Montreal Tech Watch

Codefest, a weekend hackfest for developers supported by phpquebec, was this weekend, and it begun Friday at ETS’s Pub sans génie.

There is something hardcore about spending a whole weekend with other developers with the objective to code on projects. The majority of Montréalers would want to go outdoors, and do something at the opposite end of programming. Here, attendees gladly came for the event; and many were there to code … just for the pleasure of coding.

There was for instance a Msc. student from Université de Sherbrooke, who was doing a research on Québecers involved in open source projects; and I think he went around for 30 min, unsure on how to approach the group (!!), maybe thinking that we were from another world.

I also thought about the lifestyle a great deal of time when coming there. However, I just thought that I also spent a lot of time developing new tools and architecturing new ideas and applications, be it weekdays or weekends; so it might as well be in a hackfest event.

Like the other CodeFest, attendees were free to choose any project they want to work on. There was a couple of guys who worked on drupal, Jonathan Bond (!) from GoldenEye Solutions worked on openmv; other projects were about the MediaWiki engine, TikiWiki, java and unit tests, selenium, etc. There was an actionscript geek from tribalnova, Evan Prodromou was there working on a new secret project. We also had a girl from New Zealand who came over to participate.

There was also Philippe Gamache, who talked extensively about web application security. He is very knowledgeable, and I learned a lot — by overhearing the topics he was discussing with Marc Laporte and a sysadmin from iweb, such as xss, sql injecting, css, overflow, playing with character encoding, social engineering, playing with processes, firewalls, etc. I told him it’s a good thing he was on the “good side” since he was capable of wreaking havoc in any québec website; and he replied he used to be on the other side… I also discovered he co-authored a book on security. Anyway, I’ve since then shielded and upped the level of security on servers I am working on.

Philippe Gamache currently works at mobivox, although I am not sure why a voip startup would need his skills.

In retrospective, this was a great event, with great potential. I wished there were more people coming and/or maybe organize them in regular intervals, in a pre-defined place. Yes, I am thinking about MetaLab. Quote:

The Metalab is a hacker space in Vienna, Austria — an open center for people who do creative things with technology.

Wouldn’t that be great in Montréal?

More photos from the event.

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