My idea hamster got a dose of adrenaline.

I've liked Northern Voice so much I decided to volunteer. I expected to do some general dogsbody type work but found myself somewhat more involved: Dale McGladdery joins the Northern Voice team as webmaster. And I'm having fun.

February 2007 is Conference Month

February 2007 is a busy month. There are three Vancouver conferences, each focused on a different aspect of web technology. Two of them are very affordable, one is non-technical.

Web Directions North

February 7 - 9, 2007
http://north.webdirections.org/
Before Dec 31: Conference: $895, Optional Feb 8 Workshop: $395 ($495 without conference)

Vancouver PHP Association Conference 2007

February 12 - 13, 2007
http://vancouver.php.net/confschedule
$100 before Dec 31st./ $150 regular

Northern Voice 2007

February 23 - 24, 2007
http://2007.northernvoice.ca/
$30 for 1 day/$50 for both days

October 2006 Vancouver Drupal Meeting

Drupal IconOne thing about the Vancouver Drupalier meetings, I'm never quite sure what to expect. Last night's meeting was the least technical so far and a lot of fun. Here are some notes with stuff left out to protect both the innocent and the guilty . . . . .

Patch Management

At the September CIPS Security Special Interest Group meeting Robert Hawk spoke on patch management. A lot of what Robert had to say was pure project management and governance principals applied to the security domain. The value of Robert

September Vancouver Drupal Meetup

The last Drupal Vancouver meet up proved an interesting buffet of different things. I didn't take notes, but here is a list of things still lingering in my brain:

  • DrupalCon Brussels Review, including:
    - discussions of new Drupal 5 features
    - the Drupal Association
    - Walkah's presentation explaining the infamous Pants module
  • Massoud presented an overview of his Asterix billing module
  • New Drupal sites released into the wild
  • “Stump the Drupal Ninjas” - A Q&A session of “how would I implement function/feature x”
    Joking aside, these are incredibly useful. Drupal is so feature rich and new modules are coming on the scene regularly enough I always walk away with some useful tidbits of information, whether I'm looking for them or not. Some of the topics:
    - A discussion of online payment options
    - Mapping options
    - Forum options

This meeting was one of our longer ones, with discussion taking us late enough there wasn't time to adjourn to other environs.

October Pythonistas Meeting

The next meeting of the Vancouver Python/Zope Users Group is:

Date:Tuesday October 3, 2006
Time:7:30pm to 8:30pm
Location:Uniserve, Suite 1550, 1055 West Hastings Street, Vancouver [Map]
Topics:

Programming OS X with Python - Dethe Elza

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