Quick plug: We are holding an open meeting tomorrow wednesday at 6pm, at Laika, 4040 bvd St-Laurent about the upcoming Blitzweekend. If you have questions, if you want to be in the organisation team, if you are looking for other team members, if you want to know about what we are planning for the event, then it’s the perfect opportunity.

If you follow Montreal Tech Watch or if you met me around Montreal, then you’ve probably heard of Blitzweekend.

Today, we are officially launching the website. We had previously a blog at blitzweekend.com, but this is now the definitive website.

As Mark Evans just points out, there has been lately around democamps, barcamps, startupcamps and facebookcamps around the country. There is even a creacamp for women who design, here in Montreal… Meeting people, presenting your projects, talking about perspectives of the web is great, but at one point, you actually have to stop the marketing talk and make something. Blitzweekend is made for builders, designers, entrepreneurs. To get a feeling of the event, you can take a look at the pictures on the website, which are taken from various innovative groups and events around the world that you should recognize, if you follow technology news and innovation.

I invite you to visit the website to learn more about Blitzweekend. The team behind Blitzweekend is right now me, Mehdi Akiki (who have been blogging on MTW too) and Denis Canuel, from QuebecValley and yulnews, and we are also working with Raymond Flow, from flow consulting and Innovation Toronto.

If you read Montreal Tech Watch, then you are probably the right candidate for Blitzweekend. However, if you don’t have an idea or team members yet, you can join the facebook group and post on the wall.

You may recall the first post mentionning an event called blitzweekend, where the goal was to make a product within a very limited timespan, i.e. 2 days. We are now going forward, and have a date for the first “official” blitzweekend for Montreal, Nov 24th and 25th. Teams of 3 to 5 are invited for the event, and participants will then get to vote on the most “promising” product after the 2 days.

There is already a wiki page at barcamp.org and we have also setup a website, although there seems to be DNS propagation problems (?).

Now, we are inviting those are interested in the event for a meeting tomorrow wednesday at 6pm, at Laika (4040 bvd St-Laurent). We will talk about the organization, and also about another blitzweekend test session this upcoming weekend. Yes, you read it right, we want to test the concept again this weekend, to see if it’s really possible and if there are any other shortcomings. If you want to participate this weekend, then you should come up tomorrow at the meeting. The first session proved to be intense and productive*.

* this is the understatement of the day.

This weekend, I did with Mehdi a blitzweekend session, the first of its kind. The goal was to make a product in 2 days, from concept idea, design, development to deployment. This is a real challenge in itself, something that is possible now thanks to technologies like ruby on rails.

We began Saturday 8.30 am, each having our own web application idea. I wanted to build a game, and his idea was to make something like crunchbase for Montreal.

If we fast forward to Sunday evening, I can say this was both an intense and memorable experience. Time constraints is a huge challenge, and forces you to execute, both in good and bad ways. Here are my notes, some of them are subjective, some are not that important, but we are writing them all for the next session, in hopes to make it better:

• it’s essential to write specs and sort them by priority. I had features of the application grouped into batches, from required to nice-to-haves. Looking at it again, half of the planned features were developed.
• this is obvious but one needs to be deconnected from RSS, twitter, email etc. This was super easy. No family/friends either. Somehow this was arranged. There were a couple of things I couldn’t have not gone to, but this is by far the most productive and intense days I experienced in months. I estimate I spent about 15 full hours during the two days for the exercise.
• There is no time left to look up for documentation, tutorials, reference docs etc. You just have to know your tools. If you don’t, it’s best to implement a feature with something you already master
• Time flies. Knowing that you have to deliver in a few hours shuts down the whole world and inputs. Before you know it, 4 hours have passed.
• I had another look at the code this morning. All I can say is that it’s not the most elegant code you will find out there, but hey it works. I also had a look at the results, and I can’t believe I took 2 days to do it. I guess I lost time in design concepts and design.
• coffee is a great beverage!

Mehdi finished his crunchbase application. The result for me is at startupweb20.com; the game was planned at the beginning to be a parody with what’s happenning in the “web2.0″ world. You can sign up and launch a startup*, and try to win millions before the whole ecosystem crashes. This was deployed at 9.30pm, which is 37 hours after we began. Not sure now what I am going to do with it, I guess it will scraped for the next blitzweekend session.

* note: the usual path is signup, create a new startup, hire 3 people for your startup, then develop a feature.