Montreal Tech Watch

There’s Montréal StartupDrinks, for all entrepreneurs and startup fellows, and then there’s FreeHackers Montréal.

FreeHackers is a movement started by Zed Shaw, the programmer famous for having written mongrel, and infamous for having dissed ruby:

The Freehackers Union is a gang devoted to preserving hacking and invention as methods of personal artistic expression…by any means necessary.

Whatever you make of the definition, I thought this was definitively a must for Montréal.  MTW once had a tagline, Technology and Innovation, and events like FreeHackers or Blitzweekend are main drivers to make this happen. Like Blitzweekend, FreeHackers promotes original and new work, gathers brilliant developers/engineers/hackers, and can be the origin of many new innovative technologies.

We had the first meetup on the 13th of December. A small group of developers/hackers came up for the event, hosted by Bolidea, the new web incubator on bvd St-Laurent. 

Bolidea focuses on developing technology products that bring solutions to problems and they also work with business and tech oriented people helping them execute their ideas. Apart from having great offices on St-Laurent, they are a dynamic and awesome team, which made the Bolidea / FreeHackers match perfectly from the start.

Alok Mohindra was the first to show up, and he brought with him the prototype for Arkalumen, a new LED light which would be much more powerful and more efficient than existing LEDs. A *bright* idea considering the switch we have to do with lights. Alok also demonstrated later how we could use a graphing library to chart stock markets. 

We also discussed in the first hour how we would setup the group, and what would be the schedule. We quickly realized thought that each one of us had different backgrounds, with focuses on different languages and stacks that it would be impossible to do things like group projects. The consensus was that each would work on his own project, but would also benefit on the same time of being around brilliant developers. Here are a few examples taken from my notes:

• Pierre Phaneuf (who works for Google) was re-engineering the server for a multiplayer c++ video game, a competitive and fast Tetris clone
• Arach Tchoupani tested pinax, for a possible implementation for montrealpython
• Louis Philippe Huberdeau worked on TikiWiki and also discussed with Alok
• Gregory Whiteside looked at CouchDb and how it could be deployed on Amazon aws.
• I did a ruby plugin for the open micro blogging spec (although unfinished, it’s planned to be used on this website)

The team from Bolidea also provided food, coffee, and beer for the whole afternoon, which is great. I dreaded that the event would take so much organization and resources that it would be impossible to run it regularly. We could have 20 or even 25 people for the event (which is my goal for the next event), and the setup would be able to accomodate everyone. 

Pictures by Magda Rocki 

One thing that this picture do lack is the level of discussion and exchange which happenned during the event. Of course, there was also code/work going on, but I enjoyed mostly getting everyone together and getting everyone’s feedback on new problems. If you’re up to it, FreeHackers Montréal is going to be organized every 2nd tuesday afternoon of every month. The next one is already planned 10th of January. Sign up here.