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!

The #1 reason I adore coming to work every day is for the opportunity to work with an awesome team filled with smart, ambitious people who love what they do.

It’s a privilege I’ve been appreciative of every single day, week, month and year that I’ve been a partner at TWG, and today we’re celebrating a new team milestone: our first TWG’er, Dessy, is interviewing at Y-Combinator.

I know what you’re thinking, why would we be celebrating the fact that one of our developers might not be coming back from California?

But before I answer, let me muse on what makes a great developer.

In baseball, a five-tool player is someone who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, baserunning skills & speed, throwing ability, and fielding ability.

Players considered in this elite group have included Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Andre Dawson, and Duke Snider, as well as Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodrigues (in their primes).

At TWG, a five-tool developer might look like someone who excels at:

1. Architecture & Planning;
2. Back-end coding;
3. Front-end coding;
4. Mobile development;
5. Communication – with stakeholders (someone who speaks geek & client); and

But wait.. There’s more.

There’s a bonus sixth tool.

6. Closing. I repeat… closing. Finishing. Completing. Shipping. Done for real.

When you run a company that builds Internet based software, you dream of having a five-tool dev. Frankly, if you have developers who excel in 3 of these categories, you’re doing great, and you can build a very successful team. If you have developers who excel in 4 or 5 of these categories, you hope to work with them forever – trust me. But a legendary six-tool developer, now your in “pinch-me” territory.

Back to the celebration.

One of our rising stars, Dessy Daskalov is well on her way to becoming a six-tool developer. She tech leads her own projects; builds back-ends and front-ends; develops in Rails and iOS; takes the project management burden off Dom, Chris, Jeremy and me because she’s so good with our clients; and she gets shit done!

Dessy also finds time on evenings and weekends to build side project she’s passionate about. These talents and efforts helped her get in front of Paul Graham at YC, and we’re very proud of her.

A year ago, Dom and I realized that personal and professional growth can’t be treated like a zero sum game. The goal is always for both sides to benefit and succeed, even if that means someone has to move on (one day).

We don’t know whether Paul Graham will be accepting Dessy and her team to YC, but we do know that opportunities like that don’t come around for everyone, and we’re extremely proud of her, and supportive of her efforts.

Go Go Dessislava!

Why are we getting into mobile?

Well, the truth is we’ve been doing it for a while. We launched our first mobile app about two years ago and have been developing them for select clients ever since. And for us, formalizing this into a full service offering just seemed like a logical progression given what we do: help organizations build and grow their business online.

Because right now it isn’t about web vs. mobile, it’s about combining the strengths of web and mobile together to help our clients get to where they want to be.  So we’ve decided to make it official and really put our backs into mobile application development.

Some New Faces at TWG:

We’ve brought on some great people to make sure our mobile application development is as strong as the web side of our shop. Chris Eben joined us in September as a managing partner and will be leading the business side of our mobile division.  We’re also privileged to have Jeremy Bower, formerly of Viigo and Polar Mobile, as our director of mobile development. Jeremy brings a wealth of dev chops to TWG, and will be tasked with building a world class team covering the major platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry and mobile web. Look for more information on Chris and Jeremy on this blog in the coming weeks.

Let’s Talk Mobile:

If you are thinking about developing a mobile app for your business, or if you just want to know more about our offering, please contact us at: 416.850.2500 /  info@twg.ca or checkout our mobile portfolio.

It’s not only for the Lean…
It’s certainly not for the Coffee…

It’s all about the TO!

photo credit: Chris Mudiappahpillai

For TWG, LeanCoffee has been about the trusted relationships we’ve uncovered.
I’m talking about the intelligent, driven, passionate, GOOD PEOPLE we get to debate business issues with each week, and learn from all year.

Today was a great reminder of how much we’ve gained in the past 12 months, as we all reminisced about the past year of lean, and deliberated our hopes for the year to come. It wasn’t too heavy, just a bunch of leanists drinking mimosas on a rooftop, celebrating the past and getting eager for what’s to come.

photo credit: Chris Mudiappahpillai

We look forward to another 52 weeks of 8am congregations. We look forward to making friends with more of Toronto’s brightest entrepreneurs. And of course, we look forward to being challenged and inspired by this vibrant community of thinkers and doers.

Thank you #LeanCoffeeTO.

PS – In case you missed Day 1 of Lean Week, checkout the recap from MyCityLives. And please join us for more Lean Week tomorrow at BigBangTechnology, Thursday at Jet Cooper, and Friday at BNOTIONS.

We’ve partnered with TEDxToronto since year one because it personally reminds and inspires us to keep looking forward, and to keep getting better. Like TEDxTO, TWG works with people that want to bring great ideas into existence – that’s what excites us the most.

This year’s TEDxTO theme ‘redefinition’ resonates particularly well because we sense a paradigm shift happening within internet technology. We see the ‘internet’ continuing to be the primary information ‘network’, however we also expect the channels through which it is exposed and accessed to change radically in the next five years. PC-based ‘Web’ will be supplanted by mobile, tablet, console, and transmedia experience. If redefinition means changing our understanding and thus relationships to existing things, then we’re about to see that happen with the internet.

Redefinition is a challenge that every creative individual faces in their life; and in their career. So thank you TEDxToronto for inspiring and helping redefine TWG’s creativity.

Today’s Live Stream: http://live.tedxtoronto.com

Dom & Andrés talk TEDxTO in last year’s sponsor video:

Produced by: TheBizMedia.com

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!

Interviewing Waterloo Co-op students can be an amusing exercise. Last winter, when I ran Waterloo phone interviews for most of the day, some prospects were extremely nervous and confused, to the point of being stumped by questions such as: ‘so why did you decide to pursue software engineering?‘ or ‘have you worked on any open source projects, or have you built a website before?‘.

It was astounding to me, that for all of their smarts, talent and ability, some were applying to work at a web development shop, but hadn’t yet explored the key technologies that are fundamental to it. So it was with great relief when I spoke with Chris and a few other applicants, who clearly had their shit together.

In the end, we ranked Chris at the top on our Waterloo Co-op placement sheet. He had the web development skills we were looking for, plenty of experience coding, and yes he had great reviews from previous employers, but what was key for us was his chill attitude and willingness to be flexible and adaptive to whatever might happen.

TWG is part client services web shop, part application incubator, part event space and beer hall. The projects we work on, applications we imagine, and things that happen here can change on a monthly basis. So it’s important that everyone here is willing to bend, but not break (young grasshopper).

Chris dropped his bag, pulled up a chair, and quickly got into the hang of things, rebuilding a data import and transformation system for one of our key clients. For some, this kind of work sounds pretty boring.. but I assure you the end result is certainly not. Chris’ tool has enabled tens of thousands of music tracks to now be accessible through a web-based platform where you can search them, filter them, sample them, and buy them. Chris also jumped into the Comfortable Mexican Sofa project – our own Open Source Rails CMS, and created a number of custom add-ons like a Polling system, and improvements to the Gallery system.

I know that this co-op term was a period of real growth in Chris’ life – in terms of his work here, his career, and in terms of his growth as a person (all great btw). We’re really glad to have had Chris work with us for the summer term, and we look forward to hearing about the amazing things he’s destined to do, and maybe even a visit here at the studio. Chris – we’ll have La Villa Strangiato cued up waiting..

“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.

After a rewarding and valuable period of growth in his previous position at Espresso, Brian caught the entrepreneur bug in a big way by co-founding 2010′s StartupWeekend Toronto winner Task Ave. It’s an amazing iPhone app that lets you connect reminders to a geographical location, and then buzzes you when you are near those spots. Go check it out.

The Task Ave team executed a schedule-defying progression of presentations, iterations and releases, to successfully get the app from concept, to launch in the Apple App-Store. We were impressed.

After the success of Task Ave, we found ourselves constantly bumping into Brian at local tech meetups and events about town, and we decided to get serious about working together. So we sat down to talk about our approach to work, life, short and long term goals. Finally we gave him our “patent-pending” Iron Coder challenge. He passed with flying colours.

Brian brings a great set of front-end, back-end, and ‘just get it done in the end’ skills to our team. We’re also glad to know that he shares our entrepreneurial energy and ambition to create great new software and products. Please join us in welcoming Brian Gilham to the team.