Here at TWG, we’re always inspired by the Toronto dev community, so we’re extremely excited to kick-off our first #nerdlearn panel of the year. On February 2nd (Groundhog Day!) at 6pm, we’ll be chatting about The Future of JavaScript at the TWG studio, unit 501. Grab a ticket here, and follow updates on Twitter at #nerdlearn.

This round, we’ll be talking JavaScript with three developers from the Toronto community, who are all passionate about not only this topic, but about web and mobile development in general. We can’t wait to hear their perspective on what the future will bring, and how JavaScript will fit into that future.

Meet our first panelist, Cameron Westland of Big Bang Technology Inc.

1. Cameron Westland – @camwest

Cam is the co-founder of Big Bang Technology Inc., as well as an experienced web developer. He’s a strong believer in the power of web technology to give people new perspectives, educate, and empower them. He does both front-end and back-end development, so you better believe he’s had ample JavaScript experience. Cam is very active in the Toronto dev community, and organizes JavaScript Hack Nights hosted by Big Bang. Cam’s curiosity often gets the better of him, and he’s always exploring many subject areas outside of technology.

Our second panelist, Jack Neto, is part of The Working Group family.

2. Jack Neto – @jack_neto

Jack was employee #1 at TWG back in 2005, and is now a Partner and Tech Lead of a 10 person dev team. Jack’s a quick study, a perfectionist, and an old hand at information handling and graphic interfaces. He’s been a developer for longer than he can remember, built more web apps than he can count, and used JavaScript for almost every one of those. Jack’s been talking our ears off about this topic ever since he attended The Keeping it Realtime Conference in Portland earlier this year. Most recently, he’s been obsessed with finding ways to use all the great new JavaScript technology in his Rails apps.

Dan Williams, our third panelist, lives in node.js land at Igniter.

3. Dan Williams – @deedubs

Dan is the lead developer at Igniter. Having learned at young age that drawing and painting weren’t in his genes, he turned to code as his creative outlet. After years of experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails, he’s found his home in node.js. For Dan, node is like a mind-meld with code. Living in an event-driven world, node maps naturally to the way the world works, making it easier than ever to create the world that comes next. Known as deedubs in the ether, he can often be found contributing to code communities though github and IRC where he is immersed in building better infrastructure for building better apps.

Our surprise fourth panelist, Stephen Hamer, has done things in the browser that you’ve never even heard of.

4. Stephen Hamer – @StephenHamer

Stephen is a co-founder at Upverter Inc. here in Toronto. He spends his time at Upverter trying to make electronics design easier, bringing some of the things he can’t live without in software development, like version control, to hardware development. His recent forays into JavaScript have been using the Google Closure library and tools to build a browser based CAD tool. Stephen also spends a good deal of time doing server side development in Python. Recently he’s fallen in love with gevent and is trying to find ways to use it in each of his new projects.

A little bit of background …

Last summer, we decided to start hosting #nerdlearn panels to bring together developers from the community, and give them the chance to learn from our panelists, who are always experts on the topic of the evening. The events are always very casual. We start the night off with pizza, beer, and mingling, followed by the actual panel for about an hour. Although we do have a general plan for the discussion, we encourage the audience to get involved throughout the hour, ask our panelists tough questions, and shout out their opinions.

If you’re a developer in Toronto, and you’re more than ready to #nerdlearn and meet other great local developers, come out and join us on February 2nd at 6pm!

We <3 nerds, and we <3 the Toronto dev community, so on August 25th we hosted our second #nerdlearn panel. Since mobile is the future, we wanted to discuss what the future of mobile dev is with some respected members of the Toronto mobile dev community.

Jeremy Bower, Pearl Chen, and Jeff Zakrzewski did an amazing job describing mobile development today, and speculating on what the future will bring. They also tackled some tough questions thrown out by our amazing audience.

Jon Lim put his videography skills to good use the night of #nerdlearn:

We had some great conversation,

lots of audience participation,

and the necessities of all good dev events: mingling, beer, and pizza.

A huge thank you to our panelists and audience members, we can’t wait to have you back for the next one!

“Good Developers Drinking Beer and Learning from Each Other”, aka #nerdlearn, is back, and this time we’re going mobile!

On August 25th at 6:30pm, TWG is hosting #nerdlearn 2.0, a 3-person panel discussing “The Future of Mobile Dev“.

Signup on GuestlistApp.

We all know that mobile is the future, but what is the future of mobile? That’s exactly the question our panelists will answer (or argue over), while you sit back, drink your beer, and ask them as many questions as you please…

Who will be there?

#nerdlearn panel = Our moderator Dessy will be joined by 3 senior mobile developers from our own Toronto community.

We’re happy to announce our 3 panelists:

#1, Jeremy Bower, Founder & President Bower Labs:

An experienced software developer with over 10 years in the business, Jeremy has worked at three Toronto-based startups that were acquired; one of them by Research In Motion. He jumped into mobile in 2008, and has since launched apps on five mobile platforms for large media brands and sports teams. His new venture, Bower Labs, is a boutique software development company specializing in apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

#2, Pearl Chen, Research & Technology Manager CFC Media Lab:

I love Android, especially that little green guy! I sometimes do Android dev but I tend to have 10 different things going on at once so I don’t have the time to dedicate to one single technology. I’m a big proponent for mobile web (over mobile apps, except where the need is actually there) and the future of webkit + html5. I’ve been working with frontend web technologies for over 10 years.

#3, Jeff Zakrzewski, Chief Architect & Co-Founder Five Mobile (now Zynga Toronto):

With over 10 years experience in the mobile industry, Jeff Zakrzewski has an immense passion for all things wireless.  Jeff’s experience in the mobile world has been sharped by working for companies including Redknee, 724 Solutions, and Tira Wireless.  Three years ago, Jeff co-founded Five Mobile, a company focused on providing strategic consulting for the mobile space, mobile applications and mobile web development for a variety of smartphone platforms.  Jeff has helped grow the company from 5 to 55 people, servicing customers such as Disney, Sony, MapQuest, Score Media, and Canoe Inc.  Jeff is now Chief Architect, Zynga Toronto after the Five Mobile team was acquired by Zynga in July.

You = A local developer who likes beer, pizza, and nerdy conversation

You + #nerdlearn panel = Funny YouTube Video

After lots of discussion and plenty of audience participation at #nerdlearn 1.0, The Future of Rails, a panel focusing on mobile dev seemed like the next logical step.

Summary:

• Thursday August 25th 2011, 6:30pm @ TWG HQ: 639 Queen St. West #501 (panel begins at 7pm)
• TWG will provide the beer and pizza (just like at #nerdlearn 1.0)
• Our panelists will provide the insights & controversy
• Be ready for interesting conversation, plenty of Q&A opportunities, and lots of beer.

Hope to see you on the 25th! You can follow updates on twitter at: #nerdlearn

Signup on GuestlistApp.

VIDEO UPDATE: What’s better than nerds, pizza, and beer? Our thoughts exactly. That’s why on May 19th, we gathered Toronto developers at the TWG studio for our debut #nerdlearn panel, THE FUTURE OF RAILS. A big thank you to our three panelists, Kevin Faustino, Pete Forde, and Scott Tadman, as well as to our wonderful(ly nerdy) audience for their amazing questions and participation.

As promised, our marketing superstar (and part-time videographer) Jon Lim filmed the event… enjoy:

Thank you to all the panelists and attendees that made it out to nerdlearn last night. We had a great time, and were very impressed with the quality of discussion, questions, and learning.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to our distinguished moderator, Dessy Daskalov, who did an amazing job of organizing the event, and setting the tone for our discussion on THE FUTURE OF RAILS. Thank you Dessy, we look forward to many more nerdlearn panels.

Some highlights from the night:

“PHP developers are typically like hunter gatherers… occasionally there are pockets of civilization (cakePHP, Fuel, CodeIgniter)”
- Scott parallels programming communities to the evolution of human subsistence strategies.

“When Unspace started off, our customers asked us what would happen if we all fell out of a plane? We encouraged competition, so our customers would be comfortable using Rails.”
- Pete pointed out that the biggest challenge facing Rails, is the lack of up and coming junior developers. Large companies rely on a reliable supply of developers to continually meet their software demands.

“The biggest problem Ruby has with moving to the enterprise, is the firewall… gems”
- Kevin on the resource restrictions RoR devs can make use of behind enterprise firewalls.

Thanks again, and hope to see you at future #nerdlearn panels!

OTHER RUBY ON RAILS EVENTS TO ATTEND:

May 20th (today): Ruby Job Fair at Unspace, featuring Rubyists, Employers, and Spiked Tea – http://rubyjobfair.ca
June 2nd: Technologic at UnSpace, featuring Giles Bowkett – http://technologicto.com
Every 3rd Monday (except for December): Rails Pub Nite, 7pm at the Rhino
Toronto Ruby Brigade (includes Ruby Hack Night and Ruby Book Club): http://www.meetup.com/torontoruby

On May 19th TWG is hosting, “Good Developers Drinking Beer and Learning from Each Other” code named #nerdlearn. Much akin to our Good People Drinking Wine events, #nerdlearn is for local developers looking to connect with some of TO’s best senior developers in a panel/Q&A format.

This inaugural #nerdlearn will focus on THE FUTURE OF RAILS (yes, in all caps), but going forward we’ll choose topics that influence the entire sphere of being an excellent developer.

RSVP here: http://guestli.st/55083

MEET THE PANELISTS:

Pete Forde, Unspace:

In 2004 Pete founded Unspace Interactive. Not long after, he transition from proprietary Microsoft development to becoming one of the first adopters of Ruby on Rails. He was the curator of the RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences, and hosts the popular monthly “Rails Pub Nite” developer event — of which there has been over 50 to date.

An avid traveler and occasional touring rock drummer, Pete is passionate about music and film photography. He recently co-founded BuzzData, a data publishing and collaboration hub.

Pete also likes to explore places you’re not supposed to go:

—–

TWG’s own, Scott Tadman (brought to you by the number 4):

Since 1990, before most of us had even heard of the web, Scott’s been a database manager, network engineer, system administrator, software developer, creative director, writer, and electrician. So you can bet he’s involved at every stage of the projects TWG produces.

Scott is TWG’s Senior Architect; co-founder of PostageApp.com; and 4-time Science Fair Winner when he was a kid (unfortunately no photo available).

He is also the #4 Answerer on Stack Overflow for ruby-on-rails so be sure to ask him lots of questions at #nerdlearn – http://stackoverflow.com/tags/ruby-on-rails/topusers

You can also find Scott at: twitter.com/tadmanter & github.com/tadman

—–

Kevin Faustino, Nulayer:

Kevin is a passionate programmer and craftsmanship advocate who works at Nulayer as a Senior Software Developer. He has been professionally developing for 6 years, with the last 3 years focused on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

When not working, he is organizing the Toronto Ruby Brigade and blogging at adventuresincoding.com.

You can also find Kevin at: twitter.com/kfaustino & github.com/kfaustino

We also suspect that Kevin likes Lost:

Meet Kevin, Scott and Pete on May 19th, 6:30pm at TWG HQ: http://guestli.st/55083

Other upcoming Dev events you might be interested in:

May 20th: Ruby Job Fair at Unspace, featuring Rubyists, Employers, and Spiked Tea – http://rubyjobfair.ca

June 2nd: Technologic at UnSpace, featuring Giles Bowkett – http://technologicto.com