Montreal Tech Watch

This weekend, a hackathon was planned by MontrealTechWatch and Wavome to get developers working on new technologies: nodejs, redis and mongodb. New technology startups in Montréal are built with nodejs, and with the popularity of the framework, the time was right to gather everyone in an event.

Friday afternoon, we had 70 to 80 people for the presentations. To be fair, they were planned as workshops, but there wasn’t any room to plan a proper class and get 70 people getting their first node running. Nevertheless, presentations like James Duncan’s (@jamesaduncan) inspired everyone, on how nodejs gave new tools and new ways to build web-based tools. Other presentations like Olivier’s (@oliv_oil) were more technical, while Christian Joudrey (@cjoudrey, nodemtl group) did a beginner-friendly presentation on how you can build your first node app with the express framework. Gabriel Lespérance followed with a cool presentation about RocketJS, born out of wavome’s requirement for rapid development.

Even though it takes significant time to arrange all those presentations, it gave a warm welcome to attendees, and got them into the node spirit. Thanks to all the presenters, and also the different groups & organizations who helped put together the line-up!

All in all, there were 8 groups working on different nodejs projects. There was a large team of 8 while there were also 3 projects with only 1 developer. At the end of the day, all teams had to present in front of 4 judges: Alexis Smirnov from RadialPoint (@alexissmirnov) , James A Duncan from Joyent, Gabriel Lespérance (@gablesperance) from wavome, Will Stevens from Cloudops (@willkite),

1. exsub was presented by meeech. The project was done in collaboration with Cheryl and Dov (@doooov)

exsub gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on github. Select the projects you are interested in, and it will send you email updates every week, in a more readable way. Mitch said he’s following a lot of projects on github and one of the challenges is being able to keep up with all the commits, the branches and the tags. The team spent time in the hackathon to do the smart aggregation.

exsub presented to the audience a great lickable UI, although it was not immediately usable since the team didn’t have the time to implement email.

2. fus.io a dead-simple file-sharing too, was the winner of the hackathon, and goes home with the $300 prize. Congrats!

The project is by Arlen Stalwick (github – twitter), and born out of the frustration of sending large files over the Internet. It presents the user with a simple upload button, and as soon as the file selected, it gives the user a shareable url. Users of the service don’t even have to wait for the upload to finish — downloads will begin right away.

For large files (think 2GB and more), usually you have to wait for a couple of hours or more, and it’s frustrating for professionals who get interrupted in their workflow. The judges were also impressed that fus.ly was Arlen’s first node projects

3. BrainTripping is an artistic interpretation of famous people’s words, with the user invited to mix words of what Jesus, Charles Darwin or Paul Graham said and wrote. Matthew Huebert (@geoshift) had a first glimpse of the idea back at the Disrupt Hackathon, and amazingly, found a team of linguists at the hackathon, who worked on the corpus, data analysis. Additional programmers (such as Martin Provencher) worked on the front and back-end.

It’s fair to say it was the most creative project at the hackathon, and generated amazement and aah and ooh from the audience, but it wasn’t clear for the judges what was done during the hackathon vs what was already done.

4. Node Gamification is a collaboration between Jerome Paradis from Buyosphere and George Peristerakis, researcher and LeSite developer. By writing simple rules, it’s possible to add a gamification component to an existing application. Simple user actions for instance would give points to a user who’d be pushed through a leaderboard — an interesting ux pattern to encourage good behaviour in a web app.

Jerome Paradis said it’s a system that they want to develop at Buyosphere, and could by used by other startups like wavo.me. Judges said though that the service would be better architectured as a SaaS service

5. LiveChat. is by LastRose. Like many developers at the event, it was his first nodejs project. As opposed to popular live chat systems using a database or a file text, LiveChat is using epxress, and allows the user to have multiple 1 to 1 chats. Groups are also implemented. Needless to say, it was impressive to see a fully developed system in just one day.

6. Orgnz.it was one of the two biggest teams (the other one being BrainTripping)… Orgnz.it gets your shit done, collaboratively. In its current state, it’s a spreadsheet with a conversation element added to each cell, making it a super powerful tool to track to-dos.

Orgnz.it uses socket.io, mongodb and node. While the core of the system was already done a while ago, the team really got together saturday to give the app some meat & bones. Marc-Antoine Ross (@MarcAntoineRoss) said they’re also working on a google spreadsheet script, and also on columns with data types.

It’s great to see an immediately usable product. The judges had an interesting comment though — what if orgnz.it provided an extension or an API so that it adds features and functionality on top of existing tools, instead of competing with users’s existing tools?

7. Twitter Wave js lets you see what people are typing, before they even click on the Tweet button. It’s one of those creative what-if apps that amused everyone at the hackathon and provided a fun demo. The team learned a lot during the hackathon and worked its way with all the libraries.

Twitter Wave is Nicolas Lupien, Kim Pettersen, and Benjamin Boudreau. Thanks to all 3 to making the trip all the way from Sherbrooke!

8. Logizo Web is Alex Angelini‘s project, a Live log from a distributed system. You can track different local and server logs. Other cool features includes live updates, and search. It uses socket.io and backbone

Thanks to everyone for coming to the hackathon and congrats for all the work.

Thanks to RadialPoint, Cloudops, Wavome, and Joyent for sponsoring.

Thanks also for Kolabria, Team Up and Founderfuel for helping co-organizing. Have a look of what they are offering!

And last but not least, thanks to the amazing community (MTLStartupTalent team, FringeDev, 10gen, github, MontrealTechWatch )

A few links for reference:

• #hackmtl on github
• there’s also a new facebook group for everyone’s who’s been to the hackathon and who would want to follow up with their projects. Will probably gather every developer who wants to work on new technologies (NLP, scala, node, virtualization etc.), outside the silo-ed startup community,
• #hackmtl on twitter