TorCamp

This was TorCamp weekend in Toronto. And what a weekend it was. For the longest time, it felt quite isolating to be a geek living in Toronto (at least relative to places like Seattle or San Francisco). Sure, there’s a vibrant .NET developer community in Toronto, but most of that community is focused on “corporate” apps, and far less on innovative uses of the technology (aka startups).

ObjectSharp was proud to be a sponsor of the initial run of the conference. I met a lot of really interesting folks at the event that I’m sure I’ll be having a lot more interesting follow-up conversations with in the near future. A big thanks goes out to David Crow for making this event happen.

Check out the flickr group for some images from the conference. I love the space that teehan+lax provided for hosting the conference.

The best thing about this conference was the cross-fertilization of ideas that can happen when you get a bunch of folks from different walks of life having informed conversations and debates. Reg Braithwaite gave a nice talk about the importance of context in applications ranging from search to advertising to project management(!). David Janes gave a very cool demo about metadata, microcontent, blogging, and greasemonkey. I met Albert Lai, whose company, BubbleShare is actually using Ruby and .NET to build their innovative photo sharing service. Lots of other interesting hallway conversations too numerous to recount here.

I spent some time talking to a small group of folks about bridging Ruby and the CLR (this wasn’t really the right crowd to be giving a talk like this to). It started out small, but eventually turned into a 1:1 conversation between myself and Mike Shaver of Mozilla about the difficulties of avoiding memory leaks in a process that is running multiple GC-based allocators based on his experience with Mono + Firefox. It’s definitely something that I need to spend some more time thinking about.