Just a heads up that two of my fellow SXSW panelists, Avi Bryant and Leah Culver, will be making their way to Toronto to speak at Mesh Conference’s new sister-event, meshU.

meshU is a one-day event taking place May 20th, composed of a series of best-practice and how-to workshops intended for developers/designers. Other confirmed speakers include jQuery creator John Resig, and Carsonified’s Ryan Carson.

From the meshU site:

meshU is a one-day event that will be filled with small, focused workshops by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game; people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazon’s S3 distributed server network.

Disclosure note: FreshBooks is an “in-kind sponsor” of Mesh Conference, and my boss Mike McDerment is one of it’s co-founders. Oh, and he totally put me up to this.

This past Saturday I attended BarCamp Toronto 4, the “un-official un-launch” to Toronto Tech Week. It was easily my best BarCamp experience yet. Here’s a quick summary of what I picked up:

Start-ups should consider web hosting from the world’s largest bookseller

Paul Dowman from GigPark led a discussion on the Amazon EC2 grid hosting platform, touching on both technical details and what the service ultimately means to small businesses. EC2’s ability to arbitrarily scale your application up to X servers at an affordable hourly rate is incredible, letting you do neat stuff like simulate a high-load situation on your application for mere dollars. EC2 customers can also pull/push data from Amazon’s S3 file service at no additional cost, which is another significant selling point.

The crowd happened to have a couple of other EC2 customers in attendance, and so far their experiences have been positive. It’s worth nothing that Media Temple and Joyent also offer similar services.

Darcs is the natural evolution of source control

Darcs is like Subversion, but with one significant change – every checked out copy is its own repository. You can check out from the main branch, log changes against your local repository offline, and when you’re good and ready, submit a patch back to the project maintainer straight from the command line. You can also fork the project then and there, with a repository ready to distribute immediately – your choice.

Darcs’ self-replicating properties could seriously affect the state of open source distribution. No more single points of failure; less dead projects. All it needs now is some screencasts, a book, and perhaps most importantly, a champion.

Update: James King has put up his Darcs presentation notes

Side note: Rack, a minimal Ruby web framework, is being distributed/maintained using Darcs.

The Facebook Platform could change the web

Facebook is huge: they serve 40 billion page views per month, it’s growing at a rate of 3% per week, and Toronto alone has over 500k registered users. The recently announced Facebook Platform enables developers to create externally hosted applications that are accessed from inside Facebook itself. It’s exciting, scary, and full of possibilities. It could very well change the web.

I’m not an expert on the platform, but since I first started hacking on it Friday night, I’ve had this feeling that we’re in the midst of something big, and I’ve had this overwhelming urge to talk about it. So, in a move that’s totally out of character, I decided to start an open discussion on the Facebook Platform.

It turns out I wasn’t alone. The group quickly approached our room’s 50-person capacity, and we glossed over everything from technical details, security and privacy issues, monetization, and more. A couple of developers already have projects lined up. Domain names have been registered. It’s exciting stuff, and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

See also: Pictures tagged with BarCampTTW via Flickr

This past Friday and Saturday I attended DrupalCampToronto, a BarCamp-style gathering of Drupal enthusiasts here in Toronto. Now, I’m not really a Drupal guy, but now that I’m developing professionally in PHP, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to learn about and discuss one of the more popular open source PHP projects and CMS frameworks.

I’d estimate roughly 100 people attended the ad-hoc conference, spanning 4 rooms at the University of Toronto’s Bahen centre. I attended mostly introductory sessions: a general Drupal overview, an event-site building tutorial, an introduction to module development, and so forth. The event’s highlight, for me at least, was James Walker’s technology-agnostic talk on OpenID – an in-depth continuation of a shorter demonstration he gave at DemoCamp13 last month.

As a beginner I found the Drupal material a little tough to digest, and by Saturday’s end (and a week of fooling around with a local Drupal installation) I couldn’t consider myself among the converts. I did however meet some interesting folk, had two fantastic meals, and picked up a killer event t-shirt – a recipe for success if there ever was one. Thanks to the organizers for a great job.

See also: DrupalCampToronto on Technorati.

Just came back from Enterprise Camp, one of many BarCamp-style events organized by the Toronto technology community, this time for discussing enterprise development, infrastructure, solutions, and so on.

If you’re unfamiliar with the BarCamp format, as I was going in, anyone’s allowed (and encouraged) to lead their own session. Topics included how to apply web 2.0 technology and concepts to enterprise-level software (think tagging, news syndication), getting users and managers to buy into it, other domains for the BarCamp format, and at least one software demonstration that I totally missed. Okay, maybe that sounds a little dry, but every session enjoyed a high level of participation, and I feel I sat in on some pretty exciting conversations.

When Enterprise Camp rolls around again, I would love to lead a session on how Ruby on Rails can work inside the enterprise. How can we convince managers and IT departments that Rails-solutions are robust, cost less, scale well, and will play nice with their legacy systems? Jay Fields and the ThoughtWorks bunch seem to be leading the charge on that front.

Edit: Will Pate has since put up some photos.